Talk:Northern Cities Vowel Shift/Archive 2

Off-topic rant
Yeah OK this is totally irrelevant but it sure is annoying to people in the western HALF of the country when people refer to the northeastern parts as "the North," and the southeastern parts as "the South," as if we don't even exist. I'm sorry, anything east of Chicago is NORTHEAST, and any separate North would run from Wisconsin to Montana. Foogus (talk) 16:08, 13 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Wow, that is pretty off topic. Thegryseone (talk) 23:55, 13 October 2008 (UTC)


 * I think it's a historical thing. Until California and Texas were taken by force and while Oregon Country wasn't part of the union, you actually "didn't exist." The old language has stuck. --Eamonnca1 (talk) 17:51, 14 October 2008 (UTC)


 * It's just the terms we use. They're obviously not geographically accurate, but you might as well use them because most people don't understand geography. You'll never be able to change people who have been using the term "the South" to describe what is geographically the southeastern part of our nation their entire lives. If you can't beat 'em, you might as well join 'em. Thegryseone (talk) 19:43, 14 October 2008 (UTC)


 * They are dialectal labels, used to refer to areas which have a set of dialectal features in common (although of course there are further differences within the areas. Claire (talk) 16:36, 30 December 2008 (UTC)


 * HEY EVERYONE - did anyone ever consider that "Northern cities" doesn't even specify the country, and is therefore hilariously USA-centric? The majority of the world doesn't live in the USA. "Oh but Wikipedia is an American site!", okay, so why not have a separate UK Wiki, Aus Wiki, Rwandan English Wiki etc.? Be grateful pls. 213.198.95.66 (talk) 07:47, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

What? I mean what?
This article is completely unreadable. How about some examples? Is this referring to a sort of "neaw yawk" accent, or a "bahston hahba" accent or what? IPA is unintelligible. 71.176.153.120 (talk) 01:21, 9 November 2008 (UTC)
 * The article is (was?) actually being rewritten at User:Mwalcoff/Northern cities vowel shift. And by the way, I move that the current article be replaced by the new version right away. Granted, it's still unfinished, but it's more readable (and accurate) than what we have now. And keeping it hidden in User:Mwalcoff's userspace is not gonna get us anywhere anyway. I'm  Jack (Lumber) and I approve this message. 03:10, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

It's not referring to a New York accent or a Boston accent; I can tell you that much. I don't know what ever happened to the new version of this article. Thegryseone (talk) 01:17, 10 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes. New York City and Boston are not in the colored regions of the map. Sound files would help the article though. Being from a northern city myself (Saint Paul), I find it fascinating that vowels have actually shifted there since when my parents were children. I'd like to be able to hear the difference with actual word or sentence examples. Thanks.DavidRF (talk) 23:48, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

It really depends on how old you are, and St. Paul isn't exactly the core of this shift, though it might have some parts of it. The NCS has actually been going on for quite a while. I agree with you that it's fascinating, though I'm not from there. I'm glad you asked for examples, because I love giving examples. This woman is one of my favorite examples. She's quite advanced. This guy is another example. Notice how he says smock. Both of them are from Chicagoland, but that's not the only place where the NCS can be found. This is an interview on WGN radio with linguist Corrine McCarthy about the NCS (be sure to click on her name after you get there). I find it very educational. Thegryseone (talk) 02:35, 9 February 2009 (UTC)


 * I totally agree. Need examples, currently, this is terribly difficult to comprehend without spending lots of time. -Anon 128.156.10.80 (talk) 13:30, 21 July 2009 (UTC)

