Inland Northern American English



Inland Northern (American) English, also known in American linguistics as the Inland North or Great Lakes dialect, is an American English dialect spoken primarily by White Americans in a geographic band reaching from the major urban areas of Upstate New York westward along the Erie Canal and through much of the U.S. Great Lakes region. The most distinctive Inland Northern accents are spoken in Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse. The dialect can be heard as far west as eastern Iowa and even among certain demographics in the Twin Cities, Minnesota. Some of its features have also infiltrated a geographic corridor from Chicago southwest along historic Route 66 into St. Louis, Missouri; today, the corridor shows a mixture of both Inland North and Midland American accents. Linguists often characterize the western Great Lakes region's dialect separately as North-Central American English.

The early 20th-century accent of the Inland North was the basis for the term "General American", though the regional accent has since altered, due to the Northern Cities Vowel Shift: its now-defining chain shift of vowels that began in the 1930s or possibly earlier. A 1969 study first formally showed lower-middle-class women leading the regional population in the first two stages (raising of the vowel and fronting of the  vowel) of this shift, documented since the 1970s as comprising five distinct stages. However, evidence since the mid-2010s suggests a retreat away from the Northern Cities Shift in many Inland Northern cities and toward a less marked American accent. Various common names for the Inland Northern accent exist, often based on city, for example: Chicago accent, Detroit accent, Milwaukee accent, etc.

Geographic distribution
The dialect region called the "Inland North" consists of western and central New York State (Utica, Ithaca, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Binghamton, Jamestown, Fredonia, Olean); northern Ohio (Akron, Cleveland, Toledo), Michigan's Lower Peninsula (Detroit, Flint, Grand Rapids, Lansing); northern Indiana (Gary, South Bend); northern Illinois (Chicago, Rockford); southeastern Wisconsin (Kenosha, Racine, Milwaukee); and, largely, northeastern Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley/Coal Region (Scranton and Wilkes-Barre). This is the dialect spoken in part of America's chief industrial region, an area sometimes known as the Rust Belt. Northern Iowa and southern Minnesota may also variably fall within the Inland North dialect region; in the Twin Cities, educated middle-aged men in particular have been documented as aligning to the accent, though this is not necessarily the case among other demographics of that urban area.

Linguists identify the "St. Louis Corridor", extending from Chicago down into St. Louis, as a dialectally remarkable area, because young and old speakers alike have a Midland accent, except for a single middle generation born between the 1920s and 1940s, who have an Inland Northern accent diffused into the area from Chicago.

Erie, Pennsylvania, though in the geographic area of the "Inland North" and featuring some speakers of this dialect, never underwent the Northern Cities Shift and often shares more features with Western Pennsylvania English due to contact with Pittsburghers, particularly with Erie as their choice of city for summer vacations. Many African Americans in Detroit and other Northern cities are multidialectal and also or exclusively use African-American Vernacular English rather than Inland Northern English, but some do use the Inland Northern dialect.

Social factors
The dialect's progression across the Midwest has stopped at a general boundary line traveling through central Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois and then western Wisconsin, on the other sides of which speakers have continued to maintain their Midland and North Central accents. Sociolinguist William Labov theorizes that this separation reflects a political divide and a controlled study of his shows that Inland Northern speakers tend to be more associated with liberal politics than those of the other dialects, especially as Americans continue to self-segregate in residence based on ideological concerns. Former President Barack Obama, for example, has a mild Inland Northern accent despite not having lived in the dialect region until early adulthood.

Phonology and phonetics




A Midwestern accent (which may refer to other dialectal accents as well), Chicago accent, or Great Lakes accent are all common names in the United States for the sound quality produced by speakers of this dialect. Many of the characteristics listed here are not necessarily unique to the region and are oftentimes found elsewhere in the Midwest.

Northern Cities Vowel Shift
The Northern Cities Vowel Shift or simply Northern Cities Shift is a chain shift of vowels and the defining accent feature of the Inland North dialect region, though it can also be found, variably, in the neighboring Upper Midwest and Western New England accent regions.

