Inland Northern American English

File:Inland North Map.jpg

This map shows, with red circles, the exact cities identified within the Inland North dialect region, according to Labov et al.'s (2006) ANAE.

Inland Northern (American) English,Template:Sfnp also known in American linguistics as the Inland North or Great Lakes dialect, is an American English dialect spoken primarily by White Americans throughout much of the U.S. Great Lakes region. The most distinctive Inland Northern accents are spoken in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse.Template:Sfnp The dialect can be heard as far east as upstate New York and as far west as eastern Iowa and even among certain demographics in the Twin Cities, Minnesota. 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.Template:Sfnp Linguists often characterize the northwestern 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",Template:Sfnp 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 Template:Sc2 vowel and fronting of the Template:Sc2 vowel) of this shift, documented since the 1970s as comprising five distinct stages.Template:Sfnp However, evidence since the mid-2010s suggests a retreat away from the Northern Cities Shift in many Inland Northern cities and toward a less marked American accent. Various common names for the Inland Northern accent exist, often based on city, for example: Chicago accent, Detroit accent, Cleveland accent, etc.

Geographic distribution

File:Northern Cities Vowel Shift.svg

Three isoglosses identifying the NCVS. In the brown areas Template:Sc2 is more retracted than Template:Sc2. The blue line encloses areas in which Template:Sc2 is backed. The red line encloses areas in which Template:Sc2 is diphthongized to even before oral consonants. The areas enclosed by all three lines may be considered the "core" of the NCVS; it is most consistently present in Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Detroit, and Chicago. Adapted from Template:Harvp.

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, Kalamazoo, Saginaw); northwestern Indiana (Gary); northern Illinois (Chicago, Rockford, Joliet); southeastern Wisconsin (Kenosha, Racine, Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay); and, largely, northeastern Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley and greater Coal Region (Scranton, 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 side of which speakers have continued to maintain their Midland and North-Central accents. Sociolinguist William Labov theorizes that this separation reflects a political divide; a controlled study of his shows that Inland Northern speakers tend to be more associated with liberal politics than speakers of the other two dialects, especially as Americans continue to self-segregate in residence based on ideological concerns. Former President Barack Obama, for example, has a mild Inland Northern accent despite not living in the dialect region until young adulthood.

Phonology and phonetics

File:Southern Michigan English monophthongs chart.svg

The monophthongs of Southern Michigan on a vowel chart, typical of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, though not to the extreme. Adapted from Hillenbrand (2003).

File:Southern Michigan English diphthongs chart.svg

The diphthongs of Southern Michigan on a vowel chart, adapted from Hillenbrand (2003).

Vocalic phonemes of INAE

	Front	Central	Back
	tense	lax	lax	tense
Close	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link
Close-mid	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link		Template:IPA link
Open-mid	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link	Template:IPA link
Open	Template:IPA link			Template:IPA link
Diphthongs

All vowels of the Inland Northern dialect

Pure vowels (Monophthongs)
English diaphoneme	Inland Northern realization	Example words
		bath, trap, man
		blah, father, spa
†		lot, bother, wasp
		dog, loss, off
		all, bought, saw
		dress, met, bread
		about, syrup, arena
		hit, skim, tip
		beam, chic, fleet
		bus, flood, what
		book, put, should
		food, glue, new
Diphthongs
		ride, shine, try
		bright, dice, fire
		now, ouch, scout
		lame, rein, stain
		boy, choice, moist
		goat, oh, show
R-colored vowels
		barn, car, park
		fear, peer, tier
		bare, bear, there
		burn, doctor, first, herd, learn, murder
		hoarse, horse, war
		poor, tour, lure
		cure, Europe, pure
† Footnotes When followed by , the historic is pronounced entirely differently by Inland North speakers as , for example, in the words orange, forest, and torrent. The only exceptions to this are the words tomorrow, sorry, sorrow, borrow and, for some speakers, morrow, which use the sound . This is all true of General American speakers too.

File:Inland North IPA.PNG

Based on Labov et al.; averaged F1/F2 means for speakers from the Inland North. is higher and fronter than , while is more retracted than .

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

File:Northern Cities shift.svg

Northern Cities Shift as a vowel chart, based on image in Labov, Ash, and Boberg (1997)'s "A national map of the regional dialects of American English".

The Northern Cities Vowel Shift, or simply Northern Cities Shift,Template:Sfnp 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 Template:Sc2 and fronting of Template:Sc2

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 Template:Sc2, typically rendered in American transcriptions), as well as the fronting of the sound of [[father-bother merger|Template:Sc2 or Template:Sc2]] in this accent (typically transcribed ) toward Template:IPAblink or Template:IPAblink. Inland Northern Template:Sc2 raising was first identified in the 1960s, with that vowel becoming articulated with the tongue raised and then gliding back toward the center of the mouth, thus producing a centering diphthong of the type , , or at its most extreme ; e.g. naturally Template:ErrorTemplate:Category handlerTemplate:Category handler. As for Template:Sc2 fronting, it can go beyond to the front , and may, for the most advanced speakers, even be close to Template:IPAblink—so that pot or sod come to be pronounced how a mainstream American speaker would say pat or sad; e.g. coupon Template:ErrorTemplate:Category handlerTemplate:Category handler.

