The mouths of others: The linguistic performance of race in Bermuda

This paper examines the behaviour of one linguistic feature among one black and one white group of Bermudian men over the age of 50. The acoustic analysis of the MOUTH vowel, one of the most heavily stereotyped sounds of Bermudian English, is used as a window onto linguistic parody observed in the white group, a community of practice known locally for theatrical dialect performance. In combination with contextual analysis, and in light of social conditions in Bermuda, phonetic findings suggest that this linguistic practice is not only a performance of “Bermudian‐ness,” but also a performance of a racialized stereotype which reflects and reinforces the raciolinguistic hierarchies of contemporary Bermudian society. The paper introduces this under‐researched and unusual sociolinguistic setting to the literature on racialized mock language, as well as attesting further to the usefulness of methods that examine highly self‐conscious speech.