Why did the NCVS skip over Erie?
I have been curious about this, but I have never asked. So why did the NCVS (with the exception of the backing of /ɛ/) "skip over" Erie, Pennsylvania? Thegryseone (talk) 01:05, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, the backing of /ɛ/ by itself is unrelated to the NCS. In fact, /ɛ/ appears to be more retracted than /æ/ for most U.S. speakers (though not in most of the West; this is a major difference between the phonetics of U.S. and Canadian English, btw.). I've heard that Erie used to be part of the Northern dialect region, but the speech patterns of that city have since moved away from the rest of North as Erie failed to participate in the NCS. I'm  Jack (Lumber) and I approve this message. 01:59, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Alright I digressed a bit with the /ɛ/ bit. I can verify that with my own speech as well (twenty almost rhymes with money for me). So what my question is...is does anyone (Labov, AJD, you, whoever) have a theory on why Erie failed to participate in the NCVS? Is it because people there feel more closely tied to Pittsburgh than the surrounding Great Lakes area? I just wonder how an otherwise uniform vowel shift could seemingly "skip over" an area, and then start back up again (assuming that it began further east than Erie, of course, which is almost certainly the case). Thegryseone (talk) 02:14, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
 * According to Keelan Evanini, "[Erie's] realignment with the Midland suggests that Pittsburgh has had a stronger influence on Erie since the middle of the 20 th century than either of the two large nearby Northern cities. [Buffalo and Cleveland] Qualitative evidence from sociolinguistic interviews will be presented to confirm this and to show that Erieites have more contact with speakers from Pittsburgh than either Buffalo or Cleveland. Much of this contact stems from the popularity of Erie as a summer vacation destination for residents of Pittsburgh, evidenced by the fact that some Erieites refer to these summer vacationers from Pittsburgh as “mups” (from ”come up”). It will be argued that this higher density of communication caused Erie to shift its phonological allegiance from the North to the Midland, and, consequently, that any model of dialect diffusion must take communication patterns into account in order to be fully explanatory." (Here's the rest of the paper).
 * Twenty is not a good example, since one pronunciation of twenty actually does rhyme with money, just like one pronunciation of catch rhymes with fetch (as opposed to match). I'm  Jack (Lumber) and I approve this message. 02:52, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I see, that's interesting. I knew it would have to do with contact with Pittsburghers (what a cool demonym).

I never knew that about twenty. I'm one of the people who pronounces it to rhyme with money; I always thought it was just an idiosyncrasy. You might think it was daft (I feel British) of me to say that about twenty knowing that I have the pin-pen merger, but I don't think I'm fully merged anyway (like novel and learned words tend to have /ɛ/, e.g., Kem playing cards, and Henry always has /ɛ/ for some odd reason). There are some weird pronunciations of individual words like the case with catch, twenty, etc. Sometimes I wonder if pronunciations like that came from a strange vowel shift that just never really caught on and just remained unique to a single word. Feel free not to respond to this desultory crap. Thegryseone (talk) 04:17, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
 * You're not alone. I too pronounce "catch" to rhyme with "fetch" rather than with "match", and I pronounce "twenty" to rhyme with "runty" (or "money" if I gloss over the t) rather than "plenty". But despite growing up in Texas, I don't merge pin and pen (though I do make "since" homophonous with "sense" for some reason). —Angr 07:03, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Well, I guess those idiosyncratic pronunciations only affect words that are (1) very common and (2) uttered quickly and in a casual way. If you say /kætʃ/ very fast and without bothering to correctly articulate the ash, you will probably come up with something that sounds like /kɛtʃ/ but would be interpreted as catch anyway, since this particular word is easily predictable in context. (Indeed, the sound [ɛ] is easier to articulate than [æ]; maybe that has something to do with the raising of /æ/ as one of the defining features--if not the triggering event--of the NCS. If the articulation of that particular phoneme (in this case, TRAP) comes to be systematically changed wherever it occurs, and not just in one word, a chain shift is set in motion, as LOT finds some room to move forward and DRESS finds itself compelled to get out of TRAP's way.) Now back to my point: Little by little, the "casual" alternate pronunciation becomes standard even when spoken slowly, and may even completely displace the former pronunciation, as is the case with been (formerly "bean," now "bin" or even "ben" if you take it a step further). I believe this is the same thing that happened to emphatic was, what, of, from (LOT->STRUT); the second syllable of because (THOUGHT->STRUT) is still in the process. All of this is true of U.S. English; in Canada, been can be either "bean" or "bin," and 20 seems to retain the /ɛ/ somewhat more often (based on personal observations); what is interesting is that this whole thing seems to be totally unknown outside of this continent. And that's it for my own share of desultory crap... I'm  Jack (Lumber) and I approve this message. 23:39, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

The Schwa
It seems that the schwa sometimes follows /ʌ/ in this shift in words like Stella and California. Thegryseone (talk) 22:24, 3 April 2009 (UTC)


 * That would make sense! Thing is, most sociophoneticians don't bother with reduced vowels. I think it's a shame they don't. Even when they're interested in them, they just calculate their approximate values based on theory (instead of doing it the normal way). If you're going to document a language or a regional accent of a language, shouldn't you document literally everything? Reduced vowels and r-combinations are a prime example of this (in my opinion, the vowel in "car" should not be put in the same bag as /ɑ/ in other environments because it and all other pre-r vowels can significantly differ from their non-r counterparts). Temporal Fugitive (talk) 02:49, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

Confusion About the Extent of the NCVS
Here is what it says about the NCVS at Inland North, and I quote:

Note that this shift is in progress across the region, but that each subsequent stage is a result of the previous one(s), so that an individual speaker may not display all of these shifts, but no speaker will display the last without also showing the ones before it.

