The Effect of Social Variables of Age, Education and Style on the Phonetic Representation of /r/ in the Gogani Variety of Azeri

Gogani is one of the varieties of Azeri spoken in Iran. One remarkable feature of this variety is the conversion of /r/ to [j] in speech. This research aims to study the effect of social variables such as age, education and style and linguistic context (i.e. intervocalic and other contexts) on the phonetic representation of /r/. Following Labov’s (1966, 2006) framework and through the interview method, 1200 words from the speech of 30 Gogani speakers were collected. The corpus was then divided into three groups based on the variables of age and education. The corpus was also classified into two styles of casual and formal speech. In all these categorizations, two phonetic contexts including intervocalic and non-intervocalic contexts were taken into consideration. The results of chi-square analyses show that age, education, style and phonetic context have a significant effect on the phonetic representation of /r/. In fact, the phonetic representation of this phoneme is a function of interaction between social and phonetic variables.