Race, Place, and Education: Charting the Wine-Whine Merger in the U.S. South

Over the past century, the wine-whine merger has transitioned from a localized regional feature to a nearly ubiquitous characteristic of U.S. English, a pattern of language change whose social correlates have largely gone unexplored. The present study draws from the Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS), a database of 64 linguistic interviews collected in 1970–83, to analyze the distribution of [hw] and [w] pronunciations of morpheme-initial ‹wh› across social and linguistic variables during a time and in a place where the [hw] variant was still common. Results reveal that while all speakers exhibited variation between [hw] and [w] for ‹wh›, with content words exhibiting [hw] at higher rates than function words, intraspeaker variation remained stable across apparent time for White speakers, suggesting that the wine-whine merger had not yet reached this demographic. However, [hw] use sharply declined among Black speakers over the same period, demonstrating a divergence from the local White varieties corresponding to a changing cultural landscape. Further variation in the pronunciation of ‹wh› occurs across subregions of the South. Finally, college-educated speakers were more likely to use [hw], suggesting that this variant should be interpreted as a prestige feature that persisted in the South.