Vowel List and Class Discussion Analyses

Formant Charts
I was somewhat surprised by the results of the formant chart I created using the eight cardinal vowels. My eight did not shoot four diagonally down to the right, then four straight up the back - rather, they formed a kind of strangled shape where the sounds found in "had," "hod," and "hawed" (I can't write the IPA symbols in this blog) where clustered together in the far right bottom, and the other five - "heed," "hid," "head," "hood," and "who'd" - created a V shape that was in the center vertically and a bit to the left. I think the results can be explained by this: my knowledge of IPA is still limited enough that I had to rely on the example h-d words provided rather than the vowel symbols to pronounce the word list, which leads me to think that my personal accent deviates from standard American English in certain vowels. The most obvious example is my cot/caught merger - I still don't understand how those two words can be pronounced differently, so I pronounced "hod" and "hawed" almost identically. Also, I think I may have been focusing too hard on producing the correct sounds in the same vowel lengths, and the way I ended up pronouncing a lot of the words is not perhaps how I would say them unselfconsciously. I will be very interested to see how closely the other people in the class match the chart in the text - I think of myself as having less of an accent than some, because the "Which American Accent Are You?" quiz labeled me as Midland. Maybe if I were more comfortable identifying the IPA vowel sounds without example words, I could have produced the sounds more truthfully.

Class Discussion
For me, the most interesting part of class was the tenseness that arose when Meghan asked us how we felt about the government encouraging languages other than English in public settings. Only a couple of people offered opinions, and the question seemed very politically charged. When I gave my opinion, which was a bit more conservative than others, I felt uncomfortable and guilty - no one replied to it, which added to the silent tenseness. I wonder why this one question immediately made the class uneasy - was it just politics, or did the issue resonate more personally with students than other things we have discussed in class?
I also found it interesting that even though we come from all corners of the US, we had almost exactly the same associations of foreign accents with certain stereotypes. This makes me suspect that we base these assumptions off things we see on national television or in nationally circulated media rather than from our family members and neighbors - the latter category would probably we a lot more diverse in the associations.