7. A Tale of Two Shifts: Movement Toward the Low-Back-Merger Shift in Lansing, Michigan

Nesbitt, Monica; Wagner, Suzanne Evans; Mason, Alexander

doi:10.1215/00031283-8032979

Cited by 15 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…For Baby Boomers, lowered thought has the status of a male-led NCS feature; for younger speakers, thought is simply unmarked. Although the dress vowel (as in words such as step and neck ) is not analyzed in this paper, this phenomenon is reminiscent of a pattern frequently reported for dress in NCS-losing communities (e.g., Nesbitt, Wagner & Mason 2019:150): the NCS lowering/backing of dress is not lost, because lowered/backed dress is not in conflict with supra-regional norms.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 79%

“…Since 2009, NCS loss has been documented in a wide range of communities; it seems very likely that these changes in Cooperstown are part of the same process leading to the loss of NCS in Chicago, Lansing, Rochester, Ogdensburg, and elsewhere in the Inland North. The Baby Boom/Generation X transition, or dates close to it, has been implicated as a turning point in NCS loss in other communities (Nesbitt, Wagner & Mason 2019; Thiel 2019:373; Nesbitt 2021), and the change in style-shifting of lot and trap in Cooperstown is the same as a change documented by Thiel (2019; see also Thiel & Dinkin 2020) in Ogdensburg. Morgan, DeGuise, Acton, Benson & Shvetsova (2017) describe this change as re-orientation toward “supra-regional norms”; it appears that Cooperstown, an economically well-off rural community, is participating in this re-orientation in roughly the same way as more urban and/or economically struggling cities are.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…NCS loss appears somewhat more advanced in Cooperstown than in other communities. However, most other recent studies of NCS loss—even those that discuss lot - thought merger, such as Nesbitt, Wagner, and Mason (2019)—do not seem to report minimal-pair judgments. Recent work at the northeastern fringe of the Inland North (Thiel 2019:316; Dinkin 2020:329) does report merger judgments, and finds merged minimal-pair judgments appearing somewhat later than in Cooperstown: unlike Cooperstown, no one born earlier than 1995 in the Inland North in these studies gives fully-merged judgments.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…But beginning only a few years after the publication of the Atlas , research began to emerge demonstrating the loss of NCS features in a variety of cities across the Inland North. NCS loss has been documented not only in communities at the fringe of the region, such as Eau Claire, WI (Benson, Fox & Balkman 2011) and Ogdensburg, NY (Thiel 2019; Thiel & Dinkin 2020), but in core Inland North metropolitan areas where the NCS was expected to be most stable, such as Syracuse, NY (Driscoll & Lape 2015); Rochester, NY (Kapner 2019; King 2021); Buffalo, NY (Milholland 2018); Detroit, MI (Morgan, DeGuise, Acton, Benson & Shvetsova 2017); Lansing, MI (Wagner, Mason, Nesbitt, Pevan & Savage 2016; Nesbitt, Wagner & Mason 2019; Nesbitt 2021); and Chicago, IL (McCarthy 2011; D’Onofrio & Benheim 2020; Durian & Cameron 2020). Although Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006:59) describe the Northern Cities Shift as incompatible with the low back merger of the lot and thought vowels, several studies in Inland North communities have reported trends in the direction of merger (Dinkin 2011, 2020; Wagner, Nesbitt, Mason, Pevan & Savage 2016; Nesbitt, Wagner & Mason 2019; Thiel 2019), though few have yet reported widespread merger per se.

Figure 1.The Northern Cities Shift…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Generational Phases: Toward the Low-Back Merger in Cooperstown, New York

Dinkin

2022

Journal of English Linguistics

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This paper reports on a new sociolinguistic sample of Cooperstown, a village in rural central New York. Previous research suggested Cooperstown was losing the Northern Cities Shift (NCS) and acquiring the low back merger via koineization as a result of dialect contact among locally-born children of parents from other regions. The new data shows abrupt retreat from NCS patterns between the Baby Boom generation and Generation X. A “phase transition” pattern is observed in progress toward the low back merger: Millennial women are the first to describe low back minimal pairs as merged, despite no appreciable difference between Millennials and Generation X in production of the low back vowels. No evidence is found to support the hypothesis that koineization is responsible for these changes; it appears that Cooperstown is subject to the same trend away from NCS documented in many other communities, subject to many of the same constraints.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 79%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 89%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 92%

Figure 1.The Northern Cities Shift…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Generational Phases: Toward the Low-Back Merger in Cooperstown, New York

