Internal /r/ epenthesis as gestural overlap in a memphis English emergent sound change

Temporal overlap of speech movements has occasionally been invoked as a post-hoc explanation for the historical emergence of a complex speech sound. An extreme case of this concerns so-called “internal” r-epenthesis in English dialects, limited to lexicalized pronunciations such as “warsh,” “Warshington,” “squarsh,” and “garsh” in the Midland US, as well as “erster” and “berl” (for “oyster” and “boil”) in many coastal dialects [Gick, 1999, Phonology 16]; Gick (p. 33, 50–51) hypothesizes an originating process for these forms in which the three component movements of English /r/ (i.e., lip-rounding, anterior tongue-raising and pharyngeal constriction), all present in the surrounding “rising” VC or VV sequences, temporally overlap, resulting in the “percept of an /r/.” However, this hypothesis has been untestable as only two such examples are attested, both representing long-frozen sound changes. We report an apparently relevant in-progress sound change in Memphis English (ME), a dialect exhibiting the Southern Vowel Shift [Fridland, 1999, Lang. Var. Change 11]. Videos of younger ME speakers are analyzed in which internal r-epenthesis is replacing the falling diphthong [ju] in words, such as “human,” “Cuba,” “music,” etc. Preliminary observations support a temporal overlap hypothesis; acoustic/structural analysis will be presented and implications discussed.