Northern Cities Chain Shift

Inland Northern (American) English, also known in American linguistics as the Inland North or Great Lakes dialect, is an American English dialect spoken primarily by White Americans in a geographic band reaching from the major urban areas of Upstate New York westward along the Erie Canal and through much of the U.S. Great Lakes region. The most distinctive Inland Northern accents are spoken in Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse. The dialect can be heard as far west as eastern Iowa and even among certain demographics in the Twin Cities, Minnesota.Chapman, Kaila (2017). "The Northern Cities Shift: Minnesota's Ever-Changing Vowel Space". Macalester College: "The satisfaction of the three NCS measures was found only in the 35-55 year old male speakers. The three male speakers fully participating in the NCS had high levels of education and strong ties to the city" (41). Some of its features have also infiltrated a geographic corridor from Chicago southwest along historic Route 66 into St. Louis, Missouri; today, the corridor shows a mixture of both Inland North and Midland American accents. Linguists often characterize the western Great Lakes region's dialect separately as North-Central American English.

The early 20th-century accent of the Inland North was the basis for the term "General American", though the regional accent has since altered, due to the Northern Cities Vowel Shift: its now-defining chain shift of vowels that began in the 1930s or possibly earlier. A 1969 study first formally showed lower-middle-class women leading the regional population in the first two stages ( raising of the vowel and fronting of the vowel) of this shift, documented since the 1970s as comprising five distinct stages. Evidence in the mid-2010s has suggested a reversal of some features of the Northern Cities Shift in certain locations.

Geographic distribution

The dialect region called the "Inland North" consists of western and central New York State ( Utica, Ithaca, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Binghamton, Jamestown, Fredonia, Olean); northern Ohio (Akron, Cleveland, Toledo), Michigan's Lower Peninsula (Detroit, Flint, Grand Rapids, Lansing); northern Indiana ( Gary, South Bend); northern Illinois (Chicago, Rockford); southeastern Wisconsin (Kenosha, Racine, Milwaukee); and, largely, northeastern Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley/Coal Region (Scranton and Wilkes-Barre). This is the dialect spoken in part of America's chief industrial region, an area sometimes known as the Rust Belt. Northern Iowa and southern Minnesota may also variably fall within the Inland North dialect region; in the Twin Cities, educated middle-aged men in particular have been documented as aligning to the accent, though this is not necessarily the case among other demographics of that urban area.

Linguists identify the " St. Louis Corridor", extending from Chicago down into St. Louis, as a dialectally remarkable area, because young and old speakers alike have a Midland accent, except for a single middle generation born between the 1920s and 1940s, who have an Inland Northern accent diffused into the area from Chicago.

Erie, Pennsylvania, though in the geographic area of the "Inland North" and featuring some speakers of this dialect, never underwent the Northern Cities Shift and often shares more features with Western Pennsylvania English due to contact with Pittsburghers, particularly with Erie as their choice of city for summer vacations. Many African Americans in Detroit and other Northern cities are multidialectal and also or exclusively use African-American Vernacular English rather than Inland Northern English, but some do use the Inland Northern dialect.

Social factors

The dialect's progression across the Midwest has stopped at a general boundary line traveling through central Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois and then western Wisconsin, on the other sides of which speakers have continued to maintain their Midland and North Central accents. Sociolinguist William Labov theorizes that this separation reflects a political divide and a controlled study of his shows that Inland Northern speakers tend to be more associated with liberal politics than those of the other dialects, especially as Americans continue to self-segregate in residence based on ideological concerns. President Barack Obama, for example, has a mild Inland Northern accent.

Phonology and phonetics

A Midwestern accent (which may refer to other dialectal accents as well), Chicago accent, or Great Lakes accent are all common names in the United States for the sound quality produced by speakers of this dialect. Many of the characteristics listed here are not necessarily unique to the region and are oftentimes found elsewhere in the Midwest.

Northern Cities Vowel Shift

The Northern Cities Vowel Shift or Northern Cities Shift is a chain shift of vowels and the defining accent feature of the Inland North dialect region, though it can also be found, variably, in the neighboring Upper Midwest and Western New England accent regions.

