The Rise and Fall of the Northern Cities Shift

Abstract

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.

Boomer Peak or Gen X Cliff? From SVS to LBMS in Georgia English

“…These findings have important implications for both the decline of mid-twentieth century regional vernaculars and the rise of the LBMS. As the LBMS becomes more established in other regions with longstanding regional systems (Nesbitt, 2021;Nesbitt & Stanford, 2021), we can investigate whether such changes begin around Gen X, as we find here. If so, we have the opportunity to consider possible explanations for panregional change, which may shed light on the importance of processes like demographic shift or social evaluation as driving forces behind novel linguistic changes.…”

“…Although young speakers in many parts of the United States participate in the LBMS, the chronology and motivation for change are less understood. However, a recent investigation in Lansing, Michigan, where the Northern Cities Shift has declined, highlighted the generational divide between Baby Boomers and Generation X as “a pivotal transition throughout the country” (Nesbitt, 2021:359), and the panregional arrival of the LBMS is a possible source for Nesbitt's strong generational claim. We test this hypothesis among White speakers from Georgia, where older speech patterns include the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS; Labov, 1991; Labov, Ash, & Boberg, 2006).…”

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

“…However, there are lexical exceptions, for instance, the /ae/ in sad is lax while glad, mad, bad are all tense (Labov, 1994:429-437). This synchronic view of /ae/ systems provides us with a methodological opportunity to assess individual systems if an Inland Northern community appears to move toward a latestage system, as has been observed in recent analyses (Driscoll & Lape, 2015;Nesbitt, 2021;Thiel & Dinkin, 2017;Wagner et al, 2016).…”

“…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).…”

Sociolinguistic prompts in the 21stcentury: Uniting past approaches and current directions

“…In a traditional attention‐paid‐to‐speech paradigm (Labov, 1966b), semantic differentials lie between the highly casual conversational styles and the more formal reading list styles. We originally designed our semantic differentials to elicit stressed tokens of vowels implicated in the Northern Cities Vowel Shift and its reversal (Driscoll & Lape, 2015; McCarthy, 2011; Nesbitt, 2021), but have since expanded our range of phonemes of interest.…”