Inland Northern American English


Inland Northern 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 Central New York westward along the Erie Canal, through much of the U.S. Great Lakes region, to eastern Iowa. The most innovative Inland Northern accents are spoken in Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse. A geographic corridor reaching from Chicago southwest along historic Route 66 into St. Louis, Missouri, has also been infiltrated by features of the Inland Northern accent, with the corridor today showing a mixture of both Inland Northern and Midland accents. Linguists often characterize the western Great Lakes region's dialect as the separate 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 its now-defining chain shift of vowels that began as late as the 1930s. A 1969 study first formally showed lower-middle-class women leading the regional population in the first two stages of what, since the 1970s onward, has been documented as the five-stage Northern Cities Vowel Shift. Some recent evidence has suggested a reversal of some of the shift's features in certain locations.

Geographic distribution

The dialect region called the "Inland North" consists of western and central New York State ; northern Ohio ; Michigan's Lower Peninsula ; northern Indiana ; northern Illinois ; southeastern Wisconsin ; and, largely, northeastern Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley/Coal Region. This is the dialect spoken in part of America's chief industrial region, an area sometimes known as the Rust Belt.
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," never underwent the Northern Cities Shift and now shares more features with Western Pennsylvania English due to contact with Pittsburghers, particularly with Erie as their choice of city for summer vacations. Meanwhile, in suburban areas, the dialect may be less pronounced; for example, native-born speakers in Kane, McHenry, Lake, DuPage, and Will Counties in Illinois may sound slightly different from speakers from Cook County and particularly those who grew up in Chicago. 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, as do almost all people in and around the city of Detroit who are not African American.

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. Former Democratic President Barack Obama, for example, has a mild Inland Northern accent.

History of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift

et al.'s Atlas of North American English 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 the broad a of "spa" as in and, so words like bot, gosh, or lock then 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.
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 , 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 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. came 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 that preceded the Northern Cities Shift occurred by about 1860 in upstate New York, and the later stages of the NCS are merely those that logically followed. More recent evidence suggests that German-accented English greatly influenced the shift, because German speakers tend to pronounce the English vowel as and the vowel as, 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 shows 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.

Reversal of the shift

The shift, found throughout the Great Lakes cities, still exists, but recent evidence suggests a reversal of the shift in at least some of the Inland North, such as in Lansing, Michigan, and Ogdensburg and Syracuse, New York, in particular with regard to fronting and raising.

Phonology and phonetics

A Midwestern accent, 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 :/æ/ raising|raising and lengthening of the "short a", as well as the fronting of , in the direction of. Inland Northern raising was first identified in the 1960s, with coming to be articulated so that the tongue starts from a position that is higher and fronter 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. As for fronting towards, it may, for 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 as.

Lowering of

The fronting of leaves a blank space in Inland North speakers' pronunciation that is filled by lowering , 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 the /ɑ/. 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 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 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.

Lowering and backing of

The final change is the lowering and backing of, the "short i" vowel in, to a more central position in the mouth, perhaps.

Other phonetics

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:
Individual cities and sub-regions also have their own terms; for example: