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North American English regional phonology

February 27, 2023

See also: Regional vocabularies of American English
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

North American English regional phonology is the study of variations in the pronunciation of spoken North American English (English of the United States and Canada)—what are commonly known simply as "regional accents". Though studies of regional dialects can be based on multiple characteristics, often including characteristics that are phonemic (sound-based, focusing on major word-differentiating patterns and structures in speech), phonetic (sound-based, focusing on any more exact and specific details of speech), lexical (vocabulary-based), and syntactic (grammar-based), this article focuses only on the former two items. North American English includes American English, which has several highly developed and distinct regional varieties, along with the closely related Canadian English, which is more homogeneous geographically. American English (especially Western dialects) and Canadian English have more in common with each other than with varieties of English outside North America.

The most recent work documenting and studying the phonology of North American English dialects as a whole is the 2006 Atlas of North American English (ANAE) by William Labov, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg, on which much of the description below is based, following on a tradition of sociolinguistics dating to the 1960s; earlier large-scale American dialectology focused more on lexicology than on phonology.

Overview

Regional dialects in North America are historically the most strongly differentiated along the Eastern seaboard, due to distinctive speech patterns of urban centers of the American East Coast like Boston, New York City, and certain Southern cities, all of these accents historically noted by their London-like r-dropping (called non-rhoticity), a feature gradually receding among younger generations, especially in the South. The Connecticut River is now regarded as the southern and western boundary of the traditional New England accents, today still centered on Boston and much of Eastern New England. The Potomac River generally divides a group of Northeastern coastal dialects from an area of older Southeastern coastal dialects. All older Southern dialects, however, have mostly now receded in favor of a strongly rhotic, more unified accent group spread throughout the entire Southern United States since the late 1800s and into the early 1900s. In-between the two aforementioned rivers, some other variations exist, most famous among them being New York City English.

Outside of the Eastern seaboard, all other North American English (both in the U.S. and Canada) has been firmly rhotic (pronouncing all r sounds), since the very first arrival of English-speaking settlers. Rhoticity is a feature shared today with the English of Ireland, for example, rather than most of the English of England, which has become non-rhotic since the late 1700s. The sound of Western U.S. English, overall, is much more homogeneous than Eastern U.S. English. The interior and western half of the country was settled by people who were no longer closely connected to England, living farther from the British-influenced Atlantic Coast.

Certain particular vowel sounds are the best defining characteristics of regional North American English including any given speaker's presence, absence, or transitional state of the so-called cot–caught merger. Northeastern New England, Canadian, and Western Pennsylvania accents, as well as all accents of the Western U.S. have a merger of these /ɔ/ and /ɑ/ vowels, so that pairs of words like mock and talk, rod and clawed, or slot and bought rhyme. On the contrary, Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York metropolitan accents, plus inland accents of the Northern and Southern U.S., all strongly resist this merger, keeping the two sounds separate and thus maintaining an extra distinct vowel sound. The rest of the U.S. largely shows a transitional state of the merger, particularly the Midland dialect region, from Ohio to eastern Kansas.

Another prominent differentiating feature in regional North American English is fronting of the /oʊ/ in words like goat, home, and toe and /u/ in words like goose, two, and glue. This fronting characterizes Midland, Mid-Atlantic[citation needed], and Southern U.S. accents; these accents also front and raise the /aʊ/ vowel (of words like house, now, and loud), making yowl sound something like yeah-wool or even yale. Northern U.S. English, however, tends to keep all these vowels more backed. Southern and some Midland U.S. accents are often most quickly recognized by the weakening or deleting of the "glide" sound of the /aɪ/ vowel in words like thyme, mile, and fine, making the word spy sound something like spa.

One phenomenon apparently unique to North American U.S. accents is the irregular behavior of words that in the British English standard, Received Pronunciation, have /ɒrV/ (where V stands for any vowel). Words of this class include, among others: origin, Florida, horrible, quarrel, warren, borrow, tomorrow, sorry, and sorrow. In General American there is a split: the majority of these words have /ɔr/ (the sound of the word or), but the last four words of the list above have /ɑr/ (the sound of the words are). In Canada, all of these words are pronounced as /oʊr/ (same as General American /ɔr/ but analyzed differently). In the accents of Greater New York City, Philadelphia, the Carolinas and older Southern, most or all of these words are pronounced /ɑr/ (Shitara 1993).

Classification of regional accents

Hierarchy of regional accents

The findings and categorizations of the 2006 The Atlas of North American English (or ANAE), use one well-supported way to hierarchically classify North American English accents at the level of broad geographic regions, sub-regions, etc. The North American regional accent represented by each branch, in addition to each of its own features, also contains all the features of the branch it extends from.

Maps of regional accents

The map above shows the major regional dialects of American English (each designated in all capital letters), as demarcated primarily by Labov et al.'s The Atlas of North American English,[15] as well as the related Telsur Project's regional maps. Any region may also contain speakers of "General American," the notional accent ascribed to American English speakers who have receded away from the marked sounds of their region. Furthermore, this map does not account for speakers of ethnic, cultural, or other not-strictly-regional varieties (such as African-American Vernacular English, Chicano English, Cajun English, etc.). All regional American English dialects, unless specifically stated otherwise, are rhotic, with the father–bother merger, Mary–marry–merry merger, and pre-nasal "short a" tensing.[note 1]
Western
The Western dialect, including Californian and New Mexican sub-types (with Pacific Northwest English also, arguably, a sub-type), is defined by:
  • Cot–caught merger to [ɑ] ( listen)
  • GOAT is [oʊ]
  • GOOSE is [ü~ʉ]
North Central
The North Central ("Upper Midwest") dialect, including an Upper Michigan sub-type, is defined by:
Inland Northern
The Inland Northern ("Great Lakes") dialect is defined by:
  • No cot–caught merger: the cot vowel is [ɑ̈~a] and caught vowel is [ɒ]
  • /æ/ is universally [ɛə], the triggering event for the Northern Cities Vowel Shift in more advanced sub-types ([ɛə] ← /æ/ ← /ɑ/ ← /ɔ/ ← /ʌ/ ← /ɛ/)[7]
  • GOAT is [oʊ~ʌo]
Midland
The Midland dialect is defined by:
  • Cot–caught merger is in transition[17]
  • /aɪ/ may be [a], often only before /l/, /m/, /n/, or /ɹ/
  • /aʊ/ is [æɵ~æo][18]
  • /oʊ/ is [əʊ~ɵʊ]
WPA
The Western Pennsylvania dialect, including its advanced Pittsburgh sub-type, is defined by:
  • Cot–caught merger to [ɒ~ɔ], the triggering event for the Pittsburgh Chain Shift in the city itself ([ɒ~ɔ] ← /ɑ/ ← /ʌ/) but no trace of the Canadian Shift[19]
  • /oʊ/ is [əʊ~ɞʊ][20]
  • Full–fool–foal merger to [ʊl~ʊw]
  • Specifically in Greater Pittsburgh, /aʊ/ is [aʊ~a], particularly before /l/ and /r/, and in unstressed function words[14]
Southern
The Southern dialects, including several sub-types, are defined by:

Variable rhoticity (parts of Louisiana are still non-rhotic, even among younger people )

  • No cot–caught merger: the cot vowel is [ɑ] and caught vowel is [ɑɒ]
  • /aɪ/ is [a] at least before /b/, /d/, /ɡ/, /v/, or /z/, or word-finally, and potentially elsewhere, the triggering event for the Southern Shift ([a] ← /aɪ/ ← /eɪ/ ← /i/)
  • "Southern drawl" may break short front vowels into gliding vowels: /æ/ → [ɛ(j)ə]; /ɛ/ → [ɪ(j)ə]; /ɪ/ → [i(j)ə][21]
  • MOUTH is [æo], the triggering event for the Back Upglide Shift in more advanced sub-types ([æo] ← /aʊ/ ← /ɔ/ ← /ɔɪ/)[13]
  • GOAT is [əʉ~əʊ]
Mid-Atlantic
The Mid-Atlantic ("Delaware Valley") dialect, including Philadelphia and Baltimore sub-types, is defined by:
  • No cot–caught merger: the cot vowel is [ɑ̈~ɑ] and caught vowel is [ɔə~ʊə]; this severe distinction is the triggering event for the Back Vowel Shift before /r/ (ʊr ← /ɔ(r)/ ← /ɑr/)[22][23]
  • Unique Mid-Atlantic /æ/ split system: the bad vowel is [eə] and sad vowel is [æ]
  • GOAT is [əʊ]
  • MOUTH is [ɛɔ][18]
  • No Mary–marry–merry merger
NYC
The New York City dialect (with New Orleans English an intermediate sub-type between NYC and Southern) is defined by:
  • No cot–caught merger: the cot vowel is [ɑ̈~ɑ] and caught vowel is [ɔə~ʊə]; this severe distinction is the triggering event for the Back Vowel Shift before /r/ (/ʊə/ ← /ɔ(r)/ ← /ɑr/)[22]
  • Non-rhoticity or variable rhoticity
  • Unique New York City /æ/ split system: the bad vowel is [eə] and bat vowel is [æ]
  • GOAT is [oʊ~ʌʊ]
  • No Mary–marry–merry merger
  • father–bother not necessarily merged
ENE
Eastern New England dialect, including Maine and Boston sub-types (with Rhode Island English an intermediate sub-type between ENE and NYC), is defined by:
  • Cot–caught merger to [ɒ~ɑ] (lacking only in Rhode Island)
  • Non-rhoticity or variable rhoticity[16][24]
  • MOUTH is [ɑʊ~äʊ][25]
  • GOAT is [oʊ~ɔʊ]
  • GOOSE is [u]
  • Commonly, the starting points of /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ in a raised position when before voiceless consonants: [əɪ~ʌɪ] and [əʊ~ʌʊ], respectively
  • Possibly no Mary–marry–merry merger
  • No father–bother merger (except in Rhode Island): the father vowel is [a~ɑ̈] and bother vowel is [ɒ~ɑ][26]
The major regional dialects of Canadian English (each designated in all capital letters), as demarcated primarily by Labov et al.'s The Atlas of North American English,[15] as well as the related Telsur Project's regional maps.

All regional Canadian English dialects, unless specifically stated otherwise, are rhotic, with the father–bother merger, cot–caught merger, and pre-nasal "short a" tensing. The broadest regional dialects include:

Standard Canadian
The Standard Canadian dialect, including its most advanced Inland Canadian sub-type and others, is defined by:
  • Cot–caught merger to [ɒ], the triggering event for the Canadian Shift in more advanced sub-types ([ɒ] ← /ɑ/ ← /æ/ ← /ɛ/)[20]
  • /æ/ is raised to [ɛ] or even [e(ɪ)] when before /ɡ/[10]
  • Especially in Inland Canadian, beginnings of /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ in a raised position when before voiceless consonants: [əɪ~ʌɪ] and [əʊ~ʌʊ], respectively;[27] /aʊ/ is otherwise [äʊ~ɑʊ]; and /eɪ/ approaches [e][28]
  • GOAT is [oʊ]
Atlantic Canadian
The Atlantic Canadian ("Maritimer") dialect, including Cape Breton, Lunenburg, and Newfoundland sub-types, is defined by: • Cot–caught merger to [ɑ̈], but with no trace of the Canadian Shift[27][29]
  • START is [ɐɹ~əɹ][29]
  • GOAT is [oʊ]

Chart of regional accents

Accent Most populous urban center Strong /aʊ/ fronting Strong /oʊ/ fronting Strong /u/ fronting Strong /ɑ/ fronting before /r/ Cot–caught merger Pin–pen merger /æ/ raising system Chain shift
Atlantic Canadian Halifax, NS Mixed No Yes Yes Yes No Pre-nasal (mixed) none
Inland Northern Chicago, IL No No No Yes No No General or Pre-nasal[5][6] Northern Cities
Mid-Atlantic Philadelphia, PA Yes Yes Yes No No No Split Back Vowel
Midland Columbus, OH Yes Yes Yes No Mixed Mixed Pre-nasal none
New York City New York City, NY Yes No No[30] No No No Split Back Vowel
North-Central Minneapolis, MN No No No Yes Yes No Pre-nasal & -velar none
Northern New England Boston, MA No No No Yes Yes No Pre-nasal none
Southern San Antonio, TX Yes Yes Yes No Mixed Yes Southern Southern & Back Upglide
Standard Canadian Toronto, ON No No Yes No Yes No Pre-nasal & -velar Canadian
Western Los Angeles, CA No No Yes No Yes No Pre-nasal none (California)
Western Pennsylvania Pittsburgh, PA Yes Yes Yes No Yes Mixed Pre-nasal Pittsburgh

Alternative classifications

Combining information from the phonetic research through interviews of Labov et al. in the ANAE (2006) and the phonological research through surveys of Vaux (2004), Hedges (2017) performed a latent class analysis (cluster analysis) to generate six clusters, each with American English features that naturally occurred together and each expected to match up with one of these six broad U.S. accent regions: the North, the South, the West, New England, the Midland, and the Mid-Atlantic (including New York City). The results showed that the accent regions/clusters were largely consistent with those outlined in the ANAE.