Dinkin

2022

Journal of English Linguistics

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“…The present investigation focuses on one case of phonological allophonic emergence-/ae/ nasal allophony in Lansing, Michigan. Whereas /ae/ in Lansing was previously raised to [εae] in all phonological environments, younger generations exhibit a nasal allophonic system whereby /ae/ is raised only before nasal consonants (Nesbitt, 2021;Nesbitt, Wagner, & Mason, 2019;Wagner, Mason, Nesbitt, Pevan, & Savage, 2016). To investigate the mechanisms by which this phonological rule emerged in Lansing, I utilize a combination of analyses, examining speaker-level distributions and community-level acoustic target analyses from a natural language corpus (n = 36), and the results of a judgment task (n = 107).…”

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confidence: 99%

Phonological emergence and social reorganization: Developing a nasal /æ/ system in Lansing, Michigan

Nesbitt

2023

Lang Var Change

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Phonological rule innovation is thought to come about via reanalysis of some phonetic variation (e.g., Bermúdez-Otero, 2007; Hyman, 1975; Ohala, 1981; Pierrehumbert, 2001). Yet, empirical evidence suggests instead that the role of phonetic variation during phonological rule innovation is minor (Fruehwald, 2013, 2016). This paper adds to this ongoing debate an empirical analysis of an emergent allophonic contrast—an “/æ/ nasal system”—in White Michigan English. Analyses of speaker-level acoustic data from a sociolinguistic corpus (n = 36) and a subphonemic judgment task (n = 107) suggest that Lansing exhibits gradual phonological rule emergence. Social conditioning appears to act as the catalyst of phonological rule formation and its spread. The mechanism of actuation was thus “the chance alignment of social and phonetic variability” (Baker, Archangeli, & Mielke, 2011), suggesting that social conditioning on phonetic variability must play a major role in phonological emergence.

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The Low-Back-Merger Shift: Evidence from MENA Americans in the Upper Midwest and southern California

Sheydaei

2023

English Today

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Middle Eastern or North African (MENA) Americans are an understudied speech community in sociolinguistics. In terms of racial classification and identification, MENA Americans have been legally and historically classified as white but are not socially perceived as white (Beydoun, 2013, 2015). While early immigrants from MENA regions to the US were mostly Christians, ever since 1947, the majority of immigrants from MENA regions to the US have been from Muslim backgrounds (Orfalea, 2006); this demographic change can result in more ethnic visibility for MENA Americans in the US (cf., e.g., Shryock & Lin, 2009, for a discussion of ethnic visibility of MENA Americans in southeastern Michigan). Higher ethnic visibility can in turn lead to certain linguistic performances on the part of MENA Americans. Several studies have looked at the interaction of ethnic identity/visibility and local vowel patterns such as the merging of the low back vowels (the vowels in THOUGHT and LOT1). For example, Hall–Lew (2009) showed that Asian Americans in San Francisco took part in the low back vowel merger and high back vowel fronting, which both index local meanings being part of the California Vowel Shift (Eckert, 2008). Going beyond one particular locality, Wong and Hall–Lew (2014) demonstrated clear influence of local dialect on the speech of Asian Americans in two different localities, with Asian Americans from NYC having distinct low back vowels and those from San Francisco merged low back vowels. Comparing the speech of three different ethnic groups in the multicultural context of Toronto, Hoffman and Walker (2010) explored two features of the Canadian Vowel Shift: the retraction of TRAP and the lowering and retraction of DRESS. Their findings showed that while Chinese Canadians disfavored these two patterns, British/Irish and Italian Canadians favored them. In another study in the context of California English, Cardoso et al. (2016) looked at subclasses of the TRAP vowel in the speech of Chinese Americans and white Americans of San Francisco. They found that the nasal split of TRAP (it being raised when followed by a nasal consonant, and being retracted and lowered when followed by an oral consonant) was more advanced for white speakers than the Chinese group. Cardoso et al. (2016) associated the observed difference to the social meaning of the TRAP nasal split in California indexing white or non-Chicanx social personae.

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7. A Tale of Two Shifts: Movement Toward the Low-Back-Merger Shift in Lansing, Michigan

Cited by 15 publications

References 21 publications

Generational Phases: Toward the Low-Back Merger in Cooperstown, New York

Generational Phases: Toward the Low-Back Merger in Cooperstown, New York

Phonological emergence and social reorganization: Developing a nasal /æ/ system in Lansing, Michigan

The Low-Back-Merger Shift: Evidence from MENA Americans in the Upper Midwest and southern California

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