Tensing of and fronting of
The first two sound changes in the shift, with some debate about which one led to the other or came first, are the general raising and lengthening (tensing) of the "short a" (the vowel sound of, typically rendered in American transcriptions), as well as the fronting of the sound of  or  in this accent (typically transcribed ) toward  or. Inland Northern raising was first identified in the 1960s, with that vowel becoming articulated with the tongue raised and then gliding back toward the center of the mouth, thus producing a centering diphthong of the type, , or at its most extreme ; e.g. naturally. As for fronting, it can go beyond  to the front, and may, for the most advanced speakers, even be close to —so that pot or sod come to be pronounced how a mainstream American speaker would say pat or sad; e.g. coupon.

Lowering of
The fronting of the vowel leaves a blank space that is filled by lowering the "aw" vowel in , which itself comes to be pronounced with the tongue in a lower position, closer to  or. As a result, for example, people with the shift pronounce caught the way speakers without the shift say cot; thus, shifted speakers pronounce caught as (and cot as, as explained above). In defiance of the shift, however, there is a well-documented scattering of Inland North speakers who are in a state of transition toward a cot-caught merger; this is particularly evident in northeastern Pennsylvania. Younger speakers reversing the fronting of, for example in Lansing, Michigan, also approach a merger.

Backing or lowering of
The movement of to, in order to avoid overlap with the now-fronted  vowel, presumably initiates the consequent shifting of  (the "short e" in ,  in General American) away from its original position. Thus, demonstrates backing, lowering, or a combination of both toward, the near-open central vowel, or almost.

Backing of
The next change is the movement of (the  vowel) from a central or back position toward a very far back position. People with the shift pronounce bus so that it sounds more like boss to people without the shift.

Backing or lowering of
The final change is the backing and lowering of, the "short i" vowel in , toward the schwa. Alternatively, is lowered to, without backing. This results in a considerable phonetic overlap between and, although there is no phonemic  merger because the weak vowel merger is not complete ("Rosa's" , with a morpheme-final mid schwa  is distinct from "roses" , with an unstressed allophone of  that is phonetically near-close central ).

Vowels before
Before, only undergoes the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, so that the vowel in start  varies much like the one in lot  described above. The remaining, and  retain values similar to General American (GA) in this position, so that north , merry  and near  are pronounced , with unshifted  (though somewhat closer than in GA),  and  (as close as in GA). Inland Northern American English features the north-force merger, the Mary-marry-merry merger, the mirror–nearer and – mergers, the hurry-furry merger, and the nurse-letter merger, all of which are also typical of GA varieties.

History of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift
William Labov et al.'s Atlas of North American English (2006) presents the first historical understanding of the order in which the Inland North's vowels shifted. Speakers around the Great Lakes began to pronounce the short a sound, as in, as more of a diphthong and with a higher starting point in the mouth, causing the same word to sound more like "tray-ap" or "tray-up"; Labov et al. assume that this began by the middle of the 19th century. After roughly a century following this first vowel change—general raising—the region's speakers, around the 1960s, then began to use the newly opened vowel space, previously occupied by, for  (as in  and ); therefore, words like bot, gosh, or lock came to be pronounced with the tongue extended farther forward, thus making these words sound more like how bat, gash, and lack sound in dialects without the shift. These two vowel changes were first recognized and reported in 1967. While these were certainly the first two vowel shifts of this accent, and Labov et al. assume that raising occurred first, they also admit that the specifics of time and place are unclear. In fact, real-time evidence of a small number of Chicagoans born between 1890 and 1920 suggests that fronting occurred first, starting by 1900 at the latest, and was followed by  raising sometime in the 1920s.

During the 1960s, several more vowels followed suit in rapid succession, each filling in the space left by the last, including the lowering of as in, the backing and lowering of  as in , the backing of  as in  (first reported in 1986), and the backing and lowering of  as in , often but not always in that exact order. Altogether, this constitutes the Northern Cities Shift, identified by linguists as such in 1972.

