ABSTRACT
This chapter sets the stage for the sociolinguistic network analysis of the Raleigh data by describing the Raleigh community, the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS), the Raleigh corpus, and the variability in the front vowel system observed in a subset of the corpus. During the first half of the 20th century, Raleigh’s predominant dialect included SVS features including monophthongal /ai/. The establishment and growth of Research Triangle Park, a technology industry center, from the 1950s onward motivated the large-scale migration of speakers from both in and outside the South, leading to dialect mixing and the gradual loss of Southern vowel features. This is evident in data from a 189-speaker subset of the Raleigh corpus, a set of conversational interviews with Raleigh natives collected from 2008 to 2017. Occupation and gender condition the distribution of Southern features across apparent time; in particular, blue collar speakers retain SVS features to a greater degree than white collar speakers.