So what this is saying is that no speaker will show, example, the backing of without showing everything before that. So why, then, does the map to the right side of this article show certain areas as having the backing of, for example, without having all of the shifts that precede it in the NCVS? Thegryseone (talk) 20:12, 22 October 2009 (UTC)


 * I agree, it doesn't make any sense. When you look at the map, it should be pretty clear that "Backing and lowering of /ɛ/" happened independently in some places. /ɑ/, /ɔ/ and /ʌ/ changes seem to be independent of /æ/ changes. If anything, it would seem logical that /æ/ shifted as a result of other changes. With the Minneapolis area in mind, my conclusion is that "Fronting of /ɑ/" pushed /æ/ "up". Of course, you won't find anything to support this idea. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Temporal Fugitive (talk • contribs) 03:08, 20 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm Ohio born and raised and I've never come across this, I think this whole thing is BS. The people on TV still sound exactly like us, I can't think of any person I've ever met who has started or had changed into the first shift, more prevalent is rural people saying warsh. Are there any examples or a video of people with this "shift"? 98.28.68.59 (talk) 03:40, 3 September 2010 (UTC)


 * Not many people realize that they or the people around them have it. Newsflash, suburban Michiganders think they don't have accents and that they sound just like all of the people on TV, but people from surrounding states definitely do have accents. As does almost everyone else who's not from the South or New England and has never taken an English phonetics class. You're used to hearing certain sounds. E.g. compare the recording for /ʌ/ at Open-mid_back_unrounded_vowel, as it's is pretty close to the shifted variant, and the recording for /ɐ/ at Near-open_central_vowel as it's pretty close to the unshifted vowel quality. Temporal Fugitive (talk) 00:53, 11 September 2010 (UTC)


 * But the problem is I don't think this is anywhere near as widespread in most of the areas given... there are definitely many suburban Michiganders and Ohioans who clearly display signs of the shift, but in my experience it's not the norm in those states. I know for a fact that I don't have a discernible accent and neither do most people I know (though many do, my father is in phase one of the shift). Here's an example of someone with the shift: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTsIfMbYd74... his accent actually sounds completely unusual to me. I would love if an editor could try to dig up hard numbers on how many people the shift actually affects. -- MichiganCharms (talk) 05:25, 22 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Trust me, it's common. It took leaving the state and really studying the accent to hear it. Now I hear it from almost everyone back in Ohio. It's quite widespread. It's not as strong always as some of the audio examples, for it's therefor sure. Listen to the sounds posted by Temporal Fugitive, and think of the word "almost." -- User:Sleepasthesouth 0:9:10 10 Mary 2012

South Bend
South Bend should be cited. I come from near there originally, have lived in west-central Indiana and now metro Detroit. People from SB sound MUCH more like Chicagoans and Detroiters than the rest of Indiana. When I lived in west-central Indiana, I was frequently asked where I was from, as I couldn't possibly be a "Hoosier" (frequent guesses were Chicago and even Canada).--Locutus1966 (talk) 19:02, 29 December 2009 (UTC)

I think you guys are looking for somethign that isn't there. MInnesota accent I get.... Chicago... barely... only certain words and only some people. It's not like boston or new york where the accent is obvious. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.69.56.49 (talk) 23:49, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

New Link
I don't know how to put this in the 'external link' section, so I'll put it here: Votes and Vowels: "A Changing Accent Shows How Language Parallels Politics" http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2012/03/28/votes-and-vowels-a-changing-accent-shows-how-language-parallels-politics/176.199.222.212 (talk) 21:43, 7 April 2012 (UTC)

Stupid header picture.
St. Louis isn't part of the great lakes and there's no Chicagoish accent down here.......

Stop putting up that picture. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Brewerstl (talk • contribs) 07:01, 3 July 2013‎
 * Sorry, but published reliable sources (such as the ones cited in the map's caption) carry more weight around here than users' personal observations. Angr (talk) 21:21, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

How about Canada?
Shouldn't Ontario also be included?


 * No. People from Ontario don't have the Northern Cities Shift. AJD (talk) 20:15, 13 June 2014 (UTC)