Possible motivations for the Shift
Migrants from all over the Northeastern U.S. traveled west to the rapidly industrializing Great Lakes area in the decades after the Erie Canal opened in 1825, and Labov suggests that the Inland North's general raising originated from the diverse and incompatible /æ/ raising patterns of these various migrants mixing into a new, simpler pattern. He posits that this hypothetical dialect-mixing event, which initiated the larger Northern Cities Shift (NCS), occurred by about 1860 in upstate New York, and the later stages of the NCS are merely those that logically followed (a "pull chain"). More recent evidence suggests that German-accented English helped to greatly influence the Shift, because German speakers tend to pronounce the English vowel as  and the  vowel as, both of which resemble NCS vowels, and there were more speakers of German in the Erie Canal region of upstate New York in 1850 than there were of any single variety of English. There is also evidence for an alternative theory, according to which the Great Lakes area—settled primarily by western New Englanders—simply inherited Western New England English and developed that dialect's vowel shifts further. 20th-century Western New England English variably showed NCS-like and  pronunciations, which may have already existed among 19th-century New England settlers, though this has been contested. Another theory, not mutually exclusive with the others, is that the Great Migration of African Americans intensified White Northerners' participation in the NCS in order to differentiate their accents from Black ones.

Reversals of the Shift
Recent evidence suggests that the Shift has largely begun to reverse in many cities of the Inland North, such as Lansing, Ogdensburg, Rochester, Syracuse,  Detroit, Buffalo, Chicago, and Eau Claire. In particular, fronting and  raising (though raising is persisting before nasal consonants, as is the General American norm) have now reversed among younger speakers in these areas. Several possible reasons have been proposed for the reversal, including growing stigma connected with the accent and the working-class identity it represents.

Other phonetics

 * Rhoticity: As in General American, Inland North speech is rhotic, and the r sound is typically the retroflex or perhaps, more accurately, a bunched or molar.
 * Canadian raising: The raising of the tongue for the nucleus of the gliding vowel is found in the Inland North when the vowel sound appears before any voiceless consonant, thus distinguishing, for example, between rider and writer by vowel quality . In the Inland North, unlike some other dialects, the raising occurs even before certain voiced consonants, including in the words fire, tiger, iron, and spider. When it is not subject to raising, the nucleus of  is pronounced with the tongue further to the front of the mouth than most other American dialects, as  or ; however, in the Inland North speech of Pennsylvania, the nucleus is centralized as in General American, thus:.
 * The nucleus of may be more backed than in other common North American accents (toward  or ).
 * The nucleus of (as in go and boat), like, tends to be conservative, not undergoing the fronting common in the vast American southeastern super-region. Likewise, the traditionally high back vowel  is conservative, less fronted in the North than in other American regions, though it still undergoes some fronting after coronal consonants. Also, , along with , can traditionally manifest as monophthongs:  and , respectively.
 * The vowel in can raise toward  in words like beg, negative, or segment, except in Michigan.
 * Working-class th-stopping: The two sounds represented by the spelling th&mdash; (as in thin) and (as in those)&mdash;may shift from fricative consonants to stop consonants among urban and working-class speakers: thus, for example, thin may approach the sound of tin (using ) and those may merge to the sound of doze (using ). This was parodied in the Saturday Night Live comedy sketch "Bill Swerski's Superfans," in which characters hailing from Chicago pronounce "The Bears" as "Da Bears."
 * Caramel is typically pronounced with two syllables as carmel.

Vocabulary
Note that not all of these terms, here compared with their counterparts in other regions, are necessarily unique only to the Inland North, though they appear most strongly in this region:
 * boulevard as a synonym for island (in the sense of a grassy area in the middle of some streets)
 * crayfish for a freshwater crustacean
 * drinking fountain as a synonym for water fountain
 * expressway as a synonym for highway
 * faucet for an indoor water tap (not Southern spigot)
 * goose pimples as a synonym for goose bumps
 * pit for the seed of a peach (not Southern stone or seed)
 * pop for a sweet, bubbly soft drink (not Eastern and Californian soda, nor Southern coke)
 * The "soda/pop line" has been found to run through Western New York State (Buffalo residents say pop, Syracuse residents say soda now but used to say pop until sometime in the 1970s, and Rochester residents say either. Eastern Wisconsinites around Milwaukee and some Chicagoans are also an exception, using the word soda.)
 * sucker for a lollipop (hard candy on a stick)
 * teeter totter as a synonym for seesaw
 * tennis shoes for generic athletic shoes (not Northeastern sneakers, except in New York State and Pennsylvania)

