Local features, local meanings: Language ideologies and place-linked vocalic variation among Jewish Chicagoans

Abstract

Research on Jewish English in the United States has drawn on a set of ideologies linking the Jewish ethnolinguistic repertoire to New York City English, but less is known about how these ideologies interface with the social meanings of regional features in the communities outside New York in which these speakers live. Through meta-linguistic commentary and acoustic analyses drawn from sociolinguistic interviews with white Jewish and Catholic Chicagoans, we find that meta-linguistic ideologies associate Jewish speakers with New York City English and white Catholic speakers with ‘local’ Chicago features. However, in actual production, these linguistic differences appear to be driven by neighborhood rather than ethnoreligious identity alone. We argue that while meta-linguistic commentary may re-circulate broader linguistic ideologies, the uptake of elements of the ethnolinguistic repertoire may depend on the social meanings of those features in the local community more broadly, including class- and place-linked variation. (Ethnolinguistic repertoire, place, Northern Cities Shift, Jewish English)*