The defining particular pronunciations of particular words that have more than an 86% likelihood of occurring in a particular cluster are: pajamas with either the phoneme /æ/ or the phoneme /ɑ/; coupon with either /ju/ or /u/; Monday with either /eɪ/ or /i/; Florida with either /ɔ/ or other possibilities (such as /ɑ/); caramel with either two or three syllables; handkerchief with either /ɪ/ or /i/; lawyer as either /ˈlɔɪ.ər/ or /ˈlɔ.jər/; poem with either one or two syllables; route with either /u/ or /aʊ/; mayonnaise with either two or three syllables; and been with either /ɪ/ or other possibilities (such as /ɛ/). The parenthetical words indicate that the likelihood of their pronunciation occurs overwhelmingly in a particular region (well over 50% likelihood) but does not meet the >86% threshold set by Hedges (2017) for what necessarily defines one of the six regional accents. Blank boxes in the chart indicate regions where neither pronunciation variant particularly dominates over the other; in some of these instances, the data simply may be inconclusive or unclear.[31]

Presumed accent region (cluster) pajamas coupon Monday Florida caramel handkerchief lawyer poem route mayonnaise been
North /æ/ /ju/ /eɪ/ /ɔ/ 2 syll. (/ɪ/) (/ɔɪ/)
South /ɑ/ (/ju/) (/eɪ/) (/ɔ/) 3 syll. /ɪ/ /ɔj/ 2 syll. (/ɪ/)
West /ɑ/★ (/u/) /eɪ/ /ɔ/ /ɪ/ /ɔɪ/ (2 syll.) (/ɪ/)
New England (/u/) /eɪ/ (/ɔ/) 3 syll. /ɔɪ/ (2 syll.) /u/ 3 syll.
Midland /æ/ /u/ /eɪ/ /ɔ/ 2 syll. /ɔɪ/★ (2 syll.)
Mid-Atlantic
& NYC		 /ɑ/ /u/ /eɪ/ 3 syll. /ɪ/ /ɔɪ/ (2 syll.) /u/ (3 syll.) /ɪ/

★ Hedges (2017) acknowledges that the two pronunciations marked by this star are discrepancies of her latent class analysis, since they conflict with Vaux (2004)'s surveys. Conversely, the surveys show that /æ/ is the much more common vowel for pajamas in the West, and /ɔɪ/ and /ɔj/ are in fact both common variants for lawyer in the Midland.

General American

Main article: General American

General American is an umbrella accent of American English perceived by many Americans to be "neutral" and free of regional characteristics. A General American accent is not a specific well-defined standard English in the way that Received Pronunciation (RP) has historically been the standard prestigious variant of the English language in England; rather, accents with a variety of features can all be perceived by Americans as "General American" so long as they lack certain sociolinguistically salient features: namely, that is, lacking regional features (such as R-dropping, which usually identifies an American speaker as being from the East Coast or South), ethnic features (such as the "clear L" sound, which often identifies speakers as being Hispanic), or socioeconomic features (such as th-stopping, which often identifies speakers of a lower-class background).[32][33]

Canada and Western United States

Main articles: Canadian English and Western American English

The English dialect region encompassing the Western United States and Canada is the largest one in North America and also the one with the fewest distinctive phonological features. This can be attributed to the fact that the West is the region most recently settled by English speakers, and so there has not been sufficient time for the region either to develop highly distinctive innovations or to split into strongly distinct dialectological subregions.[citation needed] The main phonological features of the Western U.S. and Canada are a completed cot-caught merger, a backed GOAT vowel (like the Northern U.S.), and a fronted GOOSE vowel (like the Southern U.S.).

Atlantic Canada

Main article: Atlantic Canadian English

The accents of Atlantic Canada are more marked than the accents of the whole rest of English-speaking Canada. English of this region broadly includes /ɑ/ fronting before /r/ and full Canadian raising, but no Canadian Shift (the vowel shift documented in Standard Canadian English).

Canada and Pacific Northwest

Main articles: Canadian English and Pacific Northwest English
Further information: Canadian Shift

All of Canada, except the Atlantic Provinces and French-speaking Québec, speaks Standard Canadian English: the relatively uniform variety of North American English native to inland and western Canada, linguistically related to the Pacific Northwest, a region extending from British Columbia south into the Northwestern United States (particularly Washington and Oregon). The vowel [ɛ] is raised and diphthongized to [ɛɪ] or [eɪ] and [æ] as [eɪ] all before /ɡ/ and /ŋ/, merging words like leg and lag [leɪɡ]; tang is pronounced [teɪŋ]. The cot–caught merger to [ɒ] creates a hole in the short vowel sub-system[34] and triggers a sound change known as the Canadian Shift, mainly found in Ontario, English-speaking Montreal, and further west, and led by Ontarians and women; it involves the front lax vowels /æ/, /ɛ/, /ɪ/. The /æ/ of TRAP is retracted to [a] (except before nasals, where it is raised and diphthongized to [eə]), then /ɛ/ (DRESS) and /ɪ/ (KIT) are lowered in the direction of [æ] and [ɛ] and/or retracted; the exact trajectory of the shift is still disputed.[35] Increasing numbers of Canadians and Northwestern Americans have a feature called "Canadian raising", in which the nucleus of the diphthongs /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ are more "raised" before voiceless consonants. Thus for Canadians and Northwestern Americans, word pairs like pouter/powder ([ˈpɐʊɾɚ] versus [ˈpaʊɾɚ]) and rider/writer are pronounced differently.

California, the most populated U.S. state, has been documented as having some notable new subsets of Western U.S. English. Some youthful urban Californians possess a vowel shift partly identical to the Canadian shift in its backing or lowering of each front vowel one space in the mouth. Before /ŋ/, /ɪ/ is raised to [i], so king has the same vowel as keen rather than kin.[36] Before /ŋ/ /æ/ may be identified with the phoneme /eɪ/, so rang is pronounced with the same vowel as ray. Elsewhere /æ/ is lowered in the direction of [a]. /ʊ/ is moving towards [ʌ], so put sounds more like putt. /ʌ/ towards [ɛ], so putt can sound slightly similar to pet. The vowel /oʊ/ (GOAT) may be more fronted, i.e. [ʉ] and [ɵʉ]. The pin–pen merger is complete in Bakersfield and rural areas of the Central Valley, and speakers in Sacramento either perceive or produce an approximation of this merger.[37]

Greater New York City

Main article: New York City English

As in Eastern New England, the accents of New York City, Long Island, and adjoining New Jersey cities are traditionally non-rhotic, while other greater New York area varieties falling under the same sweeping dialect are usually rhotic or variably rhotic. Metropolitan New York shows the back GOAT and GOOSE vowels of the North, but a fronted MOUTH vowel. The vowels of cot [kɑ̈t] and caught [kɔət] are distinct; in fact the New York dialect has perhaps the highest realizations of /ɔ/ in North American English, even approaching [oə] or [ʊə]. Furthermore, the father vowel is traditionally kept distinct from either vowel, resulting in a three "lot-palm-father distinction".[4]

The r-colored vowel of cart is back and often rounded [kɒt], and not fronted as it famously is in Boston. New York City and its surrounding areas are also known for a complicated[citation needed] short-a split into lax [æ] versus tense [eə], so that words, for example, like cast, calf, and cab have a different, higher, tenser vowel sound than cat, catch, and cap. The New York accent is well attested in American movies and television shows, often exaggerated, particularly in movies and shows about American mobsters from the area. Though it is sometimes known as a "Bronx" or "Brooklyn accent", no research has confirmed differences of accent between the city's boroughs.

Northern and North-Central United States

One vast super-dialectal area commonly identified by linguists is "the North", usually meaning New England, inland areas of the Mid-Atlantic states, and the North-Central States. There is no cot–caught merger in the North around the Great Lakes and southern New England, although the merger is in progress in the North-bordering Midland and is completed in northern New England, including as far down the Atlantic coast as Boston. The western portions of the North may also show a transitioning or completing cot-caught merger. The diphthong /aʊ/ is [aʊ~äʊ], and /oʊ/ remains a back vowel, as does and /u/ after non-coronal consonants (unlike the rest of the country). Indeed, in part of the North (much of Wisconsin and Minnesota), /u/ remains back in all environments. Where the Southeast has /ɔ/ the single word on, the North has /ɑ/. The Canadian raising of /aɪ/ (to [ʌɪ]) before voiceless consonants occurs is common in the North, and is becoming more common elsewhere in North America.

North

Main article: Northern American English

The traditional and linguistically conservative North (as defined by the Atlas of North American English) includes /ɑ/ being often raised or fronted before /r/, or both, as well as a firm resistance to the cot-caught merger (though possibly weakening in dialects reversing the fronting of /ɑ/[5]). Maintaining these two features, but also developing several new ones, a younger accent of the North is now predominating at its center, around the Great Lakes and away from the Atlantic coast: the Inland North.

Inland North

Main article: Inland Northern American English
 
This map shows the approximate extent of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, and thus the approximate area where the Inland North dialect predominates. Note that the region surrounding Erie, Pennsylvania is excluded.

The Inland North is a dialect region once considered the home of "standard Midwestern" speech that was the basis for General American in the mid-20th century. However, the Inland North dialect has been modified in the mid-1900s by the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCS), which is now the region's main outstanding feature, though it has been observed to be reversing at least in some areas, in particular with regards to /æ/ raising before non-nasal consonants and /ɑ/ fronting.[5][6] The Inland North is centered on the area on the U.S. side of the Great Lakes, most prominently including central and western New York State (including Syracuse, Binghamton, Rochester, and Buffalo), much of Michigan's Lower Peninsula (Detroit, Grand Rapids), Toledo, Cleveland, Chicago, Gary, and southeastern Wisconsin (Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha), but broken up by the city of Erie, whose accent today is non-Inland Northern and even Midland-like. The NCS itself is not uniform throughout the Inland North; it is most advanced in Western New York and Michigan, and less developed elsewhere. The NCS is a chain shift involving movements of six vowel phonemes: the raising, tensing, and diphthongization of /æ/ towards [ɪə] in all environments (cat being pronounced more like "kyat"), then the fronting of /ɑ/ to [a] (cot sounding like cat), then the lowering of /ɔ/ towards [ɑ] (caught sounding like cot, but without the two merging due to the previous step), then the backing and sometimes lowering of /ɛ/, toward either [ə] or [æ], then the backing and rounding of /ʌ/ towards [ɔ], so that (cut sounding like caught), then lastly the lowering and backing of /ɪ/ (but without any pin–pen merger).

New England

New England does not form a single unified dialect region, but rather houses as few as four native varieties of English, with some linguists identifying even more. Only Southwestern New England (Connecticut and western Massachusetts) neatly fits under the aforementioned definition of "the North". Otherwise, speakers, namely of Eastern New England, show very unusual other qualities. All of New England has a nasal short-a system, meaning that the short-a vowel most strongly raises before nasal consonants, as in much of the rest of the country.

Northeastern New England

Main article: Eastern New England English
Further information: Boston accent and Maine accent

The local and historical dialect of the coastal portions of New England, sometimes called Eastern New England English, now only encompasses Northeastern New England: Maine, New Hampshire (some of whose urban speakers are retreating from this local accent), and eastern Massachusetts (including Greater Boston). The accents spoken here share the Canadian raising of /aɪ/ as well as often /aʊ/, but they also possess the cot-caught merger, which is not associated with rest of "the North". Most famously, Northern New England accents (with the exception of Northwestern New England, much of southern New Hampshire, and Martha's Vineyard) are often non-rhotic. Some Northeastern New England accents are unique in North America for having resisted what is known as father–bother merger: in other words, the stressed vowel phonemes of father and bother remain distinct as /a/ and /ɒ/, so that the two words do not rhyme as they do in most American accents. Many Eastern New England speakers also once had a class of words with "broad a"—that is, /a/ as in father in words that in most accents contain /æ/, such as bath, half, and can't, similar to their pronunciation in London and southern England. The distinction between the vowels of horse and hoarse is maintained in traditional non-rhotic New England accents as [hɒs] for horse (with the same vowel as cot and caught) vs. [hoəs] for hoarse, though the horse–hoarse merger is certainly on the rise in the region today. The /æ/ phoneme has highly distinct allophones before nasal consonants. /ɑ/ fronting is usual before /r/.