Individual cities and sub-regions also have their own terms; for example:
 * bubbler, in a large portion of Wisconsin around Milwaukee, for water fountain (in addition to the synonym drinking fountain, also possible throughout the Inland North)
 * cash station, in the Chicago area, for ATM
 * Devil's Night, particularly in Michigan, for the night before Halloween (not Northeastern Mischief Night)
 * doorwalls, in Detroit, for sliding glass doors
 * gapers' block or gapers' delay, in Chicago, Milwaukee and Detroit; or gawk block, in Detroit, for traffic congestion caused by rubbernecking
 * gym shoes, in Chicago and Detroit, for generic athletic shoes
 * party store, in Michigan, for a liquor store
 * rummage sale, in Wisconsin, as a synonym for garage sale or yard sale
 * treelawn, in Cleveland and Michigan; devilstrip or devil's strip in Akron, Ohio; and right-of-way in Wisconsin and parkway in Chicago for the grass between the sidewalk and the street
 * yous(e) or youz, in northeastern Pennsylvania around its urban center of Scranton, for you guys; in this sub-region, there is notable self-awareness of the Inland Northern dialect (locally called by various names, including "Coalspeak"). Youse is also found in Chicago and its hinterland, utilized as a second-person plural pronoun (similar to "y'all").

Notable lifelong native speakers

 * Hillary Clinton – "playing down her flat Chicago accent"
 * Ron Coomer – "his South Side accent"
 * Joan Cusack – "a great distinctive voice" she says is due to "my Chicago accent... my A's are all flat"
 * Richard M. Daley – "makes no effort to tame a thick Chicago accent"
 * Jimmy Dore – "I think that Chicago comics like Jimmy Dore bring my Wisconsin/Chicago accent back with a vengence."
 * Kevin Dunn – "a blue-collar attitude and the Chicago accent to match"
 * David Draiman – "distinct Chicago accent"
 * Rahm Emanuel – "more refined (if still very Chicago)"
 * Dennis Farina – "rich Chicago accent"
 * Chris Farley – "beatific Wisconsin accent"
 * Robert Forster – "accent that sounded like pure Chicago—though he hailed from Rochester, N.Y."
 * Dennis Franz – "tough-guy Chicago accent"
 * Sean Giambrone – "Sean, whose Chicago accent is thick enough to cut with a knife"
 * John Goodman – "Goodman delivered a completely authentic Inland North accent.... It wasn't an act."
 * Susan Hawk – "a Midwestern truck driver whose accent and etiquette epitomized the stereotype of the tacky, abrasive, working-class character"
 * Mike Krzyzewski
 * Dennis Kucinich – "a shining example of Cleveland's version of the Inland North accent"
 * Bill Lipinski – "I could live only 100 miles from the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Lipinski) and he would have an accent and I do not"
 * Terry McAuliffe – "that rich, unhelpful Syracuse accent"
 * Jim "Mr. Skin" McBride – "a clipped Chicago accent"
 * Michael Moore – "a Flintoid, with a nasal, uncosmopolitan accent" and "a recognisable blue-collar Michigan accent"
 * Bob Odenkirk
 * Suze Orman – "broad, Midwestern accent"
 * Iggy Pop – "plainspoken Midwestern accent"
 * Paul Ryan – "may be the first candidate on a major presidential ticket to feature some of the Great Lakes vowels prominently"
 * Michael Symon – "Michael Symon's local accent gives him an honest, working-class vibe"
 * Lily Tomlin – "Tomlin's Detroit accent"
 * Gretchen Whitmer – "a Michigan accent probably most detectable when she... flattens out her 'a' sounds with a nasal twang"