Shifting from the shift: Loss of dialect distinction in the US

Abstract

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).

1. Introduction

“…Scholars have also found evidence of the LBMS even farther afield, for example, in Alaska (Bowie et al 2012), and there are even indications of the LBMS in areas considered to be solidly within the scope of the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), in Michigan (Wagner et al 2016;Nesbitt 2018;Nesbitt, Wagner, and Mason 2019 [this volume]) and in New York State (King 2018). In Michigan, both bat and bot have reversed course in apparent time from their NCS positions, with bat lowering and backing and bot backing and raising.…”