"[s~ʃ]traight up Fourthteenth [s~ʃ]treet”: /stɹ/-retraction and social class in Washington D.C. African American Language
A large body of work on /s/ has demonstrated a change-in-progress across English varieties with retraction towards [ʃ] in /stɹ/ clusters. Despite this growing body of work, no studies have empirically examined /stɹ/-retraction over time in African American Language. Using data from the Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL; Kendall & Farrington 2018), this study asks to what extent /stɹ/-retraction is present in AAL, and how it has changed over time. We use two CORAAL sub-corpora to examine the change through separate windows into apparent-time: one recorded in 1968 and one in 2016. These time-points illustrate a pattern such that /stɹ/ fronts over time in the 1968 data, and then retracts over time in the 2016 data. We investigate the role of gender and linguistic constraints in the conditioning of this retraction, shedding light on the complexities of /s/-retraction in AAL, and as a phenomenon more broadly.
