Recent acoustic analyses examining English in the North American great lakes region show that the area’s characteristic vowel chain shift, the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), is waning. Attitudinal analyses suggest that the NCS has lost prestige in some NCS cities, such that it is no longer regarded as ‘standard American English’. Socio-cultural and temporal accounts of capital loss and dialect decline remain unexplored, however. This paper examines F1, F2, and diphthongal quality of TRAP produced by 36 White speakers (18 women) in one NCS city—Lansing, Michigan—over the course of the 20th century. I show that TRAP realization is conditioned by gender and birth year, such that women led the change towards NCS realizations into the middle of the 20th century and then away from them thereafter. I discuss these findings against the backdrop of deindustrialization during this time of linguistic reorganization in Lansing. I show that as the regional industry—(auto) manufacturing—loses prestige, so does the regional variant—raised TRAP. This paper adds to our understanding of North American dialectology the importance of deindustrialization and the Baby Boomers to Generation Xer generational transition to our discussion of regional dialect maintenance.

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The Low-Back-Merger Shift (LBMS) is a major North American vowel chain shift spreading across many disparate dialect regions. In this field-based study, we examine the speech of fifty-nine White Western Massachusetts speakers, aged 18–89. Using diagnostics in Becker (2019) and Boberg (2019b), we find the LBMS emerging at the expense of the Northern Cities Shift (Labov, Yaeger, & Steiner, 1972) and traditional New England features (Boberg, 2001; Kurath, 1939; Nagy & Roberts, 2004). In Becker's LBMS model (2019:9), the low-back merger (lot-thought) triggers front-vowel shifts. Our results suggest that local social meaning can sometimes override this chronology such that the front-vowel shifts occur before the low-back merger, even as the overall configuration comes to match Becker's predictions. Sociosymbolic meaning associated with the older New England system has led to a different temporal ordering of LBMS components, thus providing new theoretical and empirical insights into the mechanisms by which supralocal patterns are adopted.

The Eastern Massachusetts Life and Language project was in its planning stages when the COVID-19 pandemic began to make headway in the United States in 2020. We contribute to the conversation about conducting linguistic fieldwork during a major social upheaval by providing a description of our shift to virtual methodologies, which include utilizing Instagram for participant recruitment and Zoom for conducting sociolinguistic interviews. Virtual data collection remains underexplored, as there has never been a widespread need for such practices until the recent lockdowns resulting from the pandemic. Likewise, social media appears to be underutilized as a recruitment tool in linguistic fieldwork. Nevertheless, it is effective in producing a heterogeneous participant sample in a short amount of time. We are delighted to engage in discussions about the effects of virtual recruitment and data collection on linguistic fieldwork and the data itself. We offer a description of our pivots to virtual recruitment and interviewing and the racial justice initiatives that become achievable because of these changes. We hope this contribution is beneficial to researchers looking to incorporate virtual methodologies into their research program.

Historically, /æ/ in the Northern Cities Shift (NCS) dialect area is realized as raised, lengthened, and diphthongized in all consonantal contexts (Boberg and Strassel 2000) and that pre-oral /æ/ is realized with as much nasalization as pre-nasal /æ/ (Plichta 2004). Recent studies suggest that young speakers in the dialect area are adopting a nasal pattern for /æ/ such that only tokens before nasal consonants are raised and fronted in phonetic space (in Lansing, MI (Wagner et al. 2016), in Syracuse, NY (Driscoll and Lape 2015), in Upstate NY (Thiel and Dinkin 2017), in Detroit, MI (Acton et al. 2017)). Through acoustic analysis of 1310 /æ/ tokens produced by 26 speakers born and raised in Lansing, MI (date of birth 1991–1997), the current study finds that younger speakers are not simply lowering and retracting this vowel, they are rejecting all phonetic components of the NCS /æ/ system. For these speakers, only pre-nasal /æ/ tokens are realized as long, diphthongal, and nasalized, while pre-oral tokens are short, monophthongal, and have little to no nasalization. Vowel quality for /æ/ in the NCS dialect area is thus undistinguishable from that in the western and midland states in the US (e.g., California and Kansas).