Tensing of and fronting of

The first two sound changes in the shift, with some debate about which one led to the other or came first, are the general raising and lengthening (tensing) of the "short a" (the vowel sound of ), as well as the fronting of (the sound of and in this accent). Inland Northern raising was first identified in the 1960s, with coming to be articulated so that the tongue starts from a position that is closer than it used to be, and then often glides back toward the center of the mouth, thus producing a centering diphthong of the type or or at its most extreme ; e.g. ''naturally'' . As for fronting, it can go beyond to the front , and may, for the most advanced speakers, even be close to —so that ''pot'' or ''sod'' come to be pronounced how a mainstream American speaker would say ''pat'' or ''sad''; e.g. ''coupon'' .

Lowering of

The fronting of leaves a blank space in Inland North speakers' pronunciation that is filled by lowering (the "aw" vowel in ), which comes to be pronounced with the tongue in a lower position, closer to or . As a result, for example, people affected by the shift may pronounce ''caught'' the way speakers without the shift say ''cot'', with both using the vowel . However, a ''cot''–''caught'' merger is robustly avoided in many parts of Inland North, due to the prior fronting of . In other words, ''cot'' is and ''caught'' is . Even so, however, there is a definite scattering of Inland North speakers who are in a state of transition towards a ''cot''–''caught'' merger; this is particularly evident in northeastern Pennsylvania. Younger speakers reversing the fronting of , for example in Lansing, Michigan, also approach a merger.

Backing or lowering of

The movement of to , in order to avoid overlap, presumably initiates the further movement of the original vowel (the "short e" in ) towards either , the near-open central vowel, or almost . As the vowel is pronounced with the tongue farther back and lower in the mouth than in the sound , this change is called "lowering and/or backing".

Backing of

The next change is the movement of from toward a very far back position . is the "short u" vowel in . People with the shift pronounce ''bus'' so that it sounds more like ''boss'' to people without the shift.

Backing or lowering of

The final change is the backing and lowering of , the "short i" vowel in , toward the schwa . Alternatively, is lowered to , without backing. This results in a considerable phonetic overlap between and , although there is no phonemic merger because the weak vowel merger is not complete ("Rosa's" , with a morpheme-final mid schwa is distinct from "roses" , with an unstressed allophone of that is phonetically near-close central ).

Vowels before

Before , only undergoes the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, so that the vowel in ''start'' varies much like the one in ''lot'' described above. The remaining , and retain GenAm-like values in this position, so that ''north'' , ''merry'' and ''near'' are pronounced , with unshifted (though somewhat closer than in GenAm), and (as close as in GenAm). Inland Northern American English features the north-force merger, the Mary-marry-merry merger, the mirror–nearer and – mergers, the hurry-furry merger, and the nurse-letter merger, all unremarkable in most of the US. Those mergers ban and from ever occurring before .

History of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift

William Labov et al.'s '' Atlas of North American English'' (2006) presents the first historical understandings about the order in which the Inland North's vowels shifted. Speakers around the Great Lakes began to pronounce the short ''a'' sound, as in , as more of a diphthong and with a higher starting point in the mouth, causing the same word to sound more like "tray-ap" or "tray-up"; Labov et al. assume that this began by the middle of the 19th century. After roughly a century following this first vowel change—general raising—the region's speakers, around the 1960s, then began to use the newly opened vowel space, previously occupied by , for (as in and ); therefore, words like ''bot'', ''gosh'', or ''lock'' came to be pronounced with the tongue extended farther forward, thus making these words sound more like how ''bat'', ''gash'', and ''lack'' sound in dialects without the shift. These two vowel changes were first recognized and reported in 1967. While these were certainly the first two vowel shifts of this accent, and Labov et al. assume that raising occurred first, they also admit that the specifics of time and place are unclear. In fact, real-time evidence of a small number of Chicagoans born between 1890 and 1920 suggests that fronting occurred first, starting by 1900 at the latest, and was followed by raising sometime in the 1920s.McCarthy, Corrine (2010)
The Northern Cities Shift in Real Time: Evidence from Chicago
. ''University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics'': Vol. 15 : Iss. 2, Article 12.

During the 1960s, several more vowels followed suit in rapid succession, each filling in the space left by the last, including the lowering of as in , the backing and lowering of as in , the backing of as in (first reported in 1986), and the backing and lowering of as in , often but not always in that exact order. Altogether, this constitutes a chain shift of vowels, identified as such in 1972, and known by linguists as the "Northern Cities (Vowel) Shift" or NCS: the defining pattern of the current Inland Northern accent.

