The Absence of the Pin-Pen Merger in Miami
Kelly Millard
Florida International Univeristy
The present study takes into consideration the common phonetic feature of southern American dialects
to merge the /I/ and /E/ vowels in the pre-nasal context of a stressed syllable so that both vowels take on
qualities that are comparable to that of /I/. The research presented here addresses the question of whether
or not the pre-nasal /I/ and /E/ merger, which characterizes most of the U.S. South, is a part of the variety of
English emerging in South Florida today by investigating the production of the vowels in question by English
speakers in Miami. Because Miami, Florida is not representative of typical southern dialect varieties, the
hypothesis suggests that these vowels will in fact be represented as two phonetically distinct vowel phonemes.
This study is based on three different types of data elicitation techniques including a sociolinguistic
interview, recitation of word lists and a reading passage. All of which were conducted with two groups of
participants; Anglos and Latinos. The two population groups were distinguished in order to answer the
question of whether or not Latinos and non-Latinos demonstrate differences in their production of /I/ and
/E/ when in the pre-nasal context of a stressed syllable. All of the participants included in the study are
Miami natives.
The speech samples from each participant were collected and analyzed in order to investigate the vowel
qualities of /I/ and /E/ and to examine whether or not this merger has taken place in the speech of Miami
natives. For each participant, the vowels in question were acoustically analyzed using PRAAT by measuring
the F1 and F2 values taken at the midpoint of each occurrence of the vowel. The mean values of the vowels
were then calculated and plotted on vowel charts in order to demonstrate whether the vowels have merged
together or remain separate. The results from this study confirm that the Miami dialect does not share this
common characteristic feature of Southern U.S. dialects. Furthermore, the results show that there was no
significant difference in the production of /I/ and /E/ between Latino and non-Latino speakers of English.
The results from this study provide further insight on Miami English as a dialect which does not share the
regional dialect features of English in the Southern U.S.