The Sounds of New Orleans

The Sounds of New Orleans is the first book-length sociophonetic study of New Orleans English, one of the most distinctive yet understudied urban varieties of American English. Based on 114 sociolinguistic interviews, the book examines three salient Southern features — /l/-vocalization, the PIN~PEN merger, and /aɪ/-monophthongization — and explores how they vary across age, gender, ethnicity, education, and urban versus suburban speech. Combining quantitative sociophonetic analysis with ethnographic fieldwork, the study situates New Orleans within the broader dialect landscape of the US South while highlighting the city’s unique cultural and linguistic history, including the role of Creole identity. The book also engages critically with contemporary sociophonetic methodology, comparing traditional and novel analytical tools. Accessible to researchers and students in sociolinguistics, phonetics, and dialectology, as well as readers interested in New Orleans culture, the book offers a detailed and community-informed account of language variation in the city.