NORTHERN CITIES VOWEL SHIFT: LANGUAGE VARIATION AND ACTUATION
by Dorina Pellumbi
The Northern Cities Vowel Shift is a shift that is taking place in the Northern Cities of the United States. Though the shift is happen- ing around the entire region of the Great Lakes, Michigan has been a primary focal point for most scholars to discuss how the shift has altered a dialectic change in the phonology of Michiganders. “The Northern Cities Shift (NCVS) is the rotation of six vowels of American English: /ɪ, ɛ, ʌ, ɔ, ɑ, æ/ (KIT, DRESS, STRUT, THOUGHT, LOT and TRAP). This shift causes the word “caught” to sound more like “cot.” And because vowels are part of a system, it forces pronunciations of all related vowels to move down the line; “cot” becomes something closer to “cat,” and so on” (Wagner 171).
Figure 1 : Understanding the Shift
/ie/ Idea
/i/ Kid
/e/ Ked
/ʌ/ Cud
/oh/ Cawed
/o/ Cod
/ æ/ Cad
In Labov’s paper on “The Organization of Dialect Diversity in North America,” he begins to describe understanding the shift in Figure 1. “The shift begins when /æ/, the vowel of cad, moves to the position of the vowel of idea /i’/ (1). The vowel /o/ in cod then shifts forward so that it sounds like cad to speakers of other dialects (2). /oh/ in cawed moves down to the position formerly occupied by cod (3), /e/ in Ked moves down and back to sound like the vowel of cud (4), /cud moves back to the position formerly occupied by cawed (5), and /i/ in kid moves back in parallel to the movement of /e/ (6)” (Labov, par 10).
Bill Labov, a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, began conducting studies around the Great Lakes region to understand how this new shift in vowels has affected Michiganders’ perception on their change in dialect. In an episode of “Do You Speak American,” Bill Labov shares how he and his colleagues have been studying the way Americans talk for decades. A recent discovery was noted that “in the first time in over a thousand years there has been a shift in the short vowels,” otherwise known as the Northern Cities Vowel Shift. About 34 million people are taking part in this shift. Labov discusses that this area used to be the “closest to network communication and what the NBC standard was based on and today it is moving further and further away” (Do You Speak American, Episode One).
Figure 2: Project on Cross-Dialectal Comprehension Gating Experiment 2
In this experiment conducted by Labov, Labov plays a sound for people who contribute to the NVCS and asks them what they hear. In the example provided in figure two above, when others interact with the word, they initially hear the word, ‘black.’ When Labov continues, he has the participant listen in on how the word is used in a phrase, “Living on one black/block”; to which they then hear the word, ‘block.’ Then after the sentence is in its full form, “Senior citizens living on one black/block,” it is clear to listeners that the word that sounds like ‘black’ is the word ‘block.’ By using context clues in the sentence after the fact of the first initial hearing, people are able to conclude that the word is ‘block.’ Those who partake in the dialect change due to the Northern Cities Vowel Shift don’t recognize that a shift is happening. Most participants heard the first word to be ‘black’ not ‘block.’ What sparks the interest of linguists is how these changes relate to each other over time.
Figure 3: Bill Labov’s charting on NCVS
In his book Dialect Diversity in America, William Labov describes the Shift as a series, or chain, of pronunciation changes. The NCVS affects five different vowel sounds, but Labov believes it was triggered by the short “a” that makes “Dallas” sound like Dale-is. In order to understand Figure 3, Labov discusses how, “The initiating event appears to be the shift of short-a in bat to a front, raised position, a sound very much like the vowel of yeah…Into the gap created by this shift, the vowel of got moves forward. In the most extreme form, cot sounds like cat, block like black, socks like sacks…The vowel of bought then moves down and front toward this position, along with other members of the “long open-o” word class: law, talk, cross, dawn, dog, etc…Short-e then shifts to the back toward short-u, producing a confusion between desk and dusk as short-e enters short-u territory. Most recently, short-u has responded to the intrusion by moving back, producing the potential confusion between busses and bosses, cud and cawed…The chain shift has come full circle.” In his book, he continues to discuss how the NCVS, is still progressing today and how most Northern Cities continue to be unaware of the shift, but that it is very prevalent a shift is taking place and dialect is changing.
Dennis Preston, a professor of perceptual linguistics at Oklahoma State University states that he doesn’t “merely study how people speak, he studies how people perceive both their own speech and the speech of others” (Mifsud par 10). Preston discovered something interesting about NCVS speakers when he was teaching at Michigan State University. “They don’t perceive their dialect at all,” he says. “The awareness of the NCS in NCS territory is zero” (Mifsud par 10).
Figure 4: Example-NCVS Speakers Unaware of Own Dialect
When in isolation, NCVS speakers could not percept or under- stand their own speech. One would think that shifters would be able to differentiate the shifting in the short vowels when listening to audio recordings; however, when they hear the word cat in isolation, they have a difficult time comprehending and understanding whether the word they are listening to is referring to the animal; or talking about a folding bed. Similar to Labov’s experiment conducted in Figure 2, when NCVs speakers listen to the way their dialect is perceived by others, they too have a difficult time understanding what word it is that they are listening to.
An article by Dennis Preston titled, “Language, People, Salience, Space: Perceptual Dialectology and Language Regard,” looks at a perceptual study conducted in 1999 by Nancy Niedzielski. “Forty-two Detroit area residents took part in a test in which they were asked to listen to the tape-recorded speech of a local Michigan speaker (whose Michigan identity was indicated on the answer sheet); they were told to concentrate on the vowel they heard in particular words. They were asked to compare the vowel to a set of three resynthesized vowels (from the speaker’s data) and to choose the one that best matched the one they heard in the original” (Preston 116). Not one of the participants said they heard the NCVS pronunciation.
