Northern Cities Shift

ABSTRACTThis article calls attention to the saliency of secondary education within the community and its utility in constructing social categories, in order to consider how it affects linguistic variation. Older St. Louisans draw on secondary education to construct a divide between those who attended Catholic high schools and those who attended public schools. I show that speakers in a sample of older St. Louisans differ in production of thethoughtvowel based on education type. This effect is weakened in apparent time when we consider a larger sample that includes both older and younger speakers. I draw on Brubaker's (2004) view of groups as events and actions to argue that these categories were indexed only while they had a high degree of groupness, and suggest that social changes that led to diminished groupness between Catholics and Publics also resulted in the loss of a linguistic distinction between the groups. (Education, groups, Northern Cities Shift, Catholicism)*

There is a long standing claim that the Received Pronunciation sociolect does not have regional features and is the same across England. We test that by looking at the FOOT-STRUT and TRAP-BATH distinctions, which are classic markers of the NorthSouth accent divide in England. 10 speakers, who were privately educated in either the North East or the South East, were recorded for this study. Using sociolinguistic interviews, forced alignment techniques, and mixed-effect models, social and linguistic effects on vowel pronunciation are analysed. All speakers are found to have the FOOT-STRUT split. However, the TRAP-BATH distinction is less prevalent in the North East speakers, who show effects of linguistic structure rather than social factors on the BATH vowel, with a possibility of a rule simplification process occurring that is bringing them towards the system used by South East speakers.

We report initial findings from a study of the Northern Cities Shift (NCS) in Lansing, Michigan. As in other urban centers recently examined, the NCS appears to be undergoing re-evaluation and attrition. However, whereas others have found the NCS to be simply undergoing “exact reversals” of its vowel movements (Driscoll and Lape 2014), in Lansing we find two additional processes in addition to reversal: reorganization and continuation. We observe reversal of the fronting of LOT, reorganization of TRAP from a raised to a continuous or nasal system, and continuation of the lowering of DRESS. Findings are derived from a sample of 50 speakers born 1908 to 1996, combining new sociolinguistic interviews with oral histories recorded

We analyze dialect accommodation of pretonic midvowels /e/ and /o/ in the speech of 32 Northeastern migrants living in the Southeastern state of São Paulo/Brazil. Both vowels undergo lowering in Northeastern dialects (hɛ.ˈlɔ.ʒiw 'watch', hɔ.ˈmã 'pomegranate') but not in the Southeast (cf. he.ˈlɔ.ʒiw, ho.ˈmã). We thus analyzed whether these speakers, in accommodating to the host community's dialect, tend to raise none, one or both vowels. Analyses of 1,916 tokens of /e/ (μF1 = 475Hz, sd = 47) and 1,645 tokens of /o/ (μF1 = 482Hz, sd = 51), extracted from sociolinguistic interviews, show that there's a significant but weak correlation between the vowels' height (Spearman's rho = 0.38, <em>p</em> < 0.05), signaling uniformity in dialect accommodation. Further analyses of the individuals' speech show that only half of them accommodated to either none or both vowels, and that accommodation to both vowels depends on speakers' early ar...

Labov begins his landmark Principles of Linguistic Change with a volume on internal factors governing sound change (Labov 1994) that focuses on the CONSTRAINTS PROBLEM (Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog 1968): what changes are possible for a language in a given state? On the basis of typological data on sound changes and his research on ongoing change in English, he puts forward a set of principled constraints and generalizations, which the field will be building on for decades to come. Here I take up each of the four major theoretical themes of the book-the regularity hypothesis, mergers and splits, chain shifts, and functionalism-and explore the significance of Labov's findings for generative phonology, and the ways in which recent developments in phonological theory might help advance Labov's research program. In a longer essay I would have tried to trace the remarkable trajectory from Labov 1963 through Labov 2007, 2010, 2014 and Labov, Rosenfelder & Fruehwald 2013-five decades of sustained inquiry into the nature of sound change, of ever increasing methodological innovativeness, empirical insight, and theoretical depth. In the way it it integrates linguistic change with phonetics, phonological theory, and sociolinguistics, resolutely rejecting even the least vestige of any Saussurian gulf between them, as in so many other respects, Labov's work has been and remains well ahead of its time. * I owe a big thank you to the three editors David Britain, Devyani Sharma, and Allan Bell, as well as to two anonymous reviewers, for closely scrutinizing my paper and suggesting many improvements in style and substance.

