Sociolinguistics research on the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont began in 2017 through the Dartmouth James O. Freedman Presidential Scholars Program under the advisement of James N. Stanford, PhD, Associate Professor of Linguistics. Isabelle conducted 61 interviews which consisted of two reading passages and 15 minutes to 2 hours of free speech samples. Her analysis focused on /au/ and /ai/ raising and  /t/ glottalization  in relation to gender, socioeconomic class, and age. Participants ranged in age from 6 to 90 years old. However, due to voice quality and limited speech sample quantity, younger participants (born after 2000) were not included in the analysis.

This research resulted in a Senior Honors Thesis for the Dartmouth Linguistics Department. Findings were also presented at the American Dialect Society’s (ADS) Annual Meeting in New York City in January of 2019 and at the New Ways of Analyzing Variation 48 (NWAV) conference in Eugene, Oregon in October of 2019.

 

NWAV 2019

ADS 2019