We Talk German Now Yet: The Sociolinguistic Development of Voice Onset Time and Final Obstruent Neutralization in Wisconsin German and English Varieties, 1863-2013

This dissertation integrates methods from historical sociolinguistics and sociophonetics to forge a new, unified approach language change analysis. I undertake historical sociolinguistics using original, handwritten data coupled with social information to make generalizations about how German and English developed in Wisconsin. I engage in sociophonetics through acoustic analysis of personal interviews and audio recordings made in the same geographic areas in the 1940s and 2013. By integrating these data types, I show how German and English came into contact, impacted each other, and how this led to the emergence of Wisconsin German and English varieties.;I use five collections of documents from the Upper Midwest to track written representations of two phonological features--voice onset time (VOT) and final obstruent neutralization (FON)--from the mid-19th century to the 1940s. Texts were collected, transcribed and analyzed to create unique sociolinguistic profiles for each author. These profiles support further linguistic analysis by linking authors to particular dialect regions. Texts were transcribed and marked for vernacular forms, which were compared with expected regional or language-specific variants. For example, one German-English bilingual author writes ticked instead of ticket, suggesting that this speaker neutralizes the distinction between /t/ and /d/ in syllable-final position. These data were then compared with the acoustic analysis of audio recordings, which I analyzed according to sociolinguistic factors such as age, sex, occupation, generation, and language status (i.e., mono-/bilingual).;This research shows that historical writings can directly inform our understanding of modern speech patterns and demonstrates how language developments before audio recordings can be inferred. Because it bridges the gap from historical to contemporary settings, this approach can be applied to historical language contact situations and it can serve as a model for investigating other communities where multiple languages remain in contact over multiple generations. This is especially important today because many of the world's increasingly mobile bilingual communities are in contact with one another. By understanding the development of speech patterns over time and in connection to sociolinguistic factors, we can better understand the changing relationships between language and identity in bilingual communities.