Rhode Island

Rhode Island, dialectally identified as "Southeastern New England", is sometimes grouped with the Eastern New England dialect region, both by the dialectologists of the mid–20th century and in certain situations by the Atlas of North American English; it shares Eastern New England's traditional non-rhoticity (or "R Dropping"). A key linguistic difference between Rhode Island and the rest of the Eastern New England, however, is that Rhode Island is subject to the father–bother merger and yet neither the cot–caught merger nor /ɑ/ fronting before /r/. Indeed, Rhode Island shares with New York and Philadelphia an unusually high and back allophone of /ɔ/ (as in caught), even compared to other communities that do not have the cot–caught merger. In the Atlas of North American English, the city of Providence (the only Rhode Island community sampled by the Atlas) is also distinguished by having the backest realizations of /u/, /oʊ/, and /aʊ/ in North America. Therefore, Rhode Island English aligns in some features more with Boston English and other features more with New York City English.

Western New England

Recognized by research since the 1940s is the linguistic boundary between Eastern and Western New England, the latter settled from the Connecticut and New Haven colonies, rather than the Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies. Western New Englanders settled most of upstate New York and the Inland North. Dialectological research has revealed some phonological nuances separating a Northwestern and Southwestern New England accent. Vermont, sometimes dialectally identified as "Northwestern New England", has the full cot-caught merger and /ɑ/ fronting before /r/ of Boston or Maine English, and yet none of the other marked features of Eastern New England, nor much evidence of the NCS, which is more robustly documented, though still variable, in Southwestern New England. Rhoticity predominates in all of Western New England, as does the father–bother merger of the rest of the nation. Southwestern New England merely forms a "less strong" extension of the Inland North dialect region, and it centers on Connecticut and western Massachusetts. It shows the same general phonological system as the Inland North, including variable elements of Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCS)—for instance, an /æ/ that is somewhat higher and tenser than average, an /ɑ/ that is fronter than /ʌ/, and so on. The cot–caught merger is approximated in western Massachusetts but usually still resisted in Connecticut. The "tail" of Connecticut may have some character diffused from New York City English.

North Central

Main article: North-Central American English

The North Central or Upper Midwest dialect region of the United States extends from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan westward across northern Minnesota and North Dakota into the middle of Montana.[citation needed] Although the Atlas of North American English does not include the North Central region as part of the North proper, it shares all of the features listed above as properties of the North as a whole. The North Central is a linguistically conservative region; it participates in few of the major ongoing sound changes of North American English. Its /oʊ/ (GOAT) and /eɪ/ (FACE) vowels are frequently even monophthongs: [o] and [e], respectively. The movie Fargo, which takes place in the North Central region, famously features strong versions of this accent.[38] Unlike most of the rest of the North, the cot–caught merger is prevalent in the North Central region.

Southeastern United States

 
Blue represents major cities of the Southern accent; darker blue represents cities with the strongest features of this accent.[39] Purple represents definitively non-Southern accents (mostly Midland accents), which together with the Southern accent fall under a "Southeastern super-region" (defined in this section).[39] Red represents cities outside of that super-region.

The 2006 Atlas of North American English identifies a "Southeastern super-region", in which all accents of the Southern States, as well as accents all along their regional margins, constitute a vast area of recent linguistic unity in certain respects:[40] namely, the movement of four vowel sounds (those in the words GOOSE, STRUT, GOAT, and MOUTH) towards the center or front of the mouth, all of which is notably different from the accents of the Northern United States.

Essentially all of the modern-day Southern dialects, plus dialects marginal to the South (some even in geographically and culturally "Northern" states), are thus considered a subset of this super-region:[note 2] the whole American South, the southern half of the Mid- and South Atlantic regions, and a transitional Midland dialect area between the South and the North, comprising parts of Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, southeastern Nebraska, southern Illinois, southern Indiana, and southern Ohio.[41] These are the minimal necessary features that identify a speaker from the Southeastern super-region:

  • Fronting of /aʊ/ and /oʊ/: The gliding vowels /aʊ/ (as in cow or ouch) and /oʊ/ (as in goat or bone) both start considerably forward in the mouth, approximately [ɛɔ~æɒ] and [ɜu], respectively. /oʊ/ may even end in a very forward position[42]—something like [ɜy~œʏ]. However, this fronting does not occur in younger speakers before /l/ (as in goal or colt) or before a syllable break between two vowels (as in going or poet), in which /oʊ/ remains back in the mouth as [ɔu~ɒu].[43]
  • Lacking or transitioning cot–caught merger: The historical distinction between the two vowels sounds /ɔ/ and /ɒ/, in words like caught and cot or stalk and stock is mainly preserved.[40] In much of the South during the 1900s, there was a trend to lower the vowel found in words like stalk and caught, often with an upglide, so that the most common result today is the gliding vowel [ɑɒ]. However, the cot–caught merger is becoming increasingly common throughout the United States, thus affecting Southeastern (even some Southern) dialects, towards a merged vowel [ɑ].[44] In the South, this merger, or a transition towards this merger, is especially documented in central, northern, and (particularly) western Texas.[45]
 
The merger of pin and pen in Southern American English. In the purple areas, the merger is complete for most speakers. Note the exclusion of the New Orleans area, Southern Florida, and of the Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia. The purple area in California consists of the Bakersfield and Kern County area, where migrants from the south-central states settled during the Dust Bowl. There is also debate as to whether or not Austin, Texas is an exclusion. Based on Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:68).
  • Pin–pen merger in transition: The vowels [ɛ] and [ɪ] often merge when before nasal consonants, so that pen and pin, for instance, or hem and him, are pronounced the same, as pin or him, respectively.[40] The merger is towards the sound [ɪ]. This merger is now firmly completed throughout the Southern dialect region; however, it is not found in some vestigial varieties of the older South, and other geographically Southern U.S. varieties that have eluded the Southern Vowel Shift, such as the Yat dialect of New Orleans or the anomalous dialect of Savannah, Georgia. The pin–pen merger has also spread beyond the South in recent decades and is now found in isolated parts of the West and the southern Midwest as well.
  • Rhoticity: Dropping of postvocalic r (and, in some dialects, intervocalic r) was historically widespread in the South, particularly in former plantation areas.[46] This phenomenon, non-rhoticity, was considered prestigious across the nation before World War II, after which the social perception reversed. Rhoticity (sometimes called r-fulness), in which all or most r sounds are pronounced, historically found only in the Midland, Appalachia, and some other Southeastern regions, has now become dominant throughout almost the entire Southeastern super-region, as in most American English, and even more so among younger and female white Southerners; major exceptions are among Black or African American Southerners, whose modern vernacular dialect continues to be mostly non-rhotic as well as most of southern Louisiana, where non-rhotic accents still dominate.[47] The sound quality of the Southeastern r is the distinctive "bunch-tongued r", produced by strongly constricting the root and/or midsection of the tongue.[48]

Midland

Main article: Midland American English

A band of the United States from Pennsylvania west to the Great Plains is what twentieth-century linguists identified as the "Midland" dialect region, though this dialect's same features are now reported in certain other pockets of the country too (for example, some major cities in Texas, all in Central and South Florida, and particular cities that are otherwise Southern).[citation needed] In older and traditional dialectological research, focused on lexicology (vocabulary) rather than phonology (accent), the Midland was divided into two discrete geographical subdivisions: the "North Midland" that begins north of the Ohio River valley area and, south of that, the "South Midland" dialect area. The North Midland region stretches from east-to-west across central and southern Ohio, central Indiana, central Illinois, Iowa, and northern Missouri, as well as Nebraska and Kansas where it begins to blend into the West. The South Midland dialect region follows the Ohio River in a generally southwesterly direction, moving across from Kentucky, southern Indiana, and southern Illinois to southern Missouri, Arkansas, southeastern Kansas, and Oklahoma, west of the Mississippi River. The distinction between a "North" versus "South Midland" was discarded in the 2006 Atlas of North American English, in which the former "North Midland" is now simply called "the Midland" (and argued to have a "stronger claim" to a General American accent than any other region) and the "South Midland" is considered merely as the upper portion of "the South"; this ANAE reevaluation is primarily on the basis of phonology. The Midland is characterized by having a distinctly fronter realization of the /oʊ/ phoneme (as in boat) than many other American accents, particularly those of the North; the phoneme is frequently realized with a central nucleus, approximating [əʊ]. Likewise, /aʊ/ has a fronter nucleus than /aɪ/, approaching [æʊ]. Another feature distinguishing the Midland from the North is that the word on contains the phoneme /ɔ/ (as in caught) rather than /ɑ/ (as in cot). For this reason, one of the names for the North-Midland boundary is the "on line". However, since the twentieth century, this area is currently undergoing a vowel merger of the "short o" /ɑ/ (as in cot) and 'aw' /ɔ/ (as in caught) phonemes, known as the cot-caught merger. Many speakers show transitional forms of the merger. The /æ/ phoneme (as in cat) shows most commonly a so-called "continuous" distribution: /æ/ is raised and tensed toward [eə] before nasal consonants, as in much of the country.

Midland outside the Midland

Atlanta, Georgia has been characterized by a massive movement of non-Southerners into the area during the 1990s, leading the city to becoming hugely inconsistent in terms of dialect.[49] Currently, /aɪ/ is variably monophthongized (as in the Southern U.S.); no complete cot-caught merger is reported; and the pin–pen merger is variable.

Charleston, South Carolina is an area where, today, most speakers have clearly conformed to a Midland regional accent, rather than any Southern accent. Charleston was once home to its own very locally-unique accent that encompassed elements of older British English while resisting Southern regional accent trends, perhaps with additional linguistic influence from French Huguenots, Sephardi Jews, and, due to Charleston's high concentration of African-Americans that spoke the Gullah language, Gullah African Americans. The most distinguishing feature of this now-dying accent is the way speakers pronounce the name of the city, to which a standard listener would hear "Chahlston", with a silent "r". Unlike Southern regional accents, Charlestonian speakers have never exhibited inglide long mid vowels, such as those found in typical Southern /aɪ/ and /aʊ/.[citation needed]

Central and South Florida show no evidence of any type of /aɪ/ glide deletion, Central Florida shows a pin–pen merger, and South Florida does not. Otherwise, Central and South Florida easily fit under the definition of the Midland dialect, including the cot-caught merger being transitional. In South Florida, particularly in and around Miami-Dade, Broward, and Monroe counties, a unique dialect, commonly called the "Miami accent", is widely spoken. The dialect first developed among second- or third-generation Hispanics, including Cuban-Americans, whose first language was English.[50] Unlike the older Florida Cracker dialect, "Miami accent" is rhotic. It also incorporates a rhythm and pronunciation heavily influenced by Spanish (wherein rhythm is syllable-timed).[51]

Mid-Atlantic States

Main article: Mid-Atlantic American English
See also: Philadelphia accent and Baltimore accent
Not to be confused with Transatlantic accent.

The cities of the Mid-Atlantic States around the Delaware Valley (South Jersey, southeastern Pennsylvania, northern Delaware, and eastern Maryland) are typically classified together, their speakers most popularly labelled as having a Philadelphia accent or a Baltimore accent. While Labov et al. state that the dialect could potentially be included in the Midland super-region, the dialect is not included in Midland proper as a result of distinct phonological features defining the dialect.[52] The Mid-Atlantic split of /æ/ into two separate phonemes, similar to but not exactly the same as New York City English, is one major defining feature of the dialect region, as is a resistance to the Mary–marry–merry merger and cot-caught merger (a raising and diphthongizing of the "caught" vowel), and a maintained distinction between historical short o and long o before intervocalic /r/, so that, for example, orange, Florida, and horrible have a different stressed vowel than story and chorus; all of these features are shared between Mid-Atlantic American and New York City English. Other features include that water is sometimes pronounced [ˈwʊɾɚ], that is, with the vowel of wood; the single word on is pronounced /ɔn/ not /ɑn/, so that, as in the South and Midland (and unlike New York and the North) it rhymes with dawn rather than don; the /oʊ/ of goat and boat is fronted, so it is pronounced [əʊ], as in the advanced accents of the Midland and South. Canadian raising occurs for /aɪ/ (price) but not for /aʊ/ (mouth).

