Second-generation Persians' participation in the Oklahoma dialect

Abstract

This thesis examines language and dialect contact as it affects second-generation Persian-American speakers of English in Oklahoma. Unlike southern states such as Alabama and Mississippi (Labov, Ash, & Boberg 2006), Oklahoma speech has a blend of Southern and Midwestern features, with considerable variation both among and within its speakers. This thesis investigates distributional trends of the English vowels produced by Oklahoma-born Persians through the lens of language variation and change (LVC). Vowel systems are a rich source of information about speakers' social affiliations and the linguistic influences on them. With the purpose of contributing to recent dialect investigations of immigrant communities inside the US, this study aims to examine the acoustics of bilingual Persian-Oklahomans and their participation in Oklahoma dialect features. Twenty Oklahoma-born second-generation Persian-Americans were studied individually and then compared to ten monolingual European-Oklahomans with respect to their production of English vowels.

Results showed similar vowel spaces between the groups, indicating that second-generation Persian-Oklahomans participated in the local mix of Southern and Midland features, with one notable exception: they did not display the PIN/PEN merger, a feature of local dialects. Similar studies on European-Oklahoman speakers suggested a uniform presence of the PIN/PEN merger. However, Persian-Oklahomans' productions of these vowels were consistently unmerged across the continuum of three speech styles. This thesis proposed that Persian-Oklahomans' PIN/PEN split as well as their substantially backed TRAP vowels could possibly be explained by their knowledge of Farsi, make-up of social network, and their Californian orientation.