The Mysterious Uniformity
of the Northern Cities Shift
William Labov, University of Pennsylvania
Methods XIII
Leeds
August 8, 2008
William Labov Home Page
www.ling.upenn.edu/~labov
Some substantial differences in dialectology
New World
Old World
Time Depth
200 years
2000 years
Spatial range
3000 mile
500 miiles
Major tendency
Divergence
Dialect leveling
Variables
Phonological
Phonological/Morphological,
Level of awareness
Low
High
The trajectory of this inquiry into the mysterious
uniformity of the Northern Cities Shift
1. The discovery of the NCS in several Northern cities.
2. The triggering event of the NCS in western New York state.
3. The westward expansion to the Inland North.
4. Differentiation of the NCS by social class and gender.
5. The uniformity of the NCS throughout the Inland North.
6. Ideological background from settlement history.
7. Modern day reflections. . .
The Northern Cities Shift in Chicago
Experiments on Cross-Dialectal Comprehension, 1989
Word
Phrase
Sentence
1 .
______
_____________
___________________
2.
______
_____________
___________________
3.
______
_____________
___________________
4.
______
_____________
___________________
The Northern Cities Shift
desk
mat
busses
head
boss
block
socks
The Telsur Project
• designed to obtain a comprehensive view of the phonological
changes in progress in the English of North America
• a telephone survey of all cities of population 50,000 and over
• names chosen from local telephone directories, concentrating on
major ethnic groups of that city
• first 2 subjects who were locally born and raised accepted as
representative of that city (4 to 6 in the largest cities)
• 762 speakers interviewed representing 325 cities, most 1992-1999
conversation on local developments
elicitation of particular words
perception and production of minimal pairs
semantic differential:
e.g., what’s the difference between a bag and a sack?
• acoustic analyses of systems of 439 speakers, 130,000 vowels
• provided data for the Atlas of North American English, (Berlin:
Mouton/degruyter, 2006.
Rochester, New York
Rochester
Extended sample of speech from Sharon K., 35, Rochester, TS 359
Sharon K. is an advanced speaker of the Northern Cities Shift. Listen
for the raising and fronting of short a in Catholic, adding, taxes, fact
fronting of short /o/ in modeling, lot
backing of short /e/ in send, went, sending
fronting of /ay/ in nine
backing of /i/ in tuition
Yeah, well I send my kids to private school, but--across the street
from me is a Catholic school, y’know I send ‘em there. I went there,
in fact I live in the house that I grew up in. We’re re-modeling right
now, uh adding on to the family room, and doing the work. We-we
like the neighborhood, and we feel very comfortable here. We like all
the neighbors, y’know, neighbors I’ve known since I was nine.
Bishop Parity behind us, but I don’t know if we’re gonna be sending
him there. The tuition could be very expensive. As it is now, we’re
paying a lot for public. . .Y’know we pay a lot of--taxes are very high
here.
Vowel system of Sharon K., Rochester
Northern Cities Shift of Sharon K., 35[1995], Rochester NY, TS 359
KIT
STRUT
TRAP
DRESS
THOUGHT
LOT
Northern Cities Shift in the vowel system of April S., 20, Rochester NY, TS360
KIT
STRUT
TRAP
THOUGHT
DRESS
LOT
Where did the Rochester accent come from?
Migration to the Rochester area
Kniffen and Glassie 1966, Fig. 7
Community movement
Mass migrations were indeed congenial to the Puritan tradition.
Whole parishes, parson and all, had sometimes migrated from Old
England. Lois Kimball Mathews mentioned 22 colonies in Illinois
alone, all of which originated in New England or in New York,
most of them planted between 1830 and 1840.
--Richard L. Power, Planting Corn Belt
Culture: The Impress of the Upland
Southerner and Yankee in the old
Northwest, 1953. P. 14.
Cities on the Erie Canal
The impact of the Erie Canal
The impact on the rest of the State can be seen by looking at a modern
map. With the exception of Binghamton and Elmira, every major city in
New York falls along the trade route established by the Erie Canal, from
New York City to Albany, through Schenectady, Utica and Syracuse, to
Rochester and Buffalo. Nearly 80% of upstate New York's population lives
within a 25 miles of the Erie Canal.
The Erie Canal: A Brief History
No established village had ever mushroomed so rapidly [as Rochester],
growing from 1507 to 9207 within a ten year span
Blake McKelvey, A Panoramic View of Rochester History.
Rochester History 11:2-24.