Lowering of Template:Sc2

The fronting of the Template:Sc2 vowel leaves a blank space that is filled by lowering the "aw" vowel in Template:Sc2 Template:IPAblink, which itself comes to be pronounced with the tongue in a lower position, closer to or . As a result, for example, people with the shift pronounce caught the way speakers without the shift say cot; thus, shifted speakers pronounce caught as (and cot as , as explained above).Template:Sfnp In defiance of the shift, however, there is a well-documented scattering of Inland North speakers who are in a state of transition toward a cot-caught merger; this is particularly evident in northeastern Pennsylvania.Template:Sfnp Younger speakers reversing the fronting of , for example in Lansing, Michigan, also approach a merger.

Backing or lowering of Template:Sc2

The movement of to , in order to avoid overlap with the now-fronted vowel, presumably initiates the consequent shifting of (the "short e" in Template:Sc2, Template:IPAblink in General American) away from its original position. Thus, demonstrates backing, lowering, or a combination of both toward , the near-open central vowel, or almost .

Backing of Template:Sc2

The next change is the movement of (the Template:Sc2 vowel) from a central or back position toward a very far back position . People with the shift pronounce bus so that it sounds more like boss to people without the shift.

Backing or lowering of Template:Sc2

The final change is the backing and lowering of , the "short i" vowel in Template:Sc2, toward ,Template:Sfnp or even toward the schwa . Alternatively, Template:Sc2 may be lowered to Template:IPAblink, without backing. This results in a considerable phonetic overlap between Template:Sc2 and Template:Sc2 .

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 vowels retain values similar to General American (GA) in this position, so that north , merry and near are pronounced , with unshifted Template:Sc2, Template:Sc2 and Template:Sc2 (as close as in GA). 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 of which are also typical of GA varieties.Template:Sfnp

History of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift

William Labov et al.'s Atlas of North American English (2006) presents the first historical understanding of the order in which the Inland North's vowels shifted. Speakers around the Great Lakes began to pronounce the short a sound, as in Template:Sc2, 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.Template:Sfnp 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 Template:Sc2 and Template:Sc2); 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.Template:Sfnp 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.Template:Sfnp 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 Template:Sc2, the backing and lowering of as in Template:Sc2, the backing of as in Template:Sc2 (first reported in 1986), and the backing and lowering of as in Template:Sc2, often but not always in that exact order. Altogether, this constitutes the Northern Cities Shift, identified by linguists as such in 1972.

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,Template:Sfnp 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 Template:Sc2 vowel as and the Template:Sc2 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.Template:Sfnp 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 Template:Sc2 and Template:Sc2 pronunciations, which may have already existed among 19th-century New England settlers, though this has been contested.Template:Sfnp 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 largely begun to reverse in many cities of the Inland North, such as Lansing, Ogdensburg, Rochester, Syracuse, Detroit, Buffalo, Chicago, and Eau Claire. In particular, fronting and raising (though raising is persisting before nasal consonants, as is the General American norm) have now reversed among younger speakers in these areas. 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: 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 rider and writer by vowel quality (Template:ErrorTemplate:Category handler).Template:Sfnp 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: .Template:Sfnp
• The nucleus of may be more backed than in other common North American accents (toward or ).
• The nucleus of (as in go and boat), like , tends to be conservative, not undergoing the fronting common in the vast American southeastern super-region. Likewise, the traditionally high back vowel is conservative, less fronted in the North than in other American regions, though it still undergoes some fronting after coronal consonants.Template:Sfnp Also, , along with , can traditionally manifest as monophthongs: and , respectively.
• The vowel in can raise toward in words like beg, negative, or segment, except in Michigan.
• 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.

Vocabulary

Not all of these terms, here compared with their counterparts in 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 through Western New York State (Buffalo residents say pop, Syracuse residents say soda now but used to say pop until sometime in the 1970s, and Rochester residents say either. 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; also called a tyme machine (spoken like time machine) in the greater Milwaukee area, from the first predominant ATM brand in the area, TYME
• 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"). Youse is also found in Chicago and its hinterland, utilized as a second-person plural pronoun (similar to "y'all").

