Accommodating ( ING ) : Individual variation in mixed - ethnicity interviews

Over the past few years I have been engaged in a collaborative research project examining a collection of sociological interviews with ten adolescent African American girls in Washington, DC (Froyum Roise 2004; Kendall 2009; Mallinson & Kendall forthcoming). A major thread of our work with these recordings has focused on assessing the degree and manner to which these recordings, conducted by the girls’ youth counselor, can be compared with the sociolinguistic interview, the bread-and-butter data collection method of variationist sociolinguistics, and the degree and manner in which data from the speech of the girls in this set of recordings compares to sociolinguistic data collected for other young urban female African Americans (see, e.g., Wolfram 1969; Goodwin 1990, 2006; Fordham 1993). In this paper, I examine the use of variable (ING), sometimes called velar nasal fronting or g-dropping, across these interviews. (ING), a stable sociolinguistic variable that is ubiquitous in English dialects (Chambers 2003), refers to the fronted alveolar production of [n] (hereafter -in) for the velar nasal [ŋ] (hereafter -ing), as in such pronunciations as talkin’ for talking and walkin’ for walking. I begin by considering the rates of (ING) for these girls in relation to previous research on (ING) and on African American English (AAE). I then turn the analytic lens onto the interviewer to examine (ING) as a site of accommodation in the speech of the white interviewer and her young African American interviewees.