Erik R. Thomas
Associate Professor
ethomas@social.chass.ncsu.edu

Erik R. Thomas is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at North Carolina State University. His research and teaching interests revolve around applications of acoustic and perceptual phonetics to the study of language variation and linguistic change. Among his published articles are several studies of vowel change in numerous communities, especially in North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas. His monograph, An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Variation in New World English, which will appear in 2001, includes acoustic analyses of vowel configurations of English dialects from Canada to Brazil, with a thorough review of the literature on each dialect covered. His research methods often involve mixing detailed analyses of historical data from dialect atlases with acoustic analyses of interviews from sociolinguistic surveys in order to gain a broad temporal perspective on a dialect. A major thrust of this research has been discovery of the causes of sound change. He has appealed to both phonetic factors and sociological factors in explaining sound changes in different studies. Another important focus has been minority dialects. In fact, a majority of his published studies have examined the speech of African Americans, Mexican Americans, or both. Currently he is working on a book comparing the speech of African Americans and European Americans in Hyde County, North Carolina, a community that has historically been isolated. Future plans include conducting perception experiments to determine what phonetic cues listeners can utilize in identifying the ethnicity of speakers.