Notable lifelong native speakers

• Mark BorchardtTemplate:Snd "intense Milwaukee accent"
• Hillary ClintonTemplate:Snd "playing down her flat Chicago accent"
• Ron CoomerTemplate:Snd "his South Side accent"
• Kathy CramerTemplate:Snd "A Grafton native ... her strong Wisconsin accent—'which I've been told I haveTemplate:' "
• Joan CusackTemplate:Snd "a great distinctive voice" that she says is due to "my Chicago accent... my A's are all flat"
• Richard J. DaleyTemplate:Snd "He never outgrew ... his Bridgeport accent, the equivalent of the speech that prevails in Queens or South Philadelphia."
• Richard M. DaleyTemplate:Snd "makes no effort to tame a thick Chicago accent"
• Jimmy DoreTemplate:Snd "I think that Chicago comics like Jimmy Dore bring my Wisconsin/Chicago accent back with a vengence [sic]."
• David DraimanTemplate:Snd "distinct Chicago accent"
• Kevin DunnTemplate:Snd "a blue-collar attitude and the Chicago accent to match"
• Rahm EmanuelTemplate:Snd "more refined (if still very Chicago)"
• Dennis FarinaTemplate:Snd "rich Chicago accent"
• Chris FarleyTemplate:Snd "beatific Wisconsin accent"
• Robert ForsterTemplate:Snd "accent that sounded like pure Chicago—though he hailed from Rochester, N.Y."
• Dennis FranzTemplate:Snd "tough-guy Chicago accent"
• Sean GiambroneTemplate:Snd "Sean, whose Chicago accent is thick enough to cut with a knife"
• John GoodmanTemplate:Snd "Goodman delivered a completely authentic Inland North accent.... It wasn't an act."
• Rob GronkowskiTemplate:Snd "the ambiguous sort of accent that sounds, at first, midwestern, but is really the product of upstate New York"
• Edythe HarrisonTemplate:Snd "a harsh nasal accent of her native Detroit"
• Sue HawkTemplate:Snd "a Midwestern truck driver whose accent and etiquette epitomized the stereotype of the tacky, abrasive, working-class character"
• Kathy HochulTemplate:Snd "She talks plainly ... with a distinctive Buffalo accent, drawing out her aTemplate:'s (habits is three syllables) and dropping her terminal gTemplate:'s."
• Bonnie HuntTemplate:Snd "speaks offstage in [an] unfiltered North Side accent"
• Mike KrzyzewskiTemplate:Snd "his nasal voice ... his flat, familiar Chicago accent"
• Dennis KucinichTemplate:Snd "a shining example of Cleveland's version of the Inland North accent"
• Pope Leo XIVTemplate:Snd "was born in Chicago (with the accent to prove it)"
• Bill LipinskiTemplate:Snd "I could live only 100 miles from the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Lipinski) and he would have an accent and I do not"
• Mike MadiganTemplate:Snd "his flat, Southwest Side accent"
• David MametTemplate:Snd "a chunky Chicago accent that's so thick it borders on Bronxian"
• Larry ManettiTemplate:Snd "that Chicago accent"
• Joe MantegnaTemplate:Snd "whose broad Chicago accent ... his unpretentious Chicago accent"
• Terry McAuliffeTemplate:Snd "that rich, unhelpful Syracuse accent"
• Jim "Mr. Skin" McBrideTemplate:Snd "a clipped Chicago accent"
• Phil MendelsonTemplate:Snd "a rasping Cleveland accent"
• Susana MendozaTemplate:Snd "an impeccable Chicago accent"
• Michael MooreTemplate:Snd "a Flintoid, with a nasal, uncosmopolitan accent" and "a recognisable blue-collar Michigan accent"
• Bill MurrayTemplate:Snd "sound[s] Chicago, with those sharp a's, elongated o's and hard consonants"
• Anthony NapolitanoTemplate:Snd "the thickest Chicago [accent] on the Council"
• Marie NewmanTemplate:Snd "a noticeable Midwestern accent"
• Kevin O'ConnellTemplate:Snd "(has) [sic] a Buffalo accent you could fry chicken wings in"
• Bob OdenkirkTemplate:Snd "every once in a while you can hear a shade of the Chicago area slip through Oswalt's Minnesotan"
• Suze OrmanTemplate:Snd "broad, Midwestern accent"
• Iggy PopTemplate:Snd "plainspoken Midwestern accent"
• Robert RitaTemplate:Snd "a thick south Chicago accent"
• Paul RyanTemplate:Snd "may be the first candidate on a major presidential ticket to feature some of the Great Lakes vowels prominently"
• Bob SegerTemplate:Snd "I say it with a flat midwestern accent ... My accent is Midwest"
• Rick SnyderTemplate:Snd "an intense Michigan accent"
• Nicholas SposatoTemplate:Snd "Everybody tells me I can't enter any Chicago accent contest—because I would win it hands down"
• Michael SymonTemplate:Snd "Symon's local accent gives him an honest, working-class vibe"
• Lily TomlinTemplate:Snd "Tomlin's Detroit accent"
• Gretchen WhitmerTemplate:Snd "a Michigan accent probably most detectable when she ... flattens out her 'a' sounds with a nasal twang"

See also

• List of dialects of English
• North American English regional phonology
• North-Central American English
• Western New England English

Sources

• Template:Cite thesis

External links

• Chicago Dialect Samples
• The Guide to Buffalo English. Template:Webarchive.
• The Northern Cities Vowel Shift. Template:Webarchive.
• NPR interview with Professor William Labov about the shift
• PBS resource from the show "Do you Speak American?"
• Select Annotated Bibliography On the Speech of Buffalo, NY. Template:Webarchive.
• Telsur Project Maps