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Urban Matters: Current approaches in variationist sociolinguistics
Edited by Arne Ziegler, Stefanie Edler and Georg Oberdorfer
[Studies in Language Variation 27] 2021
► pp. 159–178

From an indicator to a marker

Urban dialect loss in Michigan

| Indiana University

One of the most distinctive regional dialects of North American English – the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), situated in the Inland North dialect area – is receding. Recent work suggests that it has risen as a linguistic marker in upstate New York – at the dialect area’s periphery. This paper reports the results of an online implicit attitudes survey which indicates that Michiganders also negatively evaluate the NCS, rating it accented, and nasally, but indicative of a hard worker. I also find that when listeners hear NCS features in the speech of a young speaker, there are added meanings of uneducated and incorrect/bad English. These results suggest that perhaps changing attitudes and rising awareness can account for NCS recession in the dialect area – a finding that appears to echo recent reports of dialect decline in other areas of North America.

Keywords: North American English, dialectology, language regard, Northern Cities Shift, Inland North, implicit attitudes, trap , sociophonetics, vowel chain shift, social marker
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The Inland North and the Northern Cities Shift
    • 1.2Recession of the Northern Cities Shift
  • 2.Methodology
    • 2.1Respondents
    • 2.2Experimental design
      • 2.2.1Stimuli creation
      • 2.2.2The survey
  • 3.Analysis and results
    • Accented
    • Nasally
    • Hard-working
    • Bad English
    • Educated
  • 4.Discussion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 16 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.27.07nes
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