The sociophonetically inscribed nonchalance of the non-standard 1SG and its mass media origins

The re-emergence of the non-standard 1SG in English (“i”, herein NS1sg) suggests that the inclusion of the novel form as an online variant is indeed encoding sociophonetic variation; that it is deployed for its attenuative effects in a language with only one 1SG and no speech levels. The attenuation afforded by the variant is displayed in both a graphemic and—as suggested here—an acoustic reduction; a strong graphemic “I” becomes a weak graphemic “i”, and a diphthong /ɑɪ/ shifts to a monophthong /ə/ or /ɑː/. This pairing of phoneme-grapheme attenuation is socially useful. The very sound of /ɑɪ/ is salient and self-assertive, the sound of /ə/ is not. The perception of this phonetic variation relies on endophasia, but where do these vocal depictions come from, and are they faithful to the grapheme? This paper aims to demonstrate how vocal characterizations of nonchalant stance are being inscribed and enregistered in the NS1sg using personae, which are essentialized personifications of the imagined typical user. Enregisterment has been characterized as a social process whereby diverse behavioural signs (whether linguistic, non-linguistic, or both) are functionally re-analysed as cultural models of action, as behaviours capable of indexing stereotypic characteristics of incumbents of particular interactional roles, and of relations among them. Multiple tokens from 47 media sources, satisfy the prediction (p-value=<0.05) that the perceived NS1sg sits in the frequency area of high F2, and that as expected the 1SG personae reside in the low F2.