Northern vowel features within the deep south: The new orleans yat dialect
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Linguists have noted the distinctively Northern sound of the White, working class New Orleans English dialect locally referred to as Yat, though the features of this dialect have not been well documented phonetically. Vowel features attested include a split short-a system, BOUGHT raising, and Canadian raising of /ɑʊ/—common to Northeastern dialects but rare within the American South. In this study, I analyze the realization of these sounds within a corpus of interviews, reading passages, and word lists completed with 57 local Yat speakers, situating Yat within broader American English trends. Results indicate that in comparison to descriptions of these features in Northeastern dialects, the Yat split short-a system features slightly different phonetic triggers, BOUGHT is less raised and diphthongal, and Canadian raising appears to occur across the diphthong and not just in the nucleus. Thus, while these features do resemble those found in Northeastern dialects, there are some local distinctions. Moreover, BOUGHT raising and the split short-a system are in decline amongst younger speakers, while Canadian raising is a relatively recent innovation within the New Orleans area. Thus, Yat will likely remain a peculiar dialect within the South, despite its changing qualities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".