Vowels CLOTH, THOUGHT

One of the more distinctive features of New York speech involves the raising of the vowel in the THOUGHT and CLOTH classes. Labov (1966) describes this pattern as varying on a scale from  to . An inglide typically accompanies higher variants, giving . Labov (1994) has suggested that this raising may form part of a chain shift with the backing and raising of the PALM vowel. The sociolinguistic patterning seen with  is less consistent than in the case of /æ/ tensing. Labov’s (1966) data on casual speech style show raising of  to be more prevalent among middle and working class New Yorkers than among the lower class, but the pattern is reversed in more formal contexts. Still, there are similarities between the sociolinguistic distribution of the THOUGHT/CLOTH variation and that of TRAP/DANCE. These similarities combined with the fact that phonetically the changes present a mirror image suggest that they may arise out of a kind of parallelism.