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 simply 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, 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 . As for fronting, it can go beyond to the front , and may, for the most advanced speakers, even be close to —so that
stock and
botch come to be pronounced how a
mainstream American speaker would say
stack and
batch; e.g.
coupon .
Lowering of The fronting of the vowel leaves a blank space that is filled by lowering the "aw" vowel in , 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). 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, where this runs off of the
Pittsburgh accent. Younger speakers reversing the fronting of , for example in
Lansing, Michigan, also approach a merger. 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 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, 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 largely begun to reverse in many cities of the Inland North, such as Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse,
Lansing,
Eau Claire, and
Ogdensburg.
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 (). 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 (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. 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 ==