Contextualizing reversal: Local dynamics of the Northern Cities Shift in a Chicago community

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 469-491 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annette D'Onofrio ◽  
Jaime Benheim
Keyword(s):  
Local Dynamics ◽  
Northern Cities Shift ◽  
Northern Cities

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.

scholarly journals Weakening resistance: Progress toward the low back merger in New York State

2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-345 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron J. Dinkin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York State ◽  
Sound Change ◽  
Low Back ◽  
Northern Cities Shift ◽  
Upstate New York ◽  
The Status ◽  
Northern Cities ◽  
Phonetic Distance ◽  
New Community

AbstractThis paper examines the status of the low back caught-cot merger in Upstate New York. Most of this region is subject to the Northern Cities Shift (NCS) and therefore, according to Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006), ostensibly “resists” the spread of this merger. It is found that the phonology of this region is indeed trending toward the merger in apparent time, in terms of both phonetic distance between the two phonemes and speakers' explicit judgments. It is argued that the fronting of the cot vowel in the NCS region is not sufficient to withstand the spread of the merger because fronting a low vowel is a “reversible” sound change (Labov, 2010). It is further argued that the expansion of a merger to new communities may take place indirectly, through launching a sound change in the direction of merger rather than causing merger to take place immediately in the new community.

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