Back vowels

The back vowels of GOOSE and COAT indicate a distinct ethnic difference in their phonetic production. Anglo-Bahamians have fronted productions of GOOSE and COAT while they remain backed for Afro-Bahamians. The fronting of back vowels is a widespread feature of white Southern American English varieties, although it is an expanding trait of other North American varieties as well (Thomas 2001). Even though /u/ in Anglo-Bahamian speech is not as fronted as the variant in Southern American English [y], it may front to [ø]. The source of back vowel fronting in Bahamian white speech may be the result of contact with earlier or present-day Southern American English, but it may also be the result of an independent phonetic development, following the principles of vowel shifting set forth in Labov (1994). The lack of fronting for back vowels in Afro-Bahamian speech replicates the ethnic distribution found in Southern speech in the US. For example, Gullah and general Southern AAVE do not exhibit back-vowel fronting (Thomas 2001), but white Southern speech does; this parallels the ethnolinguistic dichotomy in The Bahamas.

The fronted /o/ of GOAT found among Anglo-Bahamians does not have a lowered nucleus like that typically found in Southern American varieties. The /o/ is, instead, realized as [ɵu] . For Afro-Bahamian speech /o/ remains back and upgliding, similar to African American English [ou]. This production is more like American English and less like varieties of Caribbean English, which are known for producing /o/ as a monophthong (Wells 1982). This ethnic differentiation no doubt reflects the differing founder effects, the sociohistorical development of The Bahamas, and the persistent maintenance of ethnolinguistic boundaries.

Wells (1982) and Childs, Reaser and Wolfram (2003) report that the vowel of LOT is backed in both Anglo-Bahamian and Afro-Bahamian English; furthermore, the vowels of LOT and THOUGHT are not merged as is found in some varieties that have backed vowel in LOT (Thomas 2001). This pattern is quite different from the pattern throughout the rest of the Caribbean, which may exhibit a merger of LOT and TRAP. The pattern found in The Bahamas is much more similar to the pattern found in Southern white US speech, AAVE, and the Pamlico Sound area. Again, the presence of this variant in both black and white Bahamian speech provides important information about dialect accommodation in The Bahamas.