According to linguist Barbara Johnstone, migration patterns and geography affected the Philadelphia dialect's development, which was especially influenced by immigrants from Northern England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.[53]

South

Main article: Southern American English

The Southern United States is often dialectally identified as "The South," as in ANAE. There is still great variation between sub-regions in the South (see here for more information) and between older and younger generations. Southern American English as Americans popularly imagine began to take its current shape only after the beginning of the twentieth century. Some generalizations include: the conditional merger of [ɛ] and [ɪ] before nasal consonants, the pin–pen merger; the diphthong /aɪ/ becomes monophthongized to [a]; lax and tense vowels often merge before /l/. The South Midland dialect (now considered the upper portion of the Southern U.S. dialect and often not distinguished phonologically) follows the Ohio River in a generally southwesterly direction, moves across Arkansas and some of Oklahoma west of the Mississippi, and peters out in West Texas; it also includes some of North Florida, namely around Jacksonville. It most noticeably has the loss of the diphthong [aɪ], which becomes [a]. It also shows fronting of initial vowel of /aʊ/ to [æʊ] (often lengthened and prolonged) yielding [æːʊ]; nasalization of vowels, esp. diphthongs, before [n]; raising of /æ/ to [e]; can't → cain't, etc.; fully rhoticity, unlike classical coastal varieties of older Southern American English, now mostly declined. In the Southern Vowel Shift of the early 1900s up to the present, [ɪ] moves to become a high front vowel, and [ɛ] to become a mid front unrounded vowel. In a parallel shift, the /i/ and /eɪ/ relax and become less front; the back vowels /u/ in boon and /oʊ/ in code shift considerably forward to [ʉ] and [ɞ], respectively; and, the open back unrounded vowel /ɑ/ in card shifts upward towards [ɔ] as in board, which in turn moves up towards the old location of /u/ in boon. This particular shift probably does not occur for speakers with the cot–caught merger. The lowering movement of the Southern Vowel Shift is also accompanied by a raising and "drawling" movement of vowels. The term Southern drawl has been used to refer to the diphthongization/triphthongization of the traditional short front vowels, as in the words pat, pet, and pit. these develop a glide up from their original starting position to [j], and then in some cases back down to schwa; thus: /æ/ → [æjə], /ɛ/ → [ɛjə], and /ɪ/ → [ɪjə].

Inland South and Texas South

Main article: Texan English
See also: Appalachian English

The ANAE identifies two important, especially advanced subsets of the South in terms of their leading the Southern Vowel Shift (detailed above): the "Inland South" located in the southern half of Appalachia and the "Texas South," which only covers the north-central region of Texas (Dallas), Odessa, and Lubbock, but not Abilene, El Paso, or southern Texas (which have more Midland-like accents). One Texan distinction from the rest of the South is that all Texan accents have been reported as showing a pure, non-gliding /ɔ/ vowel,[45] and the identified "Texas South" accent, specifically, is at a transitional stage of the cot-caught merger; the "Inland South" accent of Appalachia, however, firmly resists the merger. Pronunciations of the Southern dialect in Texas may also show notable influence derived from an early Spanish-speaking population or from German immigrants.

Marginal Southeast

The following Southeastern super-regional locations fit cleanly into none of the aforementioned subsets of the Southeast, and may even be marginal-at-best members of the super-region itself:

Chesapeake and the Outer Banks (North Carolina) islands are enclaves of a traditional "Hoi Toider" dialect, in which /aɪ/ is typically backed and rounded. Many other features of phonological (and lexical) note exist here too; for example, Ocracoke, North Carolina shows no cot–caught merger and its monophthongs are diphthongized (up-gliding) before /ʃ/ and /tʃ/ and Smith Island, Maryland shows an /i/ that is diphthongized (like the South) and no happy tensing.[citation needed]

New Orleans, Louisiana has been home to a type of accent with parallels to the New York City accent reported for over a century.[citation needed] This variety of New Orleans English has been locally nicknamed "Yat" since at least the 1980s, from a traditional greeting "Where y'at" ("Where are you at?", meaning "How are you?").[citation needed] The Yat/NYC parallels include the split of the historic short-a class into tense [eə] and lax [æ] versions, as well as pronunciation of cot and caught as [kɑ̈t] and [kɔət].[citation needed] The stereotypical New York coil–curl merger of "toity-toid street" (33rd Street) used to be a common New Orleans feature as well, though it has mostly receded today. One of the most detailed phonetic depictions of an extreme "yat" accent of the early 20th century is found in the speech of the character Krazy Kat in the comic strip of the same name by George Herriman.[citation needed] Such extreme accents still be found in parts of Mid-City and the 9th ward, Jefferson Parish, as well as in St. Bernard Parish, just east of New Orleans.[citation needed] The novel A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole often employs the Yat accent.[citation needed]

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, according to the ANAE's research, is not quite a member of the Midland dialect region.[54] Rather, its features seem to be a blend of the Western and Midland dialects. The overview of ANAE's studied features for Oklahoma City speakers include a conservative /aɪ/, conservative /oʊ/, transitional cot-caught merger, and variable pin–pen merger.

Savannah, Georgia once had a local accent that is now "giving way to regional patterns" of the Midland.[54] According to the ANAE, there is much transition in Savannah, and the following features are reported as inconsistent or highly variable in the city: the Southern phenomenon of /aɪ/ being monophthongized, non-rhoticity, /oʊ/ fronting, the cot–caught merger, the pin–pen merger, and conservative /aʊ/ (which is otherwise rarely if ever reported in either the South or the Midland).

St. Louis, Missouri is historically one among several (North) Midland cities, but it is largely considered by ANAE to classify under blends of Inland North accents, with the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCS), and Midland accents. The "St. Louis Corridor" demonstrates this variability in speakers following a line formed by U.S. Route 66 in Illinois (now Interstate 55), going from Chicago southwest to St. Louis. This corridor of speakers cuts right through the center of what is otherwise the firmly-documented Midland region. Older St. Louisans demonstrate a card-cord merger, so that "I-44" is pronounced like "I farty-four".[55] St. Louis resists the cot–caught merger and middle-aged speakers show the most advanced stages of the NCS,[45] while maintaining many of the other Midland features.

Western Pennsylvania

Main article: Western Pennsylvania English

The dialect of the western half of Pennsylvania is like the Midland proper in many features, including the fronting of /oʊ/ and /aʊ/. The chief distinguishing feature of Western Pennsylvania as a whole is that the cot–caught merger is noticeably complete here, whereas it is still in progress in most of the Midland. The merger has also spread from Western Pennsylvania into adjacent West Virginia, historically in the South Midland dialect region. The city of Pittsburgh shows an especially advanced subset of Western Pennsylvania English, additionally characterized by a sound change that is unique in North America: the monophthongization of /aʊ/ to [a]. This is the source of the stereotypical Pittsburgh pronunciation of downtown as "dahntahn". Pittsburgh also features an unusually low allophone of /ʌ/ (as in cut); it approaches [ɑ] (/ɑ/ itself having moved out of the way and become a rounded vowel in its merger with /ɔ/).

See also

References

Notes

  1. ^ Dialects are considered "rhotic" if they pronounce the r sound in all historical environments, without ever "dropping" this sound. The father–bother merger is the pronunciation of /ɒ/ (as in cot, lot, bother, etc.) the same as /ɑ/ (as in spa, haha, Ma), causing words like con and Kahn and like sob and Saab to sound identical, with the vowel usually realized in the back or middle of the mouth as [ɑ~ɑ̈]. Finally, most of the U.S. participates in a continuous nasal system of the "short a" vowel (in cat, trap, bath, etc.), causing /æ/ to be pronounced with the tongue raised and with a glide quality (typically sounding like [ɛə]) particularly when before a nasal consonant; thus, mad is [mæd], but man is more like [mɛən].
  2. ^ The only notable exceptions of the South being a subset of the "Southeastern super-region" are two Southern metropolitan areas, described as such because they participate in Stage 1 of the Southern Vowel Shift, but lack the other defining Southeastern features: Savannah, Georgia and Amarillo, Texas.

Citations

  1. ^ Freeman, Valerie (2014). "Bag, beg, bagel: Prevelar raising and merger in Pacific Northwest English" (PDF). University of Washington Working Papers in Linguistics. Retrieved 22 November 2015.[permanent dead link]
  2. ^ a b Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:168)
  3. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006), p. 56
  4. ^ a b Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006), p. 235
  5. ^ a b c d Wagner, S. E.; Mason, A.; Nesbitt, M.; Pevan, E.; Savage, M. (2016). "Reversal and re-organization of the Northern Cities Shift in Michigan" (PDF). University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 22.2: Selected Papers from NWAV 44.
  6. ^ a b c Driscoll, Anna; Lape, Emma (2015). "Reversal of the Northern Cities Shift in Syracuse, New York". University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics. 21 (2).
  7. ^ a b Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:123–4)
  8. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:48)
  9. ^ Wells (1982), p. 520.
  10. ^ a b c Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:182)
  11. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:54, 238)
  12. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (267)
  13. ^ a b Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:127, 254)
  14. ^ a b Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:133)
  15. ^ a b Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:148)
  16. ^ a b c d Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:141)
  17. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:135)
  18. ^ a b Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:237)
  19. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:271–2)
  20. ^ a b Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:130)
  21. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:125)
  22. ^ a b Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:124)
  23. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:229)
  24. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:137)
  25. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:230)
  26. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:231)
  27. ^ a b Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:217)
  28. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:223)
  29. ^ a b Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:221)
  30. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:107)
  31. ^ Hedges, Stephanie Nicole (2017). "A Latent Class Analysis of American English Dialects" (2017). All Theses and Dissertations. 6480. Brigham Young University. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/6480
  32. ^ Wells (1982:10)
  33. ^ Van Riper (2014:123)
  34. ^ Martinet, Andre 1955. Economie des changements phonetiques. Berne: Francke.
  35. ^ Labov et al. 2006; Charles Boberg, "The Canadian Shift in Montreal"; Robert Hagiwara. "Vowel production in Winnipeg"; Rebecca V. Roeder and Lidia Jarmasz. "The Canadian Shift in Toronto."
  36. ^ Penny Eckert, California vowels. Retrieved 24 July 2008.
  37. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:68)
  38. ^ Robin McMacken (May 9, 2004). "North Dakota: Where the accent is on friendship". St. Petersburg Times. Retrieved 2008-02-22.
  39. ^ a b Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:131, 139)
  40. ^ a b c Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:137)
  41. ^ Southard, Bruce. "Speech Patterns". Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture. Oklahoma Historical Society. Retrieved October 29, 2015.
  42. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:263)
  43. ^ Thomas (2006:14)
  44. ^ Thomas (2006:9)
  45. ^ a b c Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:61)
  46. ^ Thomas, 2006, p. 16
  47. ^ Thomas (2006:16)
  48. ^ Thomas (2006:15)
  49. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:260–1)
  50. ^ "Miami Accents: Why Locals Embrace That Heavy "L" Or Not". WLRN (WLRN-TV and WLRN-FM). Retrieved September 1, 2013.
  51. ^ . Articles - Sun-Sentinel.com. June 13, 2004. Archived from the original on 2012-08-20. Retrieved 2012-10-08.
  52. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (262)
  53. ^ Malady, Matthew J.X. (2014-04-29). "Where Yinz At; Why Pennsylvania is the most linguistically rich state in the country". The Slate Group. Retrieved 2015-06-12.
  54. ^ a b Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:304)
  55. ^ Wolfram & Ward (2006:128)

