What do you do with a Southerner who doesn’t sound Southern?: Conflicting sociolinguistic cues in geographical classification

Abstract New Orleans English (NOE) demonstrates a distinctive combination of NYC-linked and South-linked linguistic features. In a matched guise dialect classification task, listeners were presented with NOE audio featuring either only NYC-linked features, only South-linked features, or a combination of the two, and asked to identify where the speaker was from. When faced with only NYC-linked features or only South-linked features, listeners consistently identified the speaker as being from the targeted locale and accessed associated social stereotypes—suggesting that, in isolation, these NOE features are indeed perceived as being linked to NYC and the South, respectively. When presented with conflicting linguistic cues, listeners enacted several strategies: “settling” on a geographic identification aligned with one or more of the linguistic cues and ignoring incongruent cues, shifting the geographic location to a middle-ground between these North/South poles, or compromising between sociolinguistic aspects of two locations to “find” a persona that fits with both signals.