Dialect leveling and /ai/ monophthongization among African American Detroiters

In this paper I present evidence that Detroit African Americans are participating in a recent sound change which is typically associated with some White, but not African American, varieties in the American South. Although both Southern White and African American speakers monophthongize /ai/ in pre‐voiced phonetic contexts ( tide ), the spread of the monophthongal or glide‐reduced variant to pre‐voiceless environments ( tight ) is a salient characteristic of some subregions of the Southern U.S. I report a leveling pattern in which /ai/ monophthongization has expanded to the salient pre‐voiceless context in Detroit African American English (AAE). I explain this is in terms of a change in the group with whom African American speakers perceive themselves as saliently contrastive.