This study presents findings from a quantitative analysis of inter-and intraspeaker phonetic variability in the realization of /t/ and /d/ from second-and third-generation Lebanese American speakers from Dearborn, Michigan. The realization of /t/ and /d/ as either alveolar or dental (a substrate feature from Lebanese Arabic) is the focus of the analysis. The data, which come from 2006 corpus recordings, are also subject to diagnostics for a focused ethnolect i.e. the retention of distinctive features into the third and later generations of a speech community. These diagnostics are derived from new-dialect formation and ethnolect formation models. Evidence is found for a focused Lebanese American English ethnolect in Dearborn though the findings are tentative due to a small dataset. The results of the study lay the foundation for future work, which will seek to confirm these findings in greater detail.

During a merger-in-progress, occasionally one or two speakers will exhibit an unusual phonological pattern reminiscent of flip-flop (Labov et al. 1972). In such cases, the merging vowels appear to move past the point of coalescence in at least one phonetic dimension; difference is maintained but the vowel quality is opposite to the historical pattern on one or both dimensions. Flip-flop between the cot and caught vowels occurs for two speakers in a recent sample from San Francisco, California. The community shows robust change in progress toward a lower and fronter caught vowel nucleus, and no change in apparent time for cot. Further analysis shows that this is leading to a change in apparent time toward merger, and that the rate of vowel convergence is stronger among Chinese Americans than European Americans. The two speakers who produce flip-flop are seen to represent a key transitional generation with respect to the ethnic identity of the neighborhood, where flip-flop may be but ...

We analyze dialect accommodation of pretonic midvowels /e/ and /o/ in the speech of 32 Northeastern migrants living in the Southeastern state of São Paulo/Brazil. Both vowels undergo lowering in Northeastern dialects (hɛ.ˈlɔ.ʒiw 'watch', hɔ.ˈmã 'pomegranate') but not in the Southeast (cf. he.ˈlɔ.ʒiw, ho.ˈmã). We thus analyzed whether these speakers, in accommodating to the host community's dialect, tend to raise none, one or both vowels. Analyses of 1,916 tokens of /e/ (μF1 = 475Hz, sd = 47) and 1,645 tokens of /o/ (μF1 = 482Hz, sd = 51), extracted from sociolinguistic interviews with the migrants, show that there's a significant but weak correlation between the vowels' height (Spearman's rho=0.38, p<0.05), signaling uniformity in dialect accommodation. Further analyses of the individuals' speech show that half of them accommodated to only one of the vowels, and that accommodation to both vowels depends on speakers' early arrival at the host community.

We report initial findings from a study of the Northern Cities Shift (NCS) in Lansing, Michigan. As in other urban centers recently examined, the NCS appears to be undergoing re-evaluation and attrition. However, whereas others have found the NCS to be simply undergoing "exact reversals" of its vowel movements (Driscoll and Lape 2014), in Lansing we find two additional processes in addition to reversal: reorganization and continuation. We observe reversal of the fronting of LOT, reorganization of TRAP from a raised to a continuous or nasal system, and continuation of the lowering of DRESS. Findings are derived from a sample of 50 speakers born 1908 to 1996, combining new sociolinguistic interviews with oral histories recorded 1992-2006.

