This paper examines the apparent time evolution of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift among 42 White speakers in one Chicago community. We analyse quantitative patterns of community‐wide vocalic change alongside individual speakers’ lived experiences and attitudes. We find that some features of the Shift are dramatically reversing at the community level, and that changing demographics and social concerns across the community’s history condition which speakers are likely to advance or reverse the Shift. Although some have argued that regionalized sound change reversals reflect speakers’ increasing extra‐local orientations, in this community, we suggest that reversal reflects shifting definitions of racialized localness, including younger speakers’ orientation away from particular emblematic local personae that have become linked with the Shift. We argue that sound changes must be understood in their evolving local contexts, as they can be driven by shifts in the social meanings attached to place‐linked features and in definitions of localness.

Research on Jewish English in the United States has drawn on a set of ideologies linking the Jewish ethnolinguistic repertoire to New York City English, but less is known about how these ideologies interface with the social meanings of regional features in the communities outside New York in which these speakers live. Through meta-linguistic commentary and acoustic analyses drawn from sociolinguistic interviews with white Jewish and Catholic Chicagoans, we find that meta-linguistic ideologies associate Jewish speakers with New York City English and white Catholic speakers with ‘local’ Chicago features. However, in actual production, these linguistic differences appear to be driven by neighborhood rather than ethnoreligious identity alone. We argue that while meta-linguistic commentary may re-circulate broader linguistic ideologies, the uptake of elements of the ethnolinguistic repertoire may depend on the social meanings of those features in the local community more broadly, including class- and place-linked variation. (Ethnolinguistic repertoire, place, Northern Cities Shift, Jewish English)*