scholarly journals Settlement patterns and the eastern boundary of the Northern Cities Shift – ERRATUM

2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-141
Author(s):  
Aaron J. Dinkin
Keyword(s):  
Settlement Patterns ◽  
Northern Cities Shift ◽  
Eastern Boundary ◽  
Northern Cities

Settlement patterns and the eastern boundary of the Northern Cities Shift

2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron J. Dinkin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New England ◽  
Settlement Patterns ◽  
New York State ◽  
Early History ◽  
Northern Cities Shift ◽  
Sound Changes ◽  
Northern Cities ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual

This paper examines the dialectology of eastern New York State. Data are considered from twelve cities and villages bridging the gap between the Inland North dialect region (home to the Northern Cities Shift [NCS]) and the Western New England region. Communities are classified as belonging to the Inland North “core,” the Inland North “fringe,” or a non–Inland North region. The settlement history of these communities is used to explain the boundaries between the dialect regions; presence of the NCS is found to correlate well with heavy migration from southwestern New England early in a community's history. Looking in detail at the different distributions of the individual sound changes involved in the NCS across the dialect regions established in this paper makes it possible to posit a reconstructed early history for the NCS and make hypotheses about the phonological character of the different sound changes.

Escaping the Trap: Losing the Northern Cities Shift in Real Time

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 373-398
Author(s):  
Anja Thiel ◽  
Aaron J. Dinkin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Young People ◽  
Older People ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Spontaneous Speech ◽  
Time Change ◽  
Negative Evaluation ◽  
Small City ◽  
Northern Cities Shift ◽  
Northern Cities

AbstractWe examine the loss of the Northern Cities Shift raising of trap in Ogdensburg, a small city in rural northern New York. Although data from 2008 showed robust trap-raising among young people in Ogdensburg, in data collected in 2016 no speakers clear the 700-Hz threshold for NCS participation in F1 of trap—a seemingly very rapid real-time change. We find apparent-time change in style-shifting: although older people raise trap more in wordlist reading than in spontaneous speech, younger people do the opposite. We infer that increasing negative evaluation of the feature led Ogdensburg speakers to collectively abandon raising trap between 2008 and 2016. This indicates a role for communal change in the transition of a dialect feature from an indicator to a marker.

scholarly journals Secondary education as a group marker in St. Louis, Missouri

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Daniel Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Public Schools ◽  
Secondary Education ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Catholic High Schools ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Northern Cities Shift ◽  
Northern Cities ◽  
Education Groups ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Larger Sample

ABSTRACT This article calls attention to the saliency of secondary education within the community and its utility in constructing social categories, in order to consider how it affects linguistic variation. Older St. Louisans draw on secondary education to construct a divide between those who attended Catholic high schools and those who attended public schools. I show that speakers in a sample of older St. Louisans differ in production of the thought vowel based on education type. This effect is weakened in apparent time when we consider a larger sample that includes both older and younger speakers. I draw on Brubaker's (2004) view of groups as events and actions to argue that these categories were indexed only while they had a high degree of groupness, and suggest that social changes that led to diminished groupness between Catholics and Publics also resulted in the loss of a linguistic distinction between the groups. (Education, groups, Northern Cities Shift, Catholicism)*

Working the Early Shift: Older Inland Northern Speech and the Beginnings of the Northern Cities Shift

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew J. Gordon ◽  
Christopher Strelluf
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Acoustic Data ◽  
Northern Cities Shift ◽  
Complex Series ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
Open Questions ◽  
Northern Cities ◽  
Oral History Interviews

The complex series of vowel changes known as the Northern Cities Shift has been extensively documented over the last four decades across the broad territory of the Inland North dialect region. Little is known, however, about the origins of the shift, and there remain open questions about where the changes began and which vowel initiated the process. This paper examines such questions by analyzing the speech of several people born in the late 19th and early 20th centuries using archival recordings of oral history interviews. Drawing on acoustic data we identify what appear to be early stages of the Northern Cities Shift in some individual speakers though many in the sample give no evidence of participating in the changes. We consider the implications of these findings for accounts of how the shift began with particular focus on Labov’s (2010) proposal.

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