Bibliography

  • Labov, William; Ash, Sharon; Boberg, Charles (2006), The Atlas of North American English, Berlin: Mouton-de Gruyter, pp. 187–208, ISBN 3-11-016746-8
  • Shitara, Yuko (1993). "A survey of American pronunciation preferences". Speech Hearing and Language. 7: 201–32.
  • Mencken, H. L. (1977) [1921]. The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States (4th ed.). New York: Knopf. ("Mencken, H.L. 1921. The American Language". Bartleby.com. Retrieved February 28, 2017.)
  • Rainey, Virginia (2004). Insiders' Guide: Salt Lake City (4 ed.). The Globe Pequot Press. ISBN 0-7627-2836-1.
  • . Archived from the original on 2007-10-17. Retrieved 2007-10-25.
  • "BYU "Utah English" Research Team's Homepage".
  • "Utahnics", segment on All Things Considered, National Public Radio February 16, 1997.
  • Chambers, J. K. (1973). "Canadian raising". Canadian Journal of Linguistics. 18 (2): 113–35. doi:10.1017/S0008413100007350. S2CID 247196050.
  • Dailey-O'Cain, J. (1997). "Canadian raising in a midwestern U.S. city". Language Variation and Change. 9 (1): 107–120. doi:10.1017/S0954394500001812. S2CID 146637083.
  • Labov, William (1963). "The social motivation of a sound change". Word. 19 (3): 273–309. doi:10.1080/00437956.1963.11659799.
  • Labov, William (2001). Principles of Linguistic Change: Social Factors. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-17916-X.
  • Wells, John C. (1982). Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • McCarthy, John (1993). "A case of surface constraint violation". Canadian Journal of Linguistics. 38 (2): 169–95. doi:10.1017/S0008413100014730. S2CID 14047772.
  • Metcalf, Allan A. (2000). How We Talk: American Regional English Today. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
  • The Speech Accent Archive. George Mason University. 22 September 2004.
  • Van Riper, William (2014). "General American: An Ambiguity". In Harold Allen; Michael Linn (eds.). Dialect and Language Variation. Elsevier. ISBN 978-1-4832-9476-6. Retrieved 26 January 2021.
  • Walsh, M (February 28, 1995). . Burlington Free Press. Archived from the original on 2009-07-25. Retrieved 2012-10-13.
  • Wolfram, Walt; Ward, Ben, eds. (2006). American Voices: How Dialects Differ from Coast to Coast. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

External links

  • Stanford.edu: Penny Eckert Blog − "Vowel Shifts in Northern California and the Detroit Suburbs"
  • Voicesus.com: Directory of 129 North American English accents

