Advances in Sociophonetics

Chapter 1. The sociophonetic orientation of the language learner 25

2.6 Second vs. third generation in New York City

The pattern seen with relative influence of competing dialects is repeated with
even greater clarity when the caretakers are not native speakers of the dominant
language of the speech community. With the massive immigration into the U.S.
from southern and eastern Europe in the late 19th century, large numbers of chil-
dren acquired English in households where the caretakers were native speakers of
Italian, Polish, Yiddish, Greek, and many other languages. There is ample evidence
that the foreign accent of the parent has no influence on the adult English of the
next generation.
This appears most clearly in a comparison of second and third generations
that I was able to make in the 1963 study of New Yorkers on the Lower East Side
(Labov 1966). In the sample of 81 adults, it was possible to make two such com-
parisons. Among nine upper middle class Jewish men, age 21–39 years, three were
2nd generation, with Yiddish-speaking parents, and six were third generation,
with English speaking parents. Among nine working class Jewish women, age
40–65, six were second generation and three were third generation. The linguistic
variables were (æh) and (oh). The raising of (æh) carries [bæd] to [be:əd] and
[bi:əd], while the raising of /oh/ carries [kɔfi] to [kuəfi]. Both use a 40-point scale
of height: for (oh), 10 shows a consistent low lax vowel close to [ɒ] and 40 shows
consistent high tense ingliding vowels approximating [uə]. Both of these sound
changes run counter to a direct influence of Yiddish on English, which gives us
lax [ə bɛd mɛn] instead of tense [be:əd me:ən] and [ə kɒp kɒfi] instead of [ə kʌp
kʊ:əfi]. Table 2 shows the results of this comparison.

0

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

0.7

0.8

0.9

1

Age

% [R]

Panel 71

Panel 84

Figure 6. Shift of /r/ from apical [r] to uvular [R] in Montreal (from Sankoff and
Blondeau 2007).