Figure 5: Niedzielski’s Research Results
In this table above, derived from Preston’s article on page 119, this table displays the results for matching the Michigan speaker’s vowel in the word ‘pop.’ Only two out of the forty-two participants chose the fronted variant (Actual Token) that the speaker actually produced both Preston and Niedzielski note that there is “a considerable mismatch between perception and acoustic reality” (Preston 119). Based on the fact that Michiganders don’t have any more difficulty than the average American with being able to comprehend acoustic variation. The results suggest that due to the participants believing that the speaker in the study is a fellow Michigander, the stereotype of Michigan English as the standard of English, leads the participants to select the canonical vowel in the matching task. Niedzielski states that, “Michiganders are so linguistically secure that they seem to recalibrate the vowels of those around them and avoid notice of change” (Preston 120).
Where/Why the Shift is Happening Actuation and Language Variation
In Figure 6, one is able to take note of where the shift is happening around Inland North America. There is a clear absence of the shift taking place in the upper peninsula of Michigan. Though Rakerd and Plichta make note that the shift is taking place only in the lower peninsula of Detroit, some important factors to consider when regarding location is understanding who are the people that make up a majority of that location; as well as taking the location itself into consideration as well. With the linguistic variation taking place due to the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, it is possible that personality and gender could be one of the major influences in language variation and actuation.
Figure 6: Absence of NCVS Upper Peninsula, Michigan
Steve Leonard Johnson conducted a study that provided an insight to the way language variation and actuation is heavily influenced by personality and gender. Johnson’s thesis stated, “If personality traits indicate differences with respect to gender at the level of a community, can personality influence linguistic variation at the level of the community, especially as it interacts with social variables (like gender) that have been shown to affect linguistic variation?” This then led the study to state that these studies consistently show that the leaders of this sound change are generally young, European American females who are from non-rural areas. Men may also participate in the NCVS, but typically not at the same rates as women from the same community (Johnson 9). This brings us to the understanding that not only is the shift taking place in prominently the lower peninsula of Michigan, but also how gender and personality may play a role in the actuation taking place amongst the Northern Cities Vowel Shift.
Gender has been a particularly important variable of study regarding the Northern Cities Vowel Shift; however, sex-based categories have traditionally shown that women are leaders of sound change (Johnson 29). Johnson conducted a research study by using students at the University to further prove how gender plays an influence in NCVS.
Figure 7: List of Johnson’s Participants
Johnson focused his study on a few major key demographics such as age, must have lived in Michigan their entire lives, both parents must be from Michigan, had to identify being from the Detroit Metropolitan area, and ethnicity; all participants had to be European American speakers (Johnson 35). The study conducted, though, did not necessarily make it a point to prove that gender is the main factor in NCVS, did succeed in showing the way personality influences dialectic changes. Of all the men and women that were participants in this study, the data collected showed only a slight increase in the mean when it came to the women, but there was not enough data to make the information viable.
Though there is no definite answer to why a shift in the short vowels is taking place, scholars continue to make speculations. Johnson’s study draws its main focus towards gender and personality being the main influence. Rakerd and Plichta draw their focus to location being the potential factor. Whereas Labov, Preston, and Niedzielski draw their focus to patterns based on acoustics and speech. Overall, the Northern Cities Vowel Shift is very present among Michiganders and others in the Northern Inland Region; however, each study conducted has concluded and input that Michiganders do not process their dialectic change in the short vowels to be present in their everyday speech. As time progresses, so does language; only time will tell how much further the shift will go.
Johnson, Steve Leonard, I., II. “Personality, Gender, and the Northern Cities Shift.” Order No. 3518751 Michigan State University, 2012. Ann Arbor: ProQuest. Web. 19 Feb. 2021.
Labov, Bill. “The Organization of Dialect Diversity in North America.” The Organization of Dialect Diversity in North America. Web. 01 May 2021.
Labov, William. Dialect Diversity in America: The Politics of Language Change. Charlottesville: U of Virginia, 2014. Print.
Mifsud, Rob (2012-08-22). “How the Northern Cities Shift is Revolutionizing the English Language” Slate Magazine. Retrieved 2021-03-18.
Niedzielski, Nancy. “Acoustic analysis and language attitudes in Detroit.” University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 3.1 (1996): 7.
Preston, Dennis R. “Language, people, salience, space: perceptual dialectology and language regard.” Dialectologia: revista electrònica (2010): 87-131.
Rakerd, Brad, and Bartłomiej Plichta. “More on Michigan Listeners’ Perceptions of/ɑ/ Fronting.” American speech 85.4 (2010): 431-449.
Wagner, Suzanne E., et al. “Reversal and re-organization of the Northern Cities Shift in Michigan.” University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 22.2 (2016): 19
Do You Speak American? Part 1. Perf. Robert MacNeil. YouTube. YouTube, 6 Apr. 2014. Web. Accessed 1 May 2021.
Dorina Pellumbi graduated in 2021 with a Baccalaureate in English. Selected by David Bowie.
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This page references:
- Figure 1: Understanding the Shift
- Figure 2: Figure 2: Project on Cross-Dialectal Comprehension Gating Experiment 2
- Figure 3: Bill Labov’s charting on NCVS
- Figure 4: Example-NCVS Speakers Unaware of Own Dialect
- Figure 5: Niedzielski’s Research Results
- Figure 6: Absence of NCVS Upper Peninsula, Michigan
- Figure 7: List of Johnson’s Participants