The Low Back Vowel Merger (LBVM) and Northern Cities Shift (NCS) are two phonological changes believed to be structurally antagonistic (Labov, 1994) due to mutual involvement of the bot and bought vowel classes. However, resistance to the LBVM is weakening in communities in Upstate New York (Dinkin, 2011), a long-standing NCS region (Labov et al., 2006). Moreover, northwestern Wisconsin, where differential /æ/-raising before voiced velars but not voiceless velars is also well established (Bauer & Parker, 2008; Purnell, 2008), exhibits both NCS and LBVM patterns in one community (Benson et al., 2011), ostensibly making this region a fringe NCS zone. Dinkin (2011) shows that backing of bot occurs in areas of New York with full Inland North NCS systems (core) and partial NCS systems (fringe) (Labov et al., 2006). He posits this as a consequence of proximity to established LBVM communities bringing about diffusion of merger, strongly suggesting that bot-fronting or even full-blown NCS is not sufficient to prevent the diffusion of the LBVM. Northwestern Wisconsin is another area in which the LBVM and NCS regions are geographically proximate (Labov et al., 2006, p. 182), making it well situated for the investigation of the relationship between the LBVM, NCS, and bag-raising.
The internal progression of the NCS in the Inland North is associated with larger cities, such that the bigger they are the more advanced each stage of the change (Labov et al., 2006, pp. 187–215). More generally the gravity model (Trudgill, 1974) predicts that the LBVM and NCS will diffuse to larger cities first, followed by geographically contiguous suburban and rural communities. Taken together this leads to the following predictions: (1) both changes will be more advanced in the denser urban area relative to the others, and (2) bot-backing will occur due to LBVM proximity. However, whether or not bot-backing brings about retraction of other stages of the NCS in reverse sequence, or leads to a coexistence of NCS features with the LBVM is an open question.
The vowel systems of 134 participants (75 Female, 59 Male, Birth year: 1929-1992) from three geographically contiguous cities in Northwestern Wisconsin (Urban, Rural, and Suburban) were measured from force-aligned (Yuan & Liberman, 2008) reading materials (Tokens=69,074). Lobanov (1971) normalized measurements were submitted to sets of mixed-effects regressions with speaker and task as nested random-intercepts, and a random-slope-by-speaker for log(duration).
The LBVM is making inroads into the region, with substantial phonetic overlap starting in the 1980s. While it appears that bet and bought are stable across apparent-time, with bet often backer than bad, the first two stages of the NCS are found to be reversing with bot backing and bad lowering and backing, across apparent-time. A city*year of birth interaction shows the second largest city reversing bad fastest. bot is reversing in all communities, ending up in the same phonetic space, but each community had reached a different level of fronting before LBVM diffusion brought about reversal. Lastly, the different communities show different trajectories of change for both bag and ban.

Linguists in the United States have been interested in the dialects of English-speakers from Maine for many decades (Perkins 1929, Heffner 1938, Bennett 1979), but few researchers have focused exclusively on Maine in more recent years. The Linguistic Atlas of New England (LANE), a research project that contributed to the Atlas of North American English, studied Maine speech as part of the Eastern New England dialect region, which includes eastern New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, as well as all of Rhode Island (O’Cain 1979, Labov et al., 2006). Most recent independent research has used the LANE data to look at either New England as a whole (Dinkin 2004, Nagy and Irwin 2008) or the Boston area in particular (Hartley 2005, Nagy and Irwin 2010).

To contribute to this research, I decided to study the speech of residents of Portland, Maine. Filling in this gap in the literature is important because more recent data on the speech of Maine English is needed to provide a more current view of the linguistic situation of Maine as well as a more complete geographic view of New England speech. Additionally, some particular locations in Maine, such at Kittery Point, have been known to develop their own distinct subdialects (Bennett and Irwin 1974).

I designed my study to be a survey of the current state of English in Portland, and in Maine more generally. I focused on the sociophonetics of residents’ speech, looking at how their social situation affected their speech, particularly the specific sounds they used. My research consisted of recording native Maine residents while interviewing them about their lives. As such, I advertised my research as a college project on “communication in Maine” to keep my subjects from thinking too deeply about how they were talking. After asking them about where they had lived and where their family was from, I would invite them to speak about any number of topics – stories from their childhood or their opinions about life in Portland. I would finish by asking them to read a selected text used by Nagy and Irwin (2008) and to read aloud and compare pairs of words.

Like other recent researchers in New England speech, I started my search using the characteristics outlined by LANE and others. Because I focused almost exclusively on vowels, I designed my word pairs to elicit possible minimal pairs that are sometimes present in the speech of New Englanders. This included many standard vowel distinctions as well as some more distinctive to New England, like father/bother, hurry/furry, and hoarse/horse. The sample text from Nagy and Irwin (2008) also allowed me to gather data on rhoticity, most exemplified by the stereotypical Boston characteristic of dropping /r/ in some places and adding it in others.

