Making a Merger: Social and Linguistic Factors in the Low-Back Merger in New Orleans English

The merger of lot and thought, sometimes called the low-back merger, is a feature rapidly spreading across North America, even in locales historically resistant to the merger. New Orleans English has historically retained the lot/thought distinction due to raised thought, a feature more common to the mid-Atlantic region than the American South. In this study, we examine the relationship between lot and thought in a sample of fifty-seven speakers from the New Orleans suburb of Chalmette. We demonstrate that while some speakers in our sample retain phonemically distinct lot and thought, yet others demonstrate merged distributions of these low-back vowels. Using Euclidean distance measures, Bhattacharyya affinities, and modeling F1 and F2 values for lot and thought, we demonstrate a clear change in progress toward merger within New Orleans English, in apparent time. We observe two paths to merger in our dataset: women feature statistically significant lowering of thought over time in combination with lot backing, while for men the merger is mostly driven by lot backing. Progress toward the merger is most advanced in environments preceding /l/, with thought lower and fronter and lot backer preceding /l/. We note that this apparent-time evidence of progress toward a low-back merger places New Orleans English in the ranks of other Southern cities in the US demonstrating evidence of low-back merger, thereby neutralizing one of the key distinctions between New Orleans and surrounding dialects of English in the South.