ABSTRACT
I first learned the importance of dialect variation when I moved at the age of 15 from a Catholic girls’ high school in Providence, Rhode Island, to a large public high school in Los Angeles, California. Within days of starting school, kids I didn’t even know were stopping me in the hallways and asking me to say “park the car.” Most of the students, recent migrants from Missouri, Texas, and Oklahoma, had never heard anyone speak with such a strange accent. I stood out like a sore thumb, but I remember quite clearly making the decision that I would remain loyal to my roots and would never change the way I spoke. However, by the end of the school year, I sounded like and wanted to be a Californian. My parents, by contrast, were taken for Rhode Islanders for the rest of their lives. And repeating their experience, I am always recognized as an American by Australians despite having lived in Sydney for over 35 years. This little bit of my linguistic history illustrates the importance of two facts about language that are central to sociolinguistics. A language can be strikingly variable in its pronunciation and can very quickly reveal something about the speaker that she or he may or may not want others to know. Migration, peer pressure, wanting to belong, stage in the life cycle, and changes in features like the pronunciation of post-vocalic /r/ are intimately intertwined.