Possible motivations for the Shift

Migrants from all over the Northeastern U.S. traveled west to the rapidly industrializing Great Lakes area in the decades after the Erie Canal opened in 1825, and Labov suggests that the Inland North's general raising originated from the diverse and incompatible /æ/ raising patterns of these various migrants mixing into a new, simpler pattern. He posits that this hypothetical dialect-mixing event, which initiated the larger Northern Cities Shift (NCS), occurred by about 1860 in upstate New York, and the later stages of the NCS are merely those that logically followed (a "pull chain"). More recent evidence suggests that German-accented English helped to greatly influence the Shift, because German speakers tend to pronounce the English vowel as and the vowel as , both of which resemble NCS vowels, and there were more speakers of German in the Erie Canal region of upstate New York in 1850 than there were of any single variety of English. There is also evidence for an alternative theory, according to which the Great Lakes area—settled primarily by western New Englanders—simply inherited Western New England English and developed that dialect's vowel shifts further. 20th-century Western New England English variably showed NCS-like and pronunciations, which may have already existed among 19th-century New England settlers, though this has been contested. Another theory, not mutually exclusive with the others, is that the Great Migration of African Americans intensified White Northerners' participation in the NCS in order to differentiate their accents from Black ones.

Reversals of the Shift

Recent evidence suggests that the Shift has begun to reverse in at least some of the Inland North, such as Lansing, Michigan, and Ogdensburg, Rochester, and Syracuse, New York, in particular with regard to fronting and raising (though raising is persisting before nasal consonants, as is the General American norm). Several possible reasons have been proposed for the reversal, including growing stigma connected with the accent and the working-class identity it represents.

Other phonetics

* Rhoticity: As in General American, Inland North speech is rhotic, and the ''r'' sound is typically the retroflex or perhaps, more accurately, a bunched or molar .
*Canadian raising: Two phenomena typically exist, corresponding with identical phenomena in Canadian English, involving tongue-raising in the nuclei (beginning points) of gliding vowels that start in an open front (or central) unrounded position:
**The raising of the tongue for the nucleus of the gliding vowel is found in the Inland North when the vowel sound appears before any voiceless consonant, thus distinguishing, for example, between ''writer'' and ''rider'' by vowel quality (). In the Inland North, unlike some other dialects, the raising occurs even before certain voiced consonants, including in the words ''fire,'' ''tiger,'' ''iron'', and ''spider''. When it is not subject to raising, the nucleus of is pronounced with the tongue further to the front of the mouth than most other American dialects, as or ; however, in the Inland North speech of Pennsylvania, the nucleus is centralized as in General American, thus: .
**The nucleus of may be more backed than in other common North American accents (towards or ).
*The nucleus of (as in ''go'' and ''boat''), like , remains a back vowel , not undergoing the fronting that is common in the vast American southeastern super-region. Similarly, the traditionally high back vowel tends to be conservative and less fronted in the North than in other regions, though it still undergoes some fronting after coronal consonants.
*Working-class ''th''-stopping: The two sounds represented by the spelling ''th''— (as in ''thin'') and (as in ''those'')—may shift from fricative consonants to stop consonants among urban and working-class speakers: thus, for example, ''thin'' may approach the sound of ''tin'' (using ) and ''those'' may merge to the sound of ''doze'' (using ). This was parodied in the ''Saturday Night Live'' comedy sketch " Bill Swerski's Superfans," in which characters hailing from Chicago pronounce " The Bears" as "Da Bears."
*''Caramel'' is typically pronounced with two syllables as ''carmel''.Vaux, Bert and Scott Golder. 2003
The Harvard Dialect Survey
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Linguistics Department.

