Variation and change in Hawai'i Creole vowels

This dissertation presents an acoustic phonetic examination of the vowel systems of 32 Hawai'i Creole speakers with special attention paid to how these vowel realizations have changed across time, gender, phonological context, and the number of Hawai'i Creole morphosyntactic features exhibited by speakers. This research was motivated by an interest in two questions in creole and variationist linguistics: how does Hawai'i Creole differ from its main lexifier language, English; and how has the language changed over time?;To address these questions, vowel data was taken from existing sociolinguistic interviews archived in Kaipuleohone at the University of Hawai'i. The analyzed speakers come from two corpora conducted at different points in time: one conducted in the 1970s, and one conducted in the 2000s; 16 speakers from each corpus were analyzed, and these speakers were evenly distributed across age and gender. The first two formants and the duration of 11,191 vowels in fourteen vowel classes were analyzed from spontaneous speech produced during these interviews.;Taken together, these findings provide evidence that the vowel space of Hawai'i Creole speakers has changed substantially over time; many of these changes have caused Hawai'i Creole vowel spaces to approximate English vowel spaces. However, younger speakers of Hawai'i Creole who exhibit higher rates of Hawai'i Creole morpho-syntactic markers are more resistant to these changes. Together, findings from this study help characterize and describe the vowel system of Hawai'i Creole and how it has changed over time, as well as contributing to an understanding of how creoles interact at a structural level with their main lexifier language over time. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).