Major demographic transformations in the United States have shifted the country’s population into large urban areas, and have reshaped its dialect boundaries. Despite this, urbanization is a relatively new area of study in regional dialectology. Prior studies have established that linguistic and social factors associated with urban development have a clear impact on language variation and change. Urbanization can lead to the leveling of dialect differences between urban and rural speakers, as well as the emergence of innovative features and norms in the dialects of younger speakers. Studies of the linguistic impact of urbanization have focused almost exclusively on the speech of rural or urban communities, however, with the most attention paid to the latter. Very little research has explored the speech of suburban communities in the context of the rural and urban communities that surround them.

This study addresses this gap by examining phonetic variation among Anglo natives of Houston’s three most populous counties. The population of these counties has undergone rapid demographic transformations over the past few decades. Today, the approximate combined population of these three counties surpasses 5 million people and the majority of these Houstonians live in suburban neighborhoods. Prominent neighborhood differences exist across this region, however, in terms of the degree of urbanness, demographics, and community attitudes of its inhabitants. The analysis draws on these socio-geographic insights to explore the social meaning of linguistic variation and the motivations behind participation in local sound change.

The linguistic variable analyzed is a well-known feature of sound change in the southern U.S. English: the monophthongal or diphthongal production of the vowel /ai/. This vowel is a particularly suitable variable to focus on for examining urbanization in the South because its variable production has been linked with urbanness in previous research. Data come from the speech of 65 Anglos (27 females and 38 males, aged 18- 90) who participated in the 2017 Kinder Houston Area Survey, a telephone survey conducted annually to assess the public opinions of Houston residents.

Acoustic phonetic and statistical analyses of /ai/ variation among these speakers shows that Anglos are moving toward the diphthongal realization in apparent time, in parallel with other regions of the South. However, some Anglo speakers still produce monophthongal /ai/, regardless of their age, educational attainment, county of residence, or urbanness. This suggests that variant /ai/ pronunciations may carry important indexical meanings in the local community. Speakers orienting to Houston’s traditional linguistic market may use traditional linguistic forms as a way to resist innovation and maintain their local identity. At the opposite end of the spectrum, speakers orienting to Houston’s emerging linguistic market may stigmatize associations with the traditional monophthongal /ai/ variant because of its connections with the stereotypical Texas accent. I show that Spatial GIS analyses of speakers linguistic behavior, together with their locations in the city, enables much more nuanced and representative account of the dialectology of Houston at the beginning of the 21st century. Composite GIS maps showing the variability of /ai/production among Houstonians indicate the most significant differences among speakers from neighborhoods with different urbanness levels. I argue that these patterns are particularly likely in a city such as Houston, due to its sociogeographic context and history of urban development across the community.

The sociolinguistic literature contains relatively little work on phonetic variation in the English of suburban speakers, yet urbanization will become increasingly integral to speaker identities and ideologies of place as rapid urban development continues in the 21st century. This study presents a step toward understanding the impact of (sub-) urbanization on local identities and linguistic behavior.