Growth of population along the Erie Canal
Erie canal
The TRAP vowel in the speech of immigrants to western New
York State
Nasal short-a system of Diane S., 37, Providence, RI
Continuous short-a system of Jesse M., 57[1996], New Britain CT, TS465
Broad-a system of Denise L., 21 [1995], Boston MA, TS 427
Split short-a system of Nina B., 62 [1996], New York City, TS 495
Input of short-a systems to cities on the Erie Canal, 1817-1825
nasal (WNE)
broad (Boston)
QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (LZW) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
continuous
(SWNE)
split (NYC)
General raising of /æ/ for Sharon K., 35 [1995], Rochester, NY, TS 359
Westward expansion
--A. Wexler. Atlas of Westward Expansion. NY: Facts on File, 1995. p. 64
Rochester
Detroit
The Northern Cities Shift of Sabrina K., 37 [1994], Detroit MI, TS 176
KIT
STRUT
TRAP
DRESS
THOUGHT
LOT
Social variation
Gender and social category determination of five elements of
the Northern City Shift in a Detroit suburban high school
Male Jocks
70
Male Burnouts
Percent advanced tokens
60
Female Jocks
Female Burnouts
50
40
30
20
10
0
œ
æ
TRAP
o
LOT
oh
e
THOUGHT
DRESS
^U
STRUT
Source: Eckert 2000
Further westward settlement
Settlement patterns shown by diffusion of building methods from seaboard nuclei
--Kniffen & Glassie
1966. Fig. 27
The North/Midland lexical isogloss
Coincidence of the North/Midland lexical line and NCS isoglosses
Measures of the development of the Northern Cities Shift
Four measures of the progress of the Northern Cities Shift
Means of six Northern Cities Shift vowels in the speech of
Sharon K., Rochester
EQ: /æ/ higher and
backer than /e/
AE1: /æ/
< 700 Hz
ED: F2(e) - F2(o)
< 375 Hz
UD: /^/
back of /o/
NCS vowels in the system of a Midland speaker, Mimi P., 31
45 [2000], Indianapolis IN, TS 775
F1
EQ: /e/ higher
than /æ/
700
UD: /^/
front of /o/
AE1: /æ/
> 700 Hz
ED: F2(e) - F2(o)
> 375 (523 Hz)
The Northern Cities Shift AE1 measure: raising of /æ/ to F1 < 700 Hz.
The Northern Cities Shift EQ measure reversal of relative positions of /e/ and /æ/
The Northern Cities Shift ED measure: front-back alignment of /e/ and /o/
The Northern Cities Shift UD measure: /^/ backer than /o/
The Inland North
U.S. at Night
Grand
Milwaukee
Syracuse
Rochester
Rapids
Chicago
Flint
Buffalo
Detroit
Kenoshat
Cleveland
Joliet
Toledo
Do current patterns of the communication flow
contribute to the uniformity of the Inland North?
Relationships among America’s Most Populous Metropolitan Areas
North/Midland
boundary
Fridland’s view of African-American participation in the
weakening of /ay/ in Memphis
Tie, tied and tIght: the expansion of /ay/ monophthongization in
African-American and European-American speech in Memphis,
Tennessee. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7:279-298, 2000.
Social correlates of four measures of the Northern
Cities Shift [N=71]
Age
Female
Years of
25 yrs Gender
Education
AE1
34*
EQ
34*
ED
112***
UD
37
8.6*
26*
*** P < .001, * P < .05
H.S. -68*
-16*
Yankee cultural imperialism and the Northern Cities Shift
Settlement patterns of four regional cultures
Yankee
Virginia
Quaker
Upland South
Settlement
Towns
Plantations
villages
Farm
Isolated
clusters
House location
Roadside
Setback
Cornerclusters
Creek
& spring
Internal
migration
Low
Moderate
High
Very high
Persistence
75-96%
50-75%
40-60%
25-40%
David Hackett Fisher, Albion’s Seed, p. 814
An ideological opposition dividing the Inland North from the
Midland
...among the new arrivals to Jefferson [County, Indiana] was
a species of settler strikingly different in outlook from small
southern [upland] farmers. . . these newcomers not only
displayed a disgusting predilection for self-improvement
schemes but were also fond of pointing out out their virtues
to those who took life at a less feverish pace.
It was the Yankees who were described as yearning to
constitute a social and cultural elite that would sponsor
and support higher education, literary societies, and
lecture courses, and follow their inclination to regulate the
morals of the whole society.
--Richard L. Power, Planting Corn Belt
Culture: The Impress of the Upland
Southerner and Yankee in the old Northwest,
1953
The meddling Yankee
Taxed with being busybodies and meddlars, apologists own
that the instinct for meddling, as divine as that of selfreservation, runs in the Yankee blood; that the typical New
Englander was entirely unable, when there were wrongs to
be corrected, to mind his own business.
--Richard L. Power, Planting Corn Belt
Culture: The Impress of the Upland
Southerner and Yankee in the old
Northwest, 1953, P. 6.
The Yankee perspective
One of the most distinguishing features of the Yankees of the
19th century had been their confidence that theirs was a
superior vision and that America’s future depended on their
ability to impose their order on the life of the nation. . . They
established thousands of public schools and private colleges,
filled churches and lodge halls with committed believers, and
codified their version of morality in the statute books.
--Morain, Thomas J. 1988. Prairie Grass
Roots: An Iowa Small Town in the Early
Twentieth century. Ames, IA: Iowa State
University Press. P. 256
Correcting Midland speech patterns
At Greensburg in southeastern Indiana, the Reverend J. R.