February 27, 2023
north, american, english, regional, phonology, also, regional, vocabularies, american, english, this, article, contains, phonetic, transcriptions, international, phonetic, alphabet, introductory, guide, symbols, help, distinction, between, brackets, transcript. See also Regional vocabularies of American English This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet IPA For an introductory guide on IPA symbols see Help IPA For the distinction between and see IPA Brackets and transcription delimiters North American English regional phonology is the study of variations in the pronunciation of spoken North American English English of the United States and Canada what are commonly known simply as regional accents Though studies of regional dialects can be based on multiple characteristics often including characteristics that are phonemic sound based focusing on major word differentiating patterns and structures in speech phonetic sound based focusing on any more exact and specific details of speech lexical vocabulary based and syntactic grammar based this article focuses only on the former two items North American English includes American English which has several highly developed and distinct regional varieties along with the closely related Canadian English which is more homogeneous geographically American English especially Western dialects and Canadian English have more in common with each other than with varieties of English outside North America The most recent work documenting and studying the phonology of North American English dialects as a whole is the 2006 Atlas of North American English ANAE by William Labov Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg on which much of the description below is based following on a tradition of sociolinguistics dating to the 1960s earlier large scale American dialectology focused more on lexicology than on phonology Contents 1 Overview 2 Classification of regional accents 2 1 Hierarchy of regional accents 2 1 1 Maps of regional accents 2 1 2 Chart of regional accents 2 2 Alternative classifications 2 3 General American 3 Canada and Western United States 3 1 Atlantic Canada 3 2 Canada and Pacific Northwest 4 Greater New York City 5 Northern and North Central United States 5 1 North 5 1 1 Inland North 5 2 New England 5 2 1 Northeastern New England 5 2 2 Rhode Island 5 2 3 Western New England 5 3 North Central 6 Southeastern United States 6 1 Midland 6 1 1 Midland outside the Midland 6 2 Mid Atlantic States 6 3 South 6 3 1 Inland South and Texas South 6 4 Marginal Southeast 6 4 1 Western Pennsylvania 7 See also 8 References 8 1 Notes 8 2 Citations 9 Bibliography 10 External linksOverview EditRegional dialects in North America are historically the most strongly differentiated along the Eastern seaboard due to distinctive speech patterns of urban centers of the American East Coast like Boston New York City and certain Southern cities all of these accents historically noted by their London like r dropping called non rhoticity a feature gradually receding among younger generations especially in the South The Connecticut River is now regarded as the southern and western boundary of the traditional New England accents today still centered on Boston and much of Eastern New England The Potomac River generally divides a group of Northeastern coastal dialects from an area of older Southeastern coastal dialects All older Southern dialects however have mostly now receded in favor of a strongly rhotic more unified accent group spread throughout the entire Southern United States since the late 1800s and into the early 1900s In between the two aforementioned rivers some other variations exist most famous among them being New York City English Outside of the Eastern seaboard all other North American English both in the U S and Canada has been firmly rhotic pronouncing all r sounds since the very first arrival of English speaking settlers Rhoticity is a feature shared today with the English of Ireland for example rather than most of the English of England which has become non rhotic since the late 1700s The sound of Western U S English overall is much more homogeneous than Eastern U S English The interior and western half of the country was settled by people who were no longer closely connected to England living farther from the British influenced Atlantic Coast Certain particular vowel sounds are the best defining characteristics of regional North American English including any given speaker s presence absence or transitional state of the so called cot caught merger Northeastern New England Canadian and Western Pennsylvania accents as well as all accents of the Western U S have a merger of these ɔ and ɑ vowels so that pairs of words like mock and talk rod and clawed or slot and bought rhyme On the contrary Baltimore Philadelphia and New York metropolitan accents plus inland accents of the Northern and Southern U S all strongly resist this merger keeping the two sounds separate and thus maintaining an extra distinct vowel sound The rest of the U S largely shows a transitional state of the merger particularly the Midland dialect region from Ohio to eastern Kansas Another prominent differentiating feature in regional North American English is fronting of the oʊ in words like goat home and toe and u in words like goose two and glue This fronting characterizes Midland Mid Atlantic citation needed and Southern U S accents these accents also front and raise the aʊ vowel of words like house now and loud making yowl sound something like yeah wool or even yale Northern U S English however tends to keep all these vowels more backed Southern and some Midland U S accents are often most quickly recognized by the weakening or deleting of the glide sound of the aɪ vowel in words like thyme mile and fine making the word spy sound something like spa One phenomenon apparently unique to North American U S accents is the irregular behavior of words that in the British English standard Received Pronunciation have ɒrV where V stands for any vowel Words of this class include among others origin Florida horrible quarrel warren borrow tomorrow sorry and sorrow In General American there is a split the majority of these words have ɔr the sound of the word or but the last four words of the list above have ɑr the sound of the words are In Canada all of these words are pronounced as oʊr same as General American ɔr but analyzed differently In the accents of Greater New York City Philadelphia the Carolinas and older Southern most or all of these words are pronounced ɑr Shitara 1993 Classification of regional accents EditHierarchy of regional accents Edit The findings and categorizations of the 2006 The Atlas of North American English or ANAE use one well supported way to hierarchically classify North American English accents at the level of broad geographic regions sub regions etc The North American regional accent represented by each branch in addition to each of its own features also contains all the features of the branch it extends from NORTH AMERICA CANADA and WESTERN UNITED STATES conservative oʊ u is fronted cot caught merger Atlantic Canada ɑ is fronted before r full Canadian raising Standard Canada and Northwest conservative ɑ before r ae is tensed before ɡ 1 Canadian Shift a ae ɛ ɪ Inland Canada full Canadian raising GREATER NEW YORK CITY fronted aʊ conservative oʊ and u 2 cot caught distinction New York ae split system Mary marry merry 3 way distinction 3 4 New York City R dropping NEW ENGLAND and NORTH CENTRAL UNITED STATES conservative oʊ conservative u conservative aʊ 2 pin pen distinction North cot caught distinction ɑ is fronted before r Inland North ae is often 5 6 tensed encouraging the Northern Cities Shift ɛe ae ɑ ɔ ʌ ɛ 7 Eastern New England R dropping 8 full Canadian raising lack of the weak vowel merger 9 Northeastern New England cot caught merger father bother distinction ɑ is fronted before r Rhode Island cot caught distinction conservative ɑ before r Upper Midwest cot caught merger ɑ is central before r ae is tensed before ɡ 10 Wisconsin and Minnesota haggle Hegel merger 10 SOUTHEASTERN UNITED STATES aʊ is fronted oʊ is fronted u is fronted Southeastern Super Region cot caught distinction or near merger ʌ is fronted Mid Atlantic Mid Atlantic ae split system Mary marry merry 3 way distinction 11 Midland aɪ can be monophthongized before resonants 12 variable pin pen merger South aɪ is monophthongized encouraging the Southern Shift a aɪ eɪ i and drawling pin pen merger lack of the weak vowel merger Inland South Back Upglide Chain Shift aeɔ aʊ ɔ ɔɪ 13 fill feel merger Marginal Southeast cot caught merger Western Pennsylvania cot caught merger encouraging the Pittsburgh Chain Shift ɒ ɔ ɑ ʌ full fool merger Pittsburgh aʊ can be monophthongized before l and r and in unstressed function words 14 Maps of regional accents Edit ENE WNE NYC PHILADELPHIA INLAND NORTH WPA NORTH CENTRAL WEST MIDLAND SOUTH Texas California Appalachia Boston Pacific Northwest Chesapeake amp Outer Banks Maine New Orleans BaltimoreThe map above shows the major regional dialects of American English each designated in all capital letters as demarcated primarily by Labov et al s The Atlas of North American English 15 as well as the related Telsur Project s regional maps Any region may also contain speakers of General American the notional accent ascribed to American English speakers who have receded away from the marked sounds of their region Furthermore this map does not account for speakers of ethnic cultural or other not strictly regional varieties such as African American Vernacular English Chicano English Cajun English etc All regional American English dialects unless specifically stated otherwise are rhotic with the father bother merger Mary marry merry merger and pre nasal short a tensing note 1 Western The Western dialect including Californian and New Mexican sub types with Pacific Northwest English also arguably a sub type is defined by Cot caught merger to ɑ listen GOAT is oʊ GOOSE is u ʉ North Central The North Central Upper Midwest dialect including an Upper Michigan sub type is defined by Cot caught merger to ɑ listen 16 GOAT is oʊ and may even monophthongize to o 16 GOOSE is u 16 Inland Northern The Inland Northern Great Lakes dialect is defined by No cot caught merger the cot vowel is ɑ a and caught vowel is ɒ ae is universally ɛe the triggering event for the Northern Cities Vowel Shift in more advanced sub types ɛe ae ɑ ɔ ʌ ɛ 7 GOAT is oʊ ʌo Midland The Midland dialect is defined by Cot caught merger is in transition 17 aɪ may be a often only before l m n or ɹ aʊ is aeɵ aeo 18 oʊ is eʊ ɵʊ WPA The Western Pennsylvania dialect including its advanced Pittsburgh sub type is defined by Cot caught merger to ɒ ɔ the triggering event for the Pittsburgh Chain Shift in the city itself ɒ ɔ ɑ ʌ but no trace of the Canadian Shift 19 oʊ is eʊ ɞʊ 20 Full fool foal merger to ʊl ʊw Specifically in Greater Pittsburgh aʊ is aʊ a particularly before l and r and in unstressed function words 14 Southern The Southern dialects including several sub types are defined by Variable rhoticity parts of Louisiana are still non rhotic even among younger people No cot caught merger the cot vowel is ɑ and caught vowel is ɑɒ aɪ is a at least before b d ɡ v or z or word finally and potentially elsewhere the triggering event for the Southern Shift a aɪ eɪ i Southern drawl may break short front vowels into gliding vowels ae ɛ j e ɛ ɪ j e ɪ i j e 21 MOUTH is aeo the triggering event for the Back Upglide Shift in more advanced sub types aeo aʊ ɔ ɔɪ 13 GOAT is eʉ eʊ Mid Atlantic The Mid Atlantic Delaware Valley dialect including Philadelphia and Baltimore sub types is defined by No cot caught merger the cot vowel is ɑ ɑ and caught vowel is ɔe ʊe this severe distinction is the triggering event for the Back Vowel Shift before r ʊr ɔ r ɑr 22 23 Unique Mid Atlantic ae split system the bad vowel is ee and sad vowel is ae GOAT is eʊ MOUTH is ɛɔ 18 No Mary marry merry mergerNYC The New York City dialect with New Orleans English an intermediate sub type between NYC and Southern is defined by No cot caught merger the cot vowel is ɑ ɑ and caught vowel is ɔe ʊe this severe distinction is the triggering event for the Back Vowel Shift before r ʊe ɔ r ɑr 22 Non rhoticity or variable rhoticity Unique New York City ae split system the bad vowel is ee and bat vowel is ae GOAT is oʊ ʌʊ No Mary marry merry merger father bother not necessarily mergedENE Eastern New England dialect including Maine and Boston sub types with Rhode Island English an intermediate sub type between ENE and NYC is defined by Cot caught merger to ɒ ɑ lacking only in Rhode Island Non rhoticity or variable rhoticity 16 24 MOUTH is ɑʊ aʊ 25 GOAT is oʊ ɔʊ GOOSE is u Commonly the starting points of aɪ and aʊ in a raised position when before voiceless consonants eɪ ʌɪ and eʊ ʌʊ respectively Possibly no Mary marry merry merger No father bother merger except in Rhode Island the father vowel is a ɑ and bother vowel is ɒ ɑ 26 STANDARD CANADIAN Pacific Northwest Aboriginal Canadian Quebec Ottawa Valley ATLANTIC CANADIAN Lunenburg NewfoundlandThe major regional dialects of Canadian English each designated in all capital letters as demarcated primarily by Labov et al s The Atlas of North American English 15 as well as the related Telsur Project s regional maps All regional Canadian English dialects unless specifically stated otherwise are rhotic with the father bother merger cot caught merger and pre nasal short a tensing The broadest regional dialects include Standard Canadian The Standard Canadian dialect including its most advanced Inland Canadian sub type and others is defined by Cot caught merger to ɒ the triggering event for the Canadian Shift in more advanced sub types ɒ ɑ ae ɛ 20 ae is raised to ɛ or even e ɪ when before ɡ 10 Especially in Inland Canadian beginnings of aɪ and aʊ in a raised position when before voiceless consonants eɪ ʌɪ and eʊ ʌʊ respectively 27 aʊ is otherwise aʊ ɑʊ and eɪ approaches e 28 GOAT is oʊ Atlantic Canadian The Atlantic Canadian Maritimer dialect including Cape Breton Lunenburg and Newfoundland sub types is defined by Cot caught merger to ɑ but with no trace of the Canadian Shift 27 29 START is ɐɹ eɹ 29 GOAT is oʊ Chart of regional accents Edit Accent Most populous urban center Strong aʊ fronting Strong oʊ fronting Strong u fronting Strong ɑ fronting before r Cot caught merger Pin pen merger ae raising system Chain shiftAtlantic Canadian Halifax NS Mixed No Yes Yes Yes No Pre nasal mixed noneInland Northern Chicago IL No No No Yes No No General or Pre nasal 5 6 Northern CitiesMid Atlantic Philadelphia PA Yes Yes Yes No No No Split Back VowelMidland Columbus OH Yes Yes Yes No Mixed Mixed Pre nasal noneNew York City New York City NY Yes No No 30 No No No Split Back VowelNorth Central Minneapolis MN No No No Yes Yes No Pre nasal amp velar noneNorthern New England Boston MA No No No Yes Yes No Pre nasal noneSouthern San Antonio TX Yes Yes Yes No Mixed Yes Southern Southern amp Back UpglideStandard Canadian Toronto ON No No Yes No Yes No Pre nasal amp velar CanadianWestern Los Angeles CA No No Yes No Yes No Pre nasal none California Western Pennsylvania Pittsburgh PA Yes Yes Yes No Yes Mixed Pre nasal PittsburghAlternative classifications Edit Combining information from the phonetic research through interviews of Labov et al in the ANAE 2006 and the phonological research through surveys of Vaux 2004 Hedges 2017 performed a latent class analysis cluster analysis to generate six clusters each with American English features that naturally occurred together and each expected to match up with one of these six broad U S accent regions the North the South the West New England the Midland and the Mid Atlantic including New York City The results showed that the accent regions clusters were largely consistent with those outlined in the ANAE The defining particular pronunciations of particular words that have more than an 86 likelihood of occurring in a particular cluster are pajamas with either the phoneme ae or the phoneme ɑ coupon with either ju or u Monday with either eɪ or i Florida with either ɔ or other possibilities such as ɑ caramel with either two or three syllables handkerchief with either ɪ or i lawyer as either ˈlɔɪ er or ˈlɔ jer poem with either one or two syllables route with either u or aʊ mayonnaise with either two or three syllables and been with either ɪ or other possibilities such as ɛ The parenthetical words indicate that the likelihood of their pronunciation occurs overwhelmingly in a particular region well over 50 likelihood but does not meet the gt 86 threshold set by Hedges 2017 for what necessarily defines one of the six regional accents Blank boxes in the chart indicate regions where neither pronunciation variant particularly dominates over the other in some of these instances the data simply may be inconclusive or unclear 31 Presumed accent region cluster pajamas coupon Monday Florida caramel handkerchief lawyer poem route mayonnaise beenNorth ae ju eɪ ɔ 2 syll ɪ ɔɪ South ɑ ju eɪ ɔ 3 syll ɪ ɔj 2 syll ɪ West ɑ u eɪ ɔ ɪ ɔɪ 2 syll ɪ New England u eɪ ɔ 3 syll ɔɪ 2 syll u 3 syll Midland ae u eɪ ɔ 2 syll ɔɪ 2 syll Mid Atlantic amp NYC ɑ u eɪ 3 syll ɪ ɔɪ 2 syll u 3 syll ɪ Hedges 2017 acknowledges that the two pronunciations marked by this star are discrepancies of her latent class analysis since they conflict with Vaux 2004 s surveys Conversely the surveys show that ae is the much more common vowel for pajamas in the West and ɔɪ and ɔj are in fact both common variants for lawyer in the Midland General American Edit Main article General American General American is an umbrella accent of American English perceived by many Americans to be neutral and free of regional characteristics A General American accent is not a specific well defined standard English in the way that Received Pronunciation RP has historically been the standard prestigious variant of the English language in England rather accents with a variety of features can all be perceived by Americans as General American so long as they lack certain sociolinguistically salient features namely that is lacking regional features such as R dropping which usually identifies an American speaker as being from the East Coast or South ethnic features such as the clear L sound which often identifies speakers as being Hispanic or socioeconomic features such as th stopping which often identifies speakers of a lower class background 32 33 Canada and Western United States EditMain articles Canadian English and Western American English The English dialect region encompassing the Western United States and Canada is the largest one in North America and also the one with the fewest distinctive phonological features This can be attributed to the fact that the West is the region most recently settled by English speakers and so there has not been sufficient time for the region either to develop highly distinctive innovations or to split into strongly distinct dialectological subregions citation needed The main phonological features of the Western U S and Canada are a completed cot caught merger a backed GOAT vowel like the Northern U S and a fronted GOOSE vowel like the Southern U S Atlantic Canada Edit Main article Atlantic Canadian English The accents of Atlantic Canada are more marked than the accents of the whole rest of English speaking Canada English of this region broadly includes ɑ fronting before r and full Canadian raising but no Canadian Shift the vowel shift documented