In some parts of the country, "egg" often rhymes with "vague," and some people say "bag" the same way, too.
In the Northwest, this merger (collapsing of sound categories) affects three front vowel sounds /æ, ɛ, e/ before voiced velar consonants /ɡ, ŋ/ ("hard-G" and "NG"). In sociolinguistic interviews with Seattleites, young adults were less likely than their parents or grandparents to pronounce "tag, bag, lag" like "beg." In another study, I recorded people in a formal lab setting, where many pronounced the sounds as different -- like the vowels in "bat, bet, bait." In a perception study, young adults categorized all three vowel sounds as merged, but older people did not. These patterns suggest that /æ, ɛ, e/ before /ɡ/ have become more merged over the generations, but merger is not as acceptable in formal settings, and young people may be avoiding it.
Dr. Freeman studied this merger as a graduate student as part of the Pacific Northwest English Project, and she's been keeping it going as a side project. Future phases may investigate prevelar pronunciations in Oklahoma as part of the Oklahoma English Project.
Recent Papers:
- Freeman, V. (2023). Production and perception of prevelar merger: Two-dimensional comparisons using Pillai scores and confusion matrices. Journal of Phonetics, 97. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2023.101213
- Freeman, V. (2021). Vague eggs and tags: Prevelar merger in Seattle. Language Variation and Change, 33(1), 57–80. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954394521000028.
- Freeman, V. (2019). Prevelar merger in production vs. perception. Proceedings of the International Congress on Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), Melbourne, Australia.
Older Papers & Presentations:
- Freeman, V. (2015). Perceptual distribution of merging phonemes. Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (BLS 41), Berkeley, CA. [slides]
- Freeman, V. (2014). Bag, beg, bagel: Prevelar raising and merger in Pacific Northwest English. University of Washington Working Papers in Linguistics, 32. Seattle, WA: Linguistics Society at the University of Washington.
- Freeman, V. (2016, September). Style-shifting of prevelar merger more sensitive to setting than task. Experimental Approaches to Perception and Production of Language Variation (ExApp), Vienna, Austria.
- Freeman, V. (2015, January). The prevelar vowel system in Seattle. Poster, American Dialect Society (ADS), Portland, OR.
- Freeman, V. (2014, October). Bag, beg, bagel: Prevelar raising and merger in Seattle Caucasians. New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV), Chicago, IL.
- Freeman, V. (2014, March). Social differentiation of bag-raising in Seattle Caucasians. Cascadia Workshop in Sociolinguistics (CWSL), Victoria, BC.
Related work:
- Pacific Northwest English Project (University of Washington)
- Similar methods/research question: Oklahoma English Project
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