Wheelock advised his eastern sponsors that his wife had
opened a school of 20 or 30 scholars in which she would use
“the most approved N.E. school books,” to be obtained by a
local merchant from Philadelphia. “She makes defining a
distinct branch of study and this gives her a very favorable
oppy. of correcting the children & thro’ them, the parents of ‘a
heap’ of Kentuckyisms.”
--Richard L. Power, Planting Corn Belt
Culture: The Impress of the Upland
Southerner and Yankee in the old Northwest,
1953, P. 114.
Tim Frazer,
“The language of Yankee Cultural Imperialism”
...we must learn what led to the establishment of Inland
Northern as a prestige dialect in the Great Lakes region; we
need to understand as well why scholars like Kenyon, George
Phillip Krapp and Hans Kurath...embraced the concept of
Inland Northern as a General American.”
Perhaps the language of “Yankee cultural imperialism” was
appropriate for a century of corporate expansion, leveraged
buyouts, and American military intervention in the Philippines,
Central America, the Caribbean, Vietnam, and the Middle East.
from “Heartland” English., ed. T. Frazer, U. of
Alabama Pres, 1993.Pp. 60, 66.
Yankee ideology and American reform movements
Imbued with the notion that their was a superior vision, Yankees
dutifully accepted their responsibility for the moral and intellectual
life of the nation and set about to do what needed to be done, with or
without an invitation from the uneducated, the undisciplined, the
disinterested, or the unmotivated
Cultural uplift Yankee style also meant attacking sin and sloth. The
initial settlement of Iowa coincided with three very active decades for
American reform movements. Health fads, prison reform, women’s
rights, crusades for new standards of dress---the northern states
teemed with advocates of one cause or another.
Most important among the reform movements of the day were the
issues of abolition and temperance.
Morain, Thomas J. 1988. Prairie Grass Roots: An Iowa Small Town
in the Early Twentieth century. The Henry A. Wallace Series on
Agricltural History and Rural Studies. Ames, IA: Iowa State
University Press.
Election 2004 results by state
1973-1982: Restoration of the death penalty after Furman 1972.
States with no death penalty and the Northern dialect area
An experimental approach to the ideological
correlates of Inland North and Midland speech
Passage 1 in Experiment 1
(from Sabrina K., 37, Detroit MI, TS 176)
• short o fronting
• short a raising
• oh lowering
The--the way I got hired for this one job was really
weird, ‘cause I went in for a . . . secretarial position is
what I went in for, and they had hired. . .ah-somebody else that didn’t know anything, but it was a
buyer’s daughter, so then she got the job. And uh-they called me because I had done shipping and
receiving as far as--the paper work, and they had
asked me if I‘d help out ‘cause their--shipper had just
had a heart attack and she wasn’ comin’ back for a
while.
The Northern Cities Shift of Sabrina K., 37 [1994], Detroit MI, TS 176
KIT
STRUT
TRAP
DRESS
THOUGHT
LOT
Passage 2 in Experiment 1
(from Mimi P., 45 [2000], Indianapolis IN, TS 775)
•short o back of center
•tense a before nasals; lax a, e in that
•aw fronting
• ^ fronting
I read, a-n-nd like most women, I like to go shopping
and play card games with family and friends and that
kind of thing, nothing really exciting. We used to go
camping quite a bit on the weekends, but our lives
have shifted enough that we don’t do that much right
now, but uh that’s what we do.
N S means of Mimi P., 45 [2000], Indianapolis IN, TS 775
KIT
DRESS
STRUT
TRAP
THOUGHT
LOT
Cities assigned to Detroit and Indianapolis speakers by
student listeners at Indiana University [N=90]
Speaker assigned to
Chicago
Detroit
Michigan
Cleveland
Minneapolis
Fort Wayne, So. Bend
Indianapolis
Indiana
Other Midland
Ky, Tn
Atlanta
Denver
Total
Dialect
Inland North
Inland North
Inland North
Inland North
North
Transitional
Midland
Midland
Midland
Upper South
South
West
Sabrina K..
24
26
5
1
2
4
6
3
1
1
1
74
Mimi P.
3
4
24
4
3
12
1
51
Political opinions ascribed to an Inland North (Detroit) and Midland (Indianapolis)
speaker by students at U. of Indiana, Bloomington [N=90]
Abortion
Affirmative action
Gun control
3.5
Approval ->
3.7
3.9
Inland North
Midland
4.1
4.3
4.5
p < .03
p < .003
4.7
No significant difference in judgments of intelligence, trustworthiness, education;
Midland speaker judged more friendly (p < .00001)
Structural constraints and driving forces
General principles of chain shifting
1. Tense vowels rise along the peripheral track.
2. Lax nuclei fall along the nonperipheral track
3. Back vowels move to the front
The Northern Cities Shift
bit
i
6
1
bet
e
4
but
5
oh caught
3
æ
cat
o
2
cot
An image of the swimmer in the bay. . .
does the Australian crawl, the breast stroke,
backstroke, the butterfly, back to the crawl again
and thinks to himself, “I am really making this
current move!”
The mysterious uniformity of the Inland North
does not eliminate social variation
is the structural base on which social variation is built
is itself the product of social forces larger than local
identity
that we are only beginning to understand