English in the Southern United States: Social Factors and Language Variation

Despite the Southern United States being known for language diversity, sociophonetic research often focuses on broad characteristics of Southern American English as compared to non-Southern varieties. The goal of this issue is to document segmental and prosodic patterns unique to distinct subregional English varieties within the U.S. South and to determine how those patterns are perceived by Southerners and non-Southerners. This approach provides a more detailed representation of diverse Southern communities while highlighting theoretical and practical areas in speech acoustics that would otherwise remain under-investigated, such as socially meaningful variation in vowel formant dynamics, nasalance, and temporal characteristics.

Guest Editors: Irina Shport and Wendy Herd

Cover image credit: "Fall Woods," Walter Inglis Anderson (edited from the original version), with permission of the Collection of the Walter Anderson Museum of Art, Copyright the Family of Walter Anderson.