What is it about?

This book explores how New Orleanians speak and what makes their speech distinctive. It focuses on three aspects of pronunciation, including how speakers pronounce "l" in words such as "feel", whether words such as "pin" and "pen" sound alike, and how the vowel in words such as "time" is pronounced. It examines how these features vary depending on social factors such as age, gender, ethnoracial affiliation, and education, as well as different phonological factors. The study also compares speech in New Orleans with that of the neighboring suburban community of Chalmette and considers how New Orleans English fits within the broader linguistic landscape of the US South.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

New Orleans has a particularly rich linguistic history impacted by migration, multilingualism, cultural contact, and social change, yet its English remains relatively under-researched. Understanding how New Orleanians speak can therefore tell us more about how language changes in culturally and socially diverse cities and how it reflects identity, community, and a sense of place and belonging. Documenting regional speech is also increasingly important for speech technologies, which need to account for different accents and ways of speaking.

Perspectives

What I found particularly interesting in this study is that there is no single way of “speaking New Orleanian”. Even pronunciation features that are commonly associated with the US South vary considerably across speakers and communities. The linguistic variation described in this book cannot be separated from the people who speak it. Working on this book gave me the chance to hear so many different stories and experiences, and many of them have stayed with me far beyond the scope of this book.

Dana Serditova
Universitat Regensburg

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: The Sounds of New Orleans, August 2026, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/veaw.g74.
You can read the full text:

Read

Resources

Contributors

The following have contributed to this page