Vocabulary

Note that not all of these terms, here compared with other regions, are necessarily unique only to the Inland North, though they appear most strongly in this region:
*''boulevard'' as a synonym for ''island'' (in the sense of a grassy area in the middle of some streets)
*''crayfish'' for a freshwater crustacean
*''drinking fountain'' as a synonym for ''water fountain''
*''expressway'' as a synonym for ''highway''
*''faucet'' for an indoor water tap (not Southern ''spigot'')
*''goose pimples'' as a synonym for ''goose bumps''
*''pit'' for the seed of a peach (not Southern ''stone'' or ''seed'')
*''pop'' for a sweet, bubbly soft drink (not Eastern and Californian ''soda'', nor Southern ''coke'')
**The "soda/pop line" has been found to run between Western New York State (Buffalo residents say "pop", Syracuse residents who used to say "pop" until sometime in the 1970s now say "soda", and Rochester residents say either. Lollipops are also known as "suckers" in this region. Eastern Wisconsinites around Milwaukee and some Chicagoans are also an exception, using the word ''soda''.)
*''sucker'' for a ''lollipop'' (hard candy on a stick)
*''teeter totter'' as a synonym for ''seesaw''
*''tennis shoes'' for generic athletic shoes (not Northeastern ''sneakers'', except in New York State and Pennsylvania)

Individual cities and sub-regions also have their own terms; for example:
*''bubbler'', in a large portion of Wisconsin around Milwaukee, for ''water fountain'' (in addition to the synonym ''drinking fountain'', also possible throughout the Inland North)
*''cash station'', in the Chicago area, for '' ATM''
*''Devil's Night'', particularly in Michigan, for the night before Halloween (not Northeastern ''Mischief Night'')
*''doorwalls'', in Detroit, for ''sliding glass doors''
*''gapers' block'' or ''gapers' delay'', in Chicago, Milwaukee and Detroit; or ''gawk block'', in Detroit, for traffic congestion caused by rubbernecking
*''gym shoes'', in Chicago and Detroit, for generic athletic shoes
*'' party store'', in Michigan, for a liquor store
*''rummage sale'', in Wisconsin, as a synonym for ''garage sale'' or ''yard sale''
*''treelawn'', in Cleveland and Michigan; ''devilstrip'' or ''devil's strip'' in Akron, Ohio; and ''right-of-way'' in Wisconsin and ''parkway'' in Chicago for the grass between the sidewalk and the street
*''yous(e)'' or ''youz'', in northeastern Pennsylvania around its urban center of Scranton, for ''you guys''; in this sub-region, there is notable self-awareness of the Inland Northern dialect (locally called by various names, including "Coalspeak")

Notable lifelong native speakers

* Joe Biden - "Notable Scranton accent"
* Hillary Clinton – "playing down her flat Chicago accent"
* Joan Cusack – "a great distinctive voice" she says is due to "my Chicago accent... my A's are all flat"
* Richard M. Daley – "makes no effort to tame a thick Chicago accent"
* Jimmy Dore - "I think that Chicago comics like Jimmy Dore bring my Wisconsin/Chicago accent back with a vengence."
* Kevin Dunn – "a blue-collar attitude and the Chicago accent to match"
* David Draiman – "distinct Chicago accent"
* Rahm Emanuel – "more refined (if still very Chicago)"
* Dennis Farina – "rich Chicago accent"
* Chris Farley – "beatific Wisconsin accent"
* Dennis Franz – "tough-guy Chicago accent"
* Sean Giambrone – "Sean, whose Chicago accent is thick enough to cut with a knife"
* John Goodman – "Goodman delivered a completely authentic Inland North accent.... It wasn't an act."
* Susan Hawk – "a Midwestern truck driver whose accent and etiquette epitomized the stereotype of the tacky, abrasive, working-class character"
* Bill Lipinski – "I could live only 100 miles from the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Lipinski) and he would have an accent and I do not"
* Jim "Mr. Skin" McBride – "a clipped Chicago accent"
* Michael Moore – "a Flintoid, with a nasal, uncosmopolitan accent" and "a recognisable blue-collar Michigan accent"
* Bob Odenkirk
* Suze Orman – "broad, Midwestern accent"
* Iggy Pop – "plainspoken Midwestern accent"
* Paul Ryan – "may be the first candidate on a major presidential ticket to feature some of the Great Lakes vowels prominently"
* Michael Symon – "Michael Symon's local accent gives him an honest, working-class vibe"
* Lily Tomlin – "Tomlin's Detroit accent"Maupin, Elizabeth (1997). "'Signs': Still Briming With Intelligent Life." ''Orlando Sentinel''.

See also

* List of dialects of the English language
* List of English words from indigenous languages of the Americas
*American English regional differences
*North Central American English
*Western New England English

References

Sources

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External links

Chicago Dialect SamplesNPR interview with Professor William Labov about the shiftPBS resource from the show "Do you Speak American?"

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