The Study of Northern and Southern American Dialects on Jimmy Kimmel's and Ellen DeGeneres' show

This research aims to analyze language variations of the Northern American and Southern American Dialect used by Jimmy Kimmel and Ellen DeGeneres. Labov's theory is applied to analyze the utterances. Other than that, this research focuses on language variations, including phonological features, grammatical features, and vocabulary variations. There are two problems to be solved in this research: (1) How is the Northern American Dialect used by Jimmy Kimmel in Jimmy Kimmel Live? (2) How is the Southern American dialect used by Ellen DeGeneres in The Ellen DeGeneres Show? This research used a descriptive qualitative approach to analyze the data by explaining the findings. The primary data source of this research was Jimmy Kimmel's and Ellen DeGeneres's utterances. The data were collected by first downloading the videos and transcripting from the Internet. And then reading the script of each video and sorting only Jimmy Kimmel's and Ellen DeGeneres's utterances. The Data analyzed by determining the words based on language variations: phonological features, grammatical features, and vocabulary variations. Finally, the researcher concluded the findings. As the result, this research shows six variations of phonological features: fronting of /uw/, fronting of /ow/, fronting of/aw/, dropping the Plosive of [t], ji-iu-u merger, and Monophthongization. Also, there is a special vocabulary used by Jimmy Kimmel in his utterance. However, the researcher did not find any grammatical features in his utterance. Among those all variations, fronting of /ow/frequently occurs with 32.30% occurrences. Besides, the are 5 variations in Ellen DeGeneres's utterances, these are: fronted /uw/, contractic pronunciation, [d] dropping, merger of /ɪy/ and /ɪ/ before /l/, and merger of /uw/ and /u/ before /l/. Moreover, the researcher found one data of grammatical feature and vocabulary variation in her utterances. Fronted /uw/ is a feature with the highest frequency of occurrences, it is around 40%. So, from both Northen American and Southern American dialect used by Jimmy Kimmel and Ellen DeGeneres showed that phonological feature is the dominant feature. Especially, for the fronting feature.