Language , race , and vowel space : Contemporary Californian English

California is a populous, ethnically diverse state with high percentages of residents claiming Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, Latino, and/or Hispanic heritage. Individuals of Asian and Latin American descent comprise a large portion of California’s population: 14.4% and 38.6%, or twice and three times the national average, respectively.1 Nearly 44% of Californians are native speakers of a language other than English, and of those speakers, 74% speak English natively, meaning that they were raised multilingually (Modern Language Association, 2010). In California, languages other than English frequently spoken in the home include Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Korean, and Persian (Farsi). While roughly 20.7% of households in the United States report speaking a language other than English in the home, 43.7% of Califonia households report the same (United States Census Bureau, 2010). Studies of Californian English have assumed historical leveling (given California’s long history of White immigration from other parts of the United States), but have also demonstrated the rise of certain phonological patterns distinct to California. Investigations into Californian English began in earnest with the 1986 seminar that first proposed the California Vowel Shift (Hinton et al., 1987; Luthin, 1987) by comparing vowel qualities in contemporaneous elicitations to those described in Reed’s Linguistic Atlas of the Pacific Coast (1952). Subsequent research has confirmed the California Vowel Shift among White Californians in urban and rural locations (Hagiwara, 1997; Podesva et al., 2015a), debated the presence of its features in Chicano English (see Fought, 1999; Eckert, 2008a), and connected its use to gender identity (Kennedy and Grama, 2012) and the indexing of a gay male persona (Podesva, 2011). Despite this work, the majority of research on the California Vowel Shift reports on the speech of White Californians. Less attention has been given to English speakers who self-identify as nonWhite Hispanic, Black, Asian, or Native American. In the earliest studies, Asian American speakers in particular were generalized into the ‘Anglo’ category. However, more recently some studies have examined differences in vowel quality by ethnicity, including Mendoza-Denton and Iwai (1993), who compared Japanese Americans and White Americans, and Hall-Lew (2011), who found evidence that Asian-identifying San Franciscans may be leading a change that marks the California Vowel Shift (/u/-fronting).