Using these characteristics as a jumping-off point, I will compare the general findings of LANE and other researchers to the results of my own speakers. I plan to analyze my results in a variety of ways, including a historic analysis of possible changes in Portland speech over time, a synchronic analysis of the current overall characteristics of Portland speech, and an analysis of some demographic characteristics of Portland speech to see if there are any noticeable patterns along the lines of age, gender, or other factors. It is my hope that this exploration will serve as a starting point for further in-depth research on how people speak in Portland, Maine.

When people immigrate and acquire a new language (and pass it on to their offspring), the overall situation is not only one of language acquisition but also one often described as "languages in contact." Since all people actually speak dialects (or, at an even finer level of granularity, idiolects), however, the research here has as its goal "dialects in contact" (with apologies to Trudgill 1986), specifically dialects in contact across language boundaries. 1 This study considers such contact in an international/national immigration situation in which Mexican Spanish speakers and their descendents have moved to areas in southern Michigan, in the Great Lakes area of the United States (Figure 1). They are for the most part former migrant agricultural workers, some directly from Mexico, some from Texas, who have settled in Lansing, Michigan and in and around Benton Harbor, Michigan (Figure 2). The Mexican American community in Lansing is long-settled, but the Benton Harbor community is much younger, and the city is about 95% African

Few studies have examined the vowel systems of communities that border areas characterized by the Northern Cities Shift and the low back vowel merger, two sound changes currently shaping North American English. Using data from 40 respondents in greater Eau Claire, in northwestern Wisconsin, we examine the behavior of the low vowels /æ, ɑ, ɔ/ and consider the relationships among their arrangements and these sound changes. We find advanced /æ/-raising before /g/, moderate /æ/-raising in other environments, little to no /ɑ/-fronting, and the low back vowel merger in progress. The findings challenge the assumption that /æ/-raising and the low back vowel merger are unlikely to co-occur. In addition, the patterns of /æ/-raising, for example, that /æ/-raising before /g/ is not undergoing change and /æ/-raising in other environments may be receding, raise interesting questions about the relationship between /æ/-raising in northwestern Wisconsin and the Northern Cities Shift. Although /æ/- raising seems to precede the low back vowel merger in northwestern Wisconsin, the pressure of the low back vowel merger is intensifying due to geographic and social connections between northwestern Wisconsin and Minnesota.

"Hans Kurath’s 1939 Linguistic Atlas of New England reported a significant east-west dialect contrast along the Green mountains of Vermont. In 1987, using data from 1960s fieldwork for the Dictionary of American Regional English, Craig Carver found the contrast remained intact a generation later. Such results reflect the enduring influence of eighteenth-century settlers, known as the Principle of first effective Settlement or the “founder effect.” to determine the current status of the east-west dialect contrast and whether the founder effect is still present, the authors examined 62 speakers along the border in both real and apparent time. the real-time results show that, among older speakers, Kurath’s east west line of traditional New england features has moved eastward to the state border of New hampshire. the apparenttime results show that many traditional eastern variants are receding among younger speakers, and these linguistic changes are reflecting and constructing significant social changes occurring in this region. for about two centuries, the east-west contrasts of the early european settlements were faithfully transmitted to each new generation. But now, among the current generations of speakers, the founder effect in northern New england is rapidly dissipating. "

This ethnographic investigation of the vowel system of Mexican Americans in Southwest Michigan addresses several holes in the literature, including the lack of research on Mexican Americans outside in the American South and the interaction of their dialect with regional variation. Sociolinguistics has a long tradition of exploring both the language use of political minorities and the regional variation of those who considered among the mainstream population, but it often ignores interaction between the two. This work addresses such interaction among Mexican Americans in Benton Harbor, Michigan, a town which is 95% African American, in terms of both their production and their perception of vowels. This population, composed mostly of former migrant workers, is only beginning to form a community, but linguistic patterns similar to Roeder’s (2006) study of an established community of Mexican Americans in Lansing, Michigan, are already emerging. Contrary to Labov’s (1994) claims that groups like Latinos do not participate in regional variation, the vocalic patterns of Mexican Americans in Benton Harbor and Lansing demonstrate accommodation to the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), a regional change found among whites in the Inland North. This work also addresses claims about substrate Spanish effects in the vowel system, showing several of the claims about confusion patterns might be overstated. Finally, it addresses the social situation that is conditioning the developing dialect, addressing racial tensions and patterns of movement that might contribute to these speakers’ partial adoption of the NCS as opposed to other available local norms.