in Standard Canadian English Canada and Pacific Northwest Edit Main articles Canadian English and Pacific Northwest English Further information Canadian Shift All of Canada except the Atlantic Provinces and French speaking Quebec speaks Standard Canadian English the relatively uniform variety of North American English native to inland and western Canada linguistically related to the Pacific Northwest a region extending from British Columbia south into the Northwestern United States particularly Washington and Oregon The vowel ɛ is raised and diphthongized to ɛɪ or eɪ and ae as eɪ all before ɡ and ŋ merging words like leg and lag leɪɡ tang is pronounced teɪŋ The cot caught merger to ɒ creates a hole in the short vowel sub system 34 and triggers a sound change known as the Canadian Shift mainly found in Ontario English speaking Montreal and further west and led by Ontarians and women it involves the front lax vowels ae ɛ ɪ The ae of TRAP is retracted to a except before nasals where it is raised and diphthongized to ee then ɛ DRESS and ɪ KIT are lowered in the direction of ae and ɛ and or retracted the exact trajectory of the shift is still disputed 35 Increasing numbers of Canadians and Northwestern Americans have a feature called Canadian raising in which the nucleus of the diphthongs aɪ and aʊ are more raised before voiceless consonants Thus for Canadians and Northwestern Americans word pairs like pouter powder ˈpɐʊɾɚ versus ˈpaʊɾɚ and rider writer are pronounced differently California the most populated U S state has been documented as having some notable new subsets of Western U S English Some youthful urban Californians possess a vowel shift partly identical to the Canadian shift in its backing or lowering of each front vowel one space in the mouth Before ŋ ɪ is raised to i so king has the same vowel as keen rather than kin 36 Before ŋ ae may be identified with the phoneme eɪ so rang is pronounced with the same vowel as ray Elsewhere ae is lowered in the direction of a ʊ is moving towards ʌ so put sounds more like putt ʌ towards ɛ so putt can sound slightly similar to pet The vowel oʊ GOAT may be more fronted i e ʉ and ɵʉ The pin pen merger is complete in Bakersfield and rural areas of the Central Valley and speakers in Sacramento either perceive or produce an approximation of this merger 37 Greater New York City EditMain article New York City English As in Eastern New England the accents of New York City Long Island and adjoining New Jersey cities are traditionally non rhotic while other greater New York area varieties falling under the same sweeping dialect are usually rhotic or variably rhotic Metropolitan New York shows the back GOAT and GOOSE vowels of the North but a fronted MOUTH vowel The vowels of cot kɑ t and caught kɔet are distinct in fact the New York dialect has perhaps the highest realizations of ɔ in North American English even approaching oe or ʊe Furthermore the father vowel is traditionally kept distinct from either vowel resulting in a three lot palm father distinction 4 The r colored vowel of cart is back and often rounded kɒt and not fronted as it famously is in Boston New York City and its surrounding areas are also known for a complicated citation needed short a split into lax ae versus tense ee so that words for example like cast calf and cab have a different higher tenser vowel sound than cat catch and cap The New York accent is well attested in American movies and television shows often exaggerated particularly in movies and shows about American mobsters from the area Though it is sometimes known as a Bronx or Brooklyn accent no research has confirmed differences of accent between the city s boroughs Northern and North Central United States EditOne vast super dialectal area commonly identified by linguists is the North usually meaning New England inland areas of the Mid Atlantic states and the North Central States There is no cot caught merger in the North around the Great Lakes and southern New England although the merger is in progress in the North bordering Midland and is completed in northern New England including as far down the Atlantic coast as Boston The western portions of the North may also show a transitioning or completing cot caught merger The diphthong aʊ is aʊ aʊ and oʊ remains a back vowel as does and u after non coronal consonants unlike the rest of the country Indeed in part of the North much of Wisconsin and Minnesota u remains back in all environments Where the Southeast has ɔ the single word on the North has ɑ The Canadian raising of aɪ to ʌɪ before voiceless consonants occurs is common in the North and is becoming more common elsewhere in North America North Edit Main article Northern American English The traditional and linguistically conservative North as defined by the Atlas of North American English includes ɑ being often raised or fronted before r or both as well as a firm resistance to the cot caught merger though possibly weakening in dialects reversing the fronting of ɑ 5 Maintaining these two features but also developing several new ones a younger accent of the North is now predominating at its center around the Great Lakes and away from the Atlantic coast the Inland North Inland North Edit Main article Inland Northern American English This map shows the approximate extent of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift and thus the approximate area where the Inland North dialect predominates Note that the region surrounding Erie Pennsylvania is excluded The Inland North is a dialect region once considered the home of standard Midwestern speech that was the basis for General American in the mid 20th century However the Inland North dialect has been modified in the mid 1900s by the Northern Cities Vowel Shift NCS which is now the region s main outstanding feature though it has been observed to be reversing at least in some areas in particular with regards to ae raising before non nasal consonants and ɑ fronting 5 6 The Inland North is centered on the area on the U S side of the Great Lakes most prominently including central and western New York State including Syracuse Binghamton Rochester and Buffalo much of Michigan s Lower Peninsula Detroit Grand Rapids Toledo Cleveland Chicago Gary and southeastern Wisconsin Milwaukee Racine Kenosha but broken up by the city of Erie whose accent today is non Inland Northern and even Midland like The NCS itself is not uniform throughout the Inland North it is most advanced in Western New York and Michigan and less developed elsewhere The NCS is a chain shift involving movements of six vowel phonemes the raising tensing and diphthongization of ae towards ɪe in all environments cat being pronounced more like kyat then the fronting of ɑ to a cot sounding like cat then the lowering of ɔ towards ɑ caught sounding like cot but without the two merging due to the previous step then the backing and sometimes lowering of ɛ toward either e or ae then the backing and rounding of ʌ towards ɔ so that cut sounding like caught then lastly the lowering and backing of ɪ but without any pin pen merger New England Edit New England does not form a single unified dialect region but rather houses as few as four native varieties of English with some linguists identifying even more Only Southwestern New England Connecticut and western Massachusetts neatly fits under the aforementioned definition of the North Otherwise speakers namely of Eastern New England show very unusual other qualities All of New England has a nasal short a system meaning that the short a vowel most strongly raises before nasal consonants as in much of the rest of the country Northeastern New England Edit Main article Eastern New England English Further information Boston accent and Maine accent The local and historical dialect of the coastal portions of New England sometimes called Eastern New England English now only encompasses Northeastern New England Maine New Hampshire some of whose urban speakers are retreating from this local accent and eastern Massachusetts including Greater Boston The accents spoken here share the Canadian raising of aɪ as well as often aʊ but they also possess the cot caught merger which is not associated with rest of the North Most famously Northern New England accents with the exception of Northwestern New England much of southern New Hampshire and Martha s Vineyard are often non rhotic Some Northeastern New England accents are unique in North America for having resisted what is known as father bother merger in other words the stressed vowel phonemes of father and bother remain distinct as a and ɒ so that the two words do not rhyme as they do in most American accents Many Eastern New England speakers also once had a class of words with broad a that is a as in father in words that in most accents contain ae such as bath half and can t similar to their pronunciation in London and southern England The distinction between the vowels of horse and hoarse is maintained in traditional non rhotic New England accents as hɒs for horse with the same vowel as cot and caught vs hoes for hoarse though the horse hoarse merger is certainly on the rise in the region today The ae phoneme has highly distinct allophones before nasal consonants ɑ fronting is usual before r Rhode Island Edit Rhode Island dialectally identified as Southeastern New England is sometimes grouped with the Eastern New England dialect region both by the dialectologists of the mid 20th century and in certain situations by the Atlas of North American English it shares Eastern New England s traditional non rhoticity or R Dropping A key linguistic difference between Rhode Island and the rest of the Eastern New England however is that Rhode Island is subject to the father bother merger and yet neither the cot caught merger nor ɑ fronting before r Indeed Rhode Island shares with New York and Philadelphia an unusually high and back allophone of ɔ as in caught even compared to other communities that do not have the cot caught merger In the Atlas of North American English the city of Providence the only Rhode Island community sampled by the Atlas is also distinguished by having the backest realizations of u oʊ and aʊ in North America Therefore Rhode Island English aligns in some features more with Boston English and other features more with New York City English Western New England Edit Recognized by research since the 1940s is the linguistic boundary between Eastern and Western New England the latter settled from the Connecticut and New Haven colonies rather than the Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies Western New Englanders settled most of upstate New York and the Inland North Dialectological research has revealed some phonological nuances separating a Northwestern and Southwestern New England accent Vermont sometimes dialectally identified as Northwestern New England has the full cot caught merger and ɑ fronting before r of Boston or Maine English and yet none of the other marked features of Eastern New England nor much evidence of the NCS which is more robustly documented though still variable in Southwestern New England Rhoticity predominates in all of Western New England as does the father bother merger of the rest of the nation Southwestern New England merely forms a less strong extension of the Inland North dialect region and it centers on Connecticut and western Massachusetts It shows the same general phonological system as the Inland North including variable elements of Northern Cities Vowel Shift NCS for instance an ae that is somewhat higher and tenser than average an ɑ that is fronter than ʌ and so on The cot caught merger is approximated in western Massachusetts but usually still resisted in Connecticut The tail of Connecticut may have some character diffused from New York City English North Central Edit Main article North Central American English The North Central or Upper Midwest dialect region of the United States extends from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan westward across northern Minnesota and North Dakota into the middle of Montana citation needed Although the Atlas of North American English does not include the North Central region as part of the North proper it shares all of the features listed above as properties of the North as a whole The North Central is a linguistically conservative region it participates in few of the major ongoing sound changes of North American English Its oʊ GOAT and eɪ FACE vowels are frequently even monophthongs o and e respectively The movie Fargo which takes place in the North Central region famously features strong versions of this accent 38 Unlike most of the rest of the North the cot caught merger is prevalent in the North Central region Southeastern United States Edit Blue represents major cities of the Southern accent darker blue represents cities with the strongest features of this accent 39 Purple represents definitively non Southern accents mostly Midland accents which together with the Southern accent fall under a Southeastern super region defined in this section 39 Red represents cities outside of that super region The 2006 Atlas of North American English identifies a Southeastern super region in which all accents of the Southern States as well as accents all along their regional margins constitute a vast area of recent linguistic unity in certain respects 40 namely the movement of four vowel sounds those in the words GOOSE STRUT GOAT and MOUTH towards the center or front of the mouth all of which is notably different from the accents of the Northern United States Essentially all of the modern day Southern dialects plus dialects marginal to the South some even in geographically and culturally Northern states are thus considered a subset of this super region note 2 the whole American South the southern half of the Mid and South Atlantic regions and a transitional Midland dialect area between the South and the North comprising parts of Oklahoma Kansas Missouri southeastern Nebraska southern Illinois southern Indiana and southern Ohio 41 These are the minimal necessary features that identify a speaker from the Southeastern super region Fronting of aʊ and oʊ The gliding vowels aʊ as in cow or ouch and oʊ as in goat or bone both start considerably forward in the mouth approximately ɛɔ aeɒ and ɜu respectively oʊ may even end in a very forward position 42 something like ɜy œʏ However this fronting does not occur in younger speakers before l as in goal or colt or before a syllable break between two vowels as in going or poet in which oʊ remains back in the mouth as ɔu ɒu 43 Lacking or transitioning cot caught merger The historical distinction between the two vowels sounds ɔ and ɒ in words like caught and cot or stalk and stock is mainly preserved 40 In much of the South during the 1900s there was a trend to lower the vowel found in words like stalk and caught often with an upglide so that the most common result today is the gliding vowel ɑɒ However the cot caught merger is becoming increasingly common throughout the United States thus affecting Southeastern even some Southern dialects towards a merged vowel ɑ 44 In the South this merger or a transition towards this merger is especially documented in central northern and particularly western Texas 45 The merger of pin and pen in Southern American English In the purple areas the merger is complete for most speakers Note the exclusion of the New Orleans area Southern Florida and of the Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia The purple area in California consists of the Bakersfield and Kern County area where migrants from the south central states settled during the Dust Bowl There is also debate as to whether or not Austin Texas is an exclusion Based on Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 68 Pin pen merger in transition The vowels ɛ and ɪ often merge when before nasal consonants so that pen and pin for instance or hem and him are pronounced the same as pin or him respectively 40 The merger is towards the sound ɪ This merger is now firmly completed throughout the Southern dialect region however it is not found in some vestigial varieties of the older South and other geographically Southern U S varieties that have eluded the Southern Vowel Shift such as the Yat dialect of New Orleans or the anomalous dialect of Savannah Georgia The pin pen merger has also spread beyond the South in recent decades and is now found in isolated parts of the West and the southern Midwest as well Rhoticity Dropping of postvocalic r and in some dialects intervocalic r was historically widespread in the South particularly in former plantation areas 46 This phenomenon non rhoticity was considered prestigious across the nation before World War II after which the social perception reversed Rhoticity sometimes called r fulness in which all or most r sounds are pronounced historically found only in the Midland Appalachia and some other Southeastern regions has now become dominant throughout almost the entire Southeastern super region as in most American English and even more so among younger and female white Southerners major exceptions are among Black or African American Southerners whose modern vernacular dialect continues to be mostly non rhotic as well as most of southern Louisiana where non rhotic accents still dominate 47 The sound quality of the Southeastern r is the distinctive bunch tongued r produced by strongly constricting the root and or midsection of the tongue 48 Midland Edit Main article Midland American English A band of the United States from Pennsylvania west to the Great Plains is what twentieth century linguists identified as the Midland dialect region though this dialect s same features are now reported in certain other pockets of the country too for example some major cities in Texas all in Central and South Florida and particular cities that are otherwise Southern citation needed In older and traditional dialectological research focused on lexicology vocabulary rather than phonology accent the Midland was divided into two discrete geographical subdivisions the North Midland that begins north of the Ohio River valley area and south of that the South Midland dialect area The North Midland region stretches from east to west across central and southern Ohio central Indiana central Illinois Iowa and northern Missouri as well as Nebraska and Kansas where it begins to blend into the West The South Midland dialect region follows the Ohio River in a generally southwesterly direction moving across from Kentucky southern Indiana and southern Illinois to southern Missouri Arkansas southeastern Kansas and Oklahoma west of the Mississippi River The distinction between a North versus South Midland was discarded in the 2006 Atlas of North American English in which the former North Midland is now simply called the Midland and argued to have a stronger claim to a General American accent than any other region and the South Midland is considered merely as the upper portion of the South this ANAE reevaluation is primarily on the basis of phonology The Midland is characterized by having a distinctly fronter realization of the oʊ phoneme as in boat than many other American accents particularly those of the North the phoneme is frequently realized with a central nucleus approximating eʊ Likewise aʊ has a fronter nucleus than aɪ approaching aeʊ Another feature distinguishing the Midland from the North is that the word on contains the phoneme ɔ as in caught rather than ɑ as in cot For this reason one of the names for the North Midland boundary is the on line However since the twentieth century this area is currently undergoing a vowel merger of the short o ɑ as in cot and aw ɔ as in caught phonemes known as the cot caught merger Many speakers show transitional forms of the merger The ae phoneme as in cat shows most commonly a so called continuous distribution ae is raised and tensed toward ee before nasal consonants as in much of the country Midland outside the Midland Edit Atlanta Georgia has been characterized by a massive movement of non Southerners into the area during the 1990s leading the city to becoming hugely inconsistent in terms of dialect 49 Currently aɪ is variably monophthongized as in the Southern U S no complete cot caught merger is reported and the pin pen merger is variable Charleston South Carolina is an area where today most speakers have clearly conformed to a Midland regional accent rather than any Southern accent Charleston was once home to its own very locally unique accent that encompassed elements of older British English while resisting Southern regional accent trends perhaps with additional linguistic influence from French Huguenots Sephardi Jews and due to Charleston s high concentration of African Americans that spoke the Gullah language Gullah African Americans The most distinguishing feature of this now dying accent is the way speakers pronounce the name of the city to which a standard listener would hear Chahlston with a silent r Unlike Southern regional accents Charlestonian speakers have never exhibited inglide long mid vowels such as those found in typical Southern aɪ and aʊ citation needed Central and South Florida show no evidence of any type of aɪ glide deletion Central Florida shows a pin pen merger and South Florida does not Otherwise Central and South Florida easily fit under the definition of the Midland dialect including the cot caught merger being transitional In South Florida particularly in and around Miami Dade Broward and Monroe counties a unique dialect commonly called the Miami accent is widely spoken The dialect first developed among second or third generation Hispanics including Cuban Americans whose first language was English 50 Unlike the older Florida Cracker dialect Miami accent is rhotic It also incorporates a rhythm and pronunciation heavily influenced by Spanish wherein rhythm is syllable timed 51 Mid Atlantic States Edit Main article Mid Atlantic American EnglishSee also Philadelphia accent and Baltimore accentNot to be confused with Transatlantic accent The cities of the Mid Atlantic States around the Delaware Valley South Jersey southeastern Pennsylvania northern Delaware and eastern Maryland are typically classified together their speakers most popularly labelled as having a Philadelphia accent or a Baltimore accent While Labov et al state that the dialect could potentially be included in the Midland super region the dialect is not included in Midland proper as a result of distinct phonological features defining the dialect 52 The Mid Atlantic split of ae into two separate phonemes similar to but not exactly the same as New York City English is one major defining feature of the dialect region as is a resistance to the Mary marry merry merger and cot caught merger a raising and diphthongizing of the caught vowel and a maintained distinction between historical short o and long o before intervocalic r so that for example orange Florida and horrible have a different stressed vowel than story and chorus all of these features are shared between Mid Atlantic American and New York City English Other features include that water is sometimes pronounced ˈwʊɾɚ that is with the vowel of wood the single word on is pronounced ɔn not ɑn so that as in the South and Midland and unlike New York and the North it rhymes with dawn rather than don the oʊ of goat and boat is fronted so it is pronounced eʊ as in the advanced accents of the Midland and South Canadian raising occurs for aɪ price but not for aʊ mouth According to linguist Barbara Johnstone migration patterns and geography affected the Philadelphia dialect s development which was especially influenced by immigrants from Northern England Scotland and Northern Ireland 53 South Edit Main article Southern American English The Southern United States is often dialectally identified as The South as in ANAE There is still great variation between sub regions in the South see here for more information and between older and younger generations Southern American English as Americans popularly imagine began to take its current shape only after the beginning of the twentieth century Some generalizations include the conditional merger of ɛ and ɪ before nasal consonants the pin pen merger the diphthong aɪ becomes monophthongized to a lax and tense vowels often merge before l The South Midland dialect now considered the upper portion of the Southern U S dialect and often not distinguished phonologically follows the Ohio River in a generally southwesterly direction moves across Arkansas and some of Oklahoma west of the Mississippi and peters out in West Texas it also includes some of North Florida namely around Jacksonville It most noticeably has the loss of the diphthong aɪ which becomes a It also shows fronting of initial vowel of aʊ to aeʊ often lengthened and prolonged yielding aeːʊ nasalization of vowels esp diphthongs before n raising of ae to e can t cain t etc fully rhoticity unlike classical coastal varieties of older Southern American English now mostly declined In the Southern Vowel Shift of the early 1900s up to the present ɪ moves to become a high front vowel and ɛ to become a mid front unrounded vowel In a parallel shift the i and eɪ relax and become less front the back vowels u in boon and oʊ in code shift considerably forward to ʉ and ɞ respectively and the open back unrounded vowel ɑ in card shifts upward towards ɔ as in board which in turn moves up towards the old location of u in boon This particular shift probably does not occur for speakers with the cot caught merger The lowering movement of the Southern Vowel Shift is also accompanied by a raising and drawling movement of vowels The term Southern drawl has been used to refer to the diphthongization triphthongization of the traditional short front vowels as in the words pat pet and pit these develop a glide up from their original starting position to j and then in some cases back down to schwa thus ae aeje ɛ ɛje and ɪ ɪje Inland South and Texas South Edit Main article Texan English See also Appalachian English The ANAE identifies two important especially advanced subsets of the South in terms of their leading the Southern Vowel Shift detailed above the Inland South located in the southern half of Appalachia and the Texas South which only covers the north central region of Texas Dallas Odessa and Lubbock but not Abilene El Paso or southern Texas which have more Midland like accents One Texan distinction from the rest of the South is that all Texan accents have been reported as showing a pure non gliding ɔ vowel 45 and the identified Texas South accent specifically is at a transitional stage of the cot caught merger the Inland South accent of Appalachia however firmly resists the merger Pronunciations of the Southern dialect in Texas may also show notable influence derived from an early Spanish speaking population or from German immigrants Marginal Southeast Edit The following Southeastern super regional locations fit cleanly into none of the aforementioned subsets of the Southeast and may even be marginal at best members of the super region itself Chesapeake and the Outer Banks North Carolina islands are enclaves of a traditional Hoi Toider dialect in which aɪ is typically backed and rounded Many other features of phonological and lexical note exist here too for example Ocracoke North Carolina shows no cot caught merger and its monophthongs are diphthongized up gliding before ʃ and tʃ and Smith Island Maryland shows an i that is diphthongized like the South and no happy tensing citation needed New Orleans Louisiana has been home to a type of accent with parallels to the New York City accent reported for over a century citation needed This variety of New Orleans English has been locally nicknamed Yat since at least the 1980s from a traditional greeting Where y at Where are you at meaning How are you citation needed The Yat NYC parallels include the split of the historic short a class into tense ee and lax ae versions as well as pronunciation of cot and caught as kɑ t and kɔet citation needed The stereotypical New York coil curl merger of toity toid street 33rd Street used to be a common New Orleans feature as well though it has mostly receded today One of the most detailed phonetic depictions of an extreme yat accent of the early 20th century is found in the speech of the character Krazy Kat in the comic strip of the same name by George Herriman citation needed Such extreme accents still be found in parts of Mid City and the 9th ward Jefferson Parish as well as in St Bernard Parish just east of New Orleans citation needed The novel A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole often employs the Yat accent citation needed Oklahoma City Oklahoma according to the ANAE s research is not quite a member of the Midland dialect region 54 Rather its features seem to be a blend of the Western and Midland dialects The overview of ANAE s studied features for Oklahoma City speakers include a conservative aɪ conservative oʊ transitional cot caught merger and variable pin pen merger Savannah Georgia once had a local accent that is now giving way to regional patterns of the Midland 54 According to the ANAE there is much transition in Savannah and the following features are reported as inconsistent or highly variable in the city the Southern phenomenon of aɪ being monophthongized non rhoticity oʊ fronting the cot caught merger the pin pen merger and conservative aʊ which is otherwise rarely if ever reported in either the South or the Midland St Louis Missouri is historically one among several North Midland cities but it is largely considered by ANAE to classify under blends of Inland North accents with the Northern Cities Vowel Shift NCS and Midland accents The St Louis Corridor demonstrates this variability in speakers following a line formed by U S Route 66 in Illinois now Interstate 55 going from Chicago southwest to St Louis This corridor of speakers cuts right through the center of what is otherwise the firmly documented Midland region Older St Louisans demonstrate a card cord merger so that I 44 is pronounced like I farty four 55 St Louis resists the cot caught merger and middle aged speakers show the most advanced stages of the NCS 45 while maintaining many of the other Midland features Western Pennsylvania Edit Main article Western Pennsylvania English The dialect of the western half of Pennsylvania is like the Midland proper in many features including the fronting of oʊ and aʊ The chief distinguishing feature of Western Pennsylvania as a whole is that the cot caught merger is noticeably complete here whereas it is still in progress in most of the Midland The merger has also spread from Western Pennsylvania into adjacent West Virginia historically in the South Midland dialect region The city of Pittsburgh shows an especially advanced subset of Western Pennsylvania English additionally characterized by a sound change that is unique in North America the monophthongization of aʊ to a This is the source of the stereotypical Pittsburgh pronunciation of downtown as dahntahn Pittsburgh also features an unusually low allophone of ʌ as in cut it approaches ɑ ɑ itself having moved out of the way and become a rounded vowel in its merger with ɔ See also EditAccent sociolinguistics American English Boontling California English Canadian English Chicano English English in New Mexico Hawaiian Pidgin Pacific Northwest EnglishReferences EditNotes Edit Dialects are considered rhotic if they pronounce the r sound in all historical environments without ever dropping this sound The father bother merger is the pronunciation of ɒ as in cot lot bother etc the same as ɑ as in spa haha Ma causing words like con and Kahn and like sob and Saab to sound identical with the vowel usually realized in the back or middle of the mouth as ɑ ɑ Finally most of the U S participates in a continuous nasal system of the short a vowel in cat trap bath etc causing ae to be pronounced with the tongue raised and with a glide quality typically sounding like ɛe particularly when before a nasal consonant thus mad is maed but man is more like mɛen The only notable exceptions of the South being a subset of the Southeastern super region are two Southern metropolitan areas described as such because they participate in Stage 1 of the Southern Vowel Shift but lack the other defining Southeastern features Savannah Georgia and Amarillo Texas Citations Edit Freeman Valerie 2014 Bag beg bagel Prevelar raising and merger in Pacific Northwest English PDF University of Washington Working Papers in Linguistics Retrieved 22 November 2015 permanent dead link a b Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 168 Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 p 56 a b Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 p 235 a b c d Wagner S E Mason A Nesbitt M Pevan E Savage M 2016 Reversal and re organization of the Northern Cities Shift in Michigan PDF University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 22 2 Selected Papers from NWAV 44 a b c Driscoll Anna Lape Emma 2015 Reversal of the Northern Cities Shift in Syracuse New York University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 21 2 a b Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 123 4 Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 48 Wells 1982 p 520 a b c Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 182 Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 54 238 Labov Ash amp Boberg 267 harvp error no target CITEREFLabovAshBoberg267 help a b Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 127 254 a b Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 133 a b Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 148 a b c d Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 141 Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 135 a b Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 237 Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 271 2 a b Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 130 Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 125 a b Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 124 Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 229 Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 137 Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 230 Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 231 a b Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 217 Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 223 a b Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 221 Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 107 Hedges Stephanie Nicole 2017 A Latent Class Analysis of American English Dialects 2017 All Theses and Dissertations 6480 Brigham Young University https scholarsarchive byu edu etd 6480 Wells 1982 10 Van Riper 2014 123 Martinet Andre 1955 Economie des changements phonetiques Berne Francke Labov et al 2006 Charles Boberg The Canadian Shift in Montreal Robert Hagiwara Vowel production in Winnipeg Rebecca V Roeder and Lidia Jarmasz The Canadian Shift in Toronto Penny Eckert California vowels Retrieved 24 July 2008 Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 68 Robin McMacken May 9 2004 North Dakota Where the accent is on friendship St Petersburg Times Retrieved 2008 02 22 a b Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 131 139 a b c Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 137 Southard Bruce Speech Patterns Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture Oklahoma Historical Society Retrieved October 29 2015 Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 263 Thomas 2006 14 harvcoltxt error no target CITEREFThomas2006 help Thomas 2006 9 harvcoltxt error no target CITEREFThomas2006 help a b c Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 61 Thomas 2006 p 16 Thomas 2006 16 harvcoltxt error no target CITEREFThomas2006 help Thomas 2006 15 harvcoltxt error no target CITEREFThomas2006 help Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 260 1 Miami Accents Why Locals Embrace That Heavy L Or Not WLRN WLRN TV and WLRN FM Retrieved September 1 2013 Miami Accent Takes Speakers By Surprise Articles Sun Sentinel com June 13 2004 Archived from the original on 2012 08 20 Retrieved 2012 10 08 Labov Ash amp Boberg 262 harvp error no target CITEREFLabovAshBoberg262 help Malady Matthew J X 2014 04 29 Where Yinz At Why Pennsylvania is the most linguistically rich state in the country The Slate Group Retrieved 2015 06 12 a b Labov Ash amp Boberg 2006 304 Wolfram amp Ward 2006 128 Bibliography EditLabov William Ash Sharon Boberg Charles 2006 The Atlas of North American English Berlin Mouton de Gruyter pp 187 208 ISBN 3 11 016746 8 Shitara Yuko 1993 A survey of American pronunciation preferences Speech Hearing and Language 7 201 32 Mencken H L 1977 1921 The American Language An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States 4th ed New York Knopf Mencken H L 1921 The American Language Bartleby com Retrieved February 28 2017 Rainey Virginia 2004 Insiders Guide Salt Lake City 4 ed The Globe Pequot Press ISBN 0 7627 2836 1 Brigham Young University Linguistics Department Research Teams Archived from the original on 2007 10 17 Retrieved 2007 10 25 BYU Utah English Research Team s Homepage Utahnics segment on All Things Considered National Public Radio February 16 1997 Chambers J K 1973 Canadian raising Canadian Journal of Linguistics 18 2 113 35 doi 10 1017 S0008413100007350 S2CID 247196050 Dailey O Cain J 1997 Canadian raising in a midwestern U S city Language Variation and Change 9 1 107 120 doi 10 1017 S0954394500001812 S2CID 146637083 Labov William 1963 The social motivation of a sound change Word 19 3 273 309 doi 10 1080 00437956 1963 11659799 Labov William 2001 Principles of Linguistic Change Social Factors Malden Mass Blackwell ISBN 0 631 17916 X Wells John C 1982 Accents of English Cambridge Cambridge University Press McCarthy John 1993 A case of surface constraint violation Canadian Journal of Linguistics 38 2 169 95 doi 10 1017 S0008413100014730 S2CID 14047772 Metcalf Allan A 2000 How We Talk American Regional English Today Boston Houghton Mifflin The Speech Accent Archive George Mason University 22 September 2004 Van Riper William 2014 General American An Ambiguity In Harold Allen Michael Linn eds Dialect and Language Variation Elsevier ISBN 978 1 4832 9476 6 Retrieved 26 January 2021 Walsh M February 28 1995 Vermont Accent Endangered Species Burlington Free Press Archived from the original on 2009 07 25 Retrieved 2012 10 13 Wolfram Walt Ward Ben eds 2006 American Voices How Dialects Differ from Coast to Coast Malden MA Blackwell Publishing External links EditStanford edu Penny Eckert Blog Vowel Shifts in Northern California and the Detroit Suburbs Voicesus com Directory of 129 North American English accents Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title North American English regional phonology amp oldid 1141770568, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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