Inland Northern (American) English, also known in American linguistics as the Inland North or Great Lakes dialect, is an American English dialect spoken primarily by White Americans throughout much of the U.S. Great Lakes region. The most distinctive Inland Northern accents are spoken in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse. The dialect can be heard as far east as upstate New York and as far west as eastern Iowa and even among certain demographics in the Twin Cities, Minnesota. Some of its features have also infiltrated a geographic corridor from Chicago southwest along historic Route 66 into St. Louis; today, the corridor shows a mixture of both Inland North and Midland American accents. Linguists often characterize the northwestern Great Lakes region's dialect separately as North-Central American English.
The early 20th-century accent of the Inland North was the basis for the term "General American", though the regional accent has since altered, due to the Northern cities vowel shift, its now-defining chain shift of vowels that began in the 1930s or possibly earlier. A 1969 study first formally showed lower-middle-class women leading the regional population in the first two stages (raising of the vowel and fronting of the vowel) of this shift, documented since the 1970s as comprising five distinct stages. However, evidence since the mid-2010s suggests a retreat away from the Northern Cities Shift in many Inland Northern cities and toward a less marked American accent. Various common names for the Inland Northern accent exist, often based on city, for example: Chicago accent, Detroit accent, Cleveland accent, etc.
Geographic distribution
The dialect region called the "Inland North" consists of all but the east of Upstate New York (Buffalo, Binghamton, Ithaca, Jamestown, Ogdensburg, Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, Watertown); northern Ohio (Cleveland, Akron, Sandusky, Toledo), Michigan's Lower Peninsula (Detroit, Ann Arbor, Bay City, Coldwater, Flint, Grand Rapids, Midland, Lansing, Kalamazoo, Muskegon, Niles, Pontiac, Port Huron, Saginaw); northwestern Indiana (Gary, South Bend, Valparaiso); northern Illinois (Chicago, Freeport, Kankakee, Rock Island, Rockford, Sterling); southern and eastern Wisconsin (Milwaukee, Appleton, Dodgeville, Fond du Lac, Green Bay, Janesville, Kenosha, Madison, Manitowoc, Oshkosh, Platteville, Racine, Sheboygan); eastern-central Iowa (Cedar Rapids, Davenport, Dubuque, Iowa City); and, largely, northeastern Pennsylvania's Coal Region (Allentown, Bethlehem, Carbondale, Easton, Hazleton, Scranton, Stroudsburg, Towanda, Wilkes-Barre). This is the dialect spoken in part of America's chief industrial region, an area sometimes known as the Rust Belt. Northern Iowa and southern Minnesota may also variably fall within the Inland North dialect region; in the Twin Cities, educated middle-aged men in particular have been documented as aligning to the accent, though this is not necessarily the case among other demographics of that urban area.
Linguists identify the "St. Louis Corridor", extending from Chicago down into St. Louis, as a dialectally remarkable area, because young and old speakers alike have a Midland accent, except for a single middle generation born between the 1920s and 1940s, who have an Inland Northern accent diffused into the area from Chicago.
Erie, Pennsylvania, though in the geographic area of the "Inland North" and featuring some speakers of this dialect, never underwent the Northern Cities Shift and often shares more features with Western Pennsylvania English due to contact with Pittsburghers, particularly with Erie as their choice of city for summer vacations. Many African Americans in Detroit and other Northern cities are multidialectal and also or exclusively use African-American Vernacular English rather than Inland Northern English, but some do use the Inland Northern dialect.
Social factors The dialect's progression across the Midwest has stopped at a general boundary line traveling through central Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois and then western Wisconsin, on the other side of which speakers have continued to maintain their Midland and North-Central accents. Sociolinguist William Labov theorizes that this separation reflects a political divide; a controlled study of his shows that Inland Northern speakers tend to be more associated with liberal politics than speakers of the other two dialects, especially as Americans continue to self-segregate in residence based on ideological concerns. Former president Barack Obama, for example, has a mild Inland Northern accent despite not having lived in the dialect region until young adulthood.
Phonology and phonetics
+ Vocalic phonemes of INAE Front Central Back tense lax lax tense Close Close-mid Open-mid Open Diphthongs
All vowels of the Inland Northern dialect Pure vowels (Monophthongs) English diaphoneme Inland Northern realization Example words bath, trap, man blah, father, spa† lot, bother, wasp dog, loss, off all, bought, saw dress, met, bread about, syrup, arena hit, skim, tip beam, chic, fleet bus, flood, what book, put, should food, glue, new Diphthongs ride, shine, try bright, dice, fire now, ouch, scout lame, rein, stain boy, choice, moist goat, oh, show R-colored vowels barn, car, park fear, peer, tier bare, bear, there burn, doctor, first, herd, learn, murder hoarse, horse, war poor, tour, lure cure, Europe, pure When followed by , the historic is pronounced entirely differently by Inland North speakers as , for example, in the words orange, forest, and torrent. The only exceptions to this are the words tomorrow, sorry, sorrow, borrow and, for some speakers, morrow, which use the sound . This is all true of General American speakers too.
A Midwestern accent (which may refer to other regional accents as well), Chicago accent, or Great Lakes accent are all common names in the United States for the sound quality produced by speakers of this dialect. Many of the characteristics listed here are not necessarily unique to the region and are oftentimes found elsewhere in the Midwest.
Northern cities vowel shift
The Northern cities vowel shift, or simply Northern cities shift, is a chain shift of vowels and the defining accent feature of the Inland North dialect region, though it can also be found, variably, in the neighboring Upper Midwest and Western New England accent regions.
Tensing of and fronting of The first two sound changes in the shift, with some debate about which one led to the other or came first, are the general raising and lengthening (tensing) of the "short a" (the vowel sound of , typically rendered in American transcriptions), as well as the fronting of the sound of or in this accent (typically transcribed ) toward or . Inland Northern raising was first identified in the 1960s, with that vowel becoming articulated with the tongue raised and then gliding back toward the center of the mouth, thus producing a centering diphthong of the type , , or at its most extreme ; e.g. naturally . As for fronting, it can go beyond to the front , and may, for the most advanced speakers, even be close to —so that stock and botch come to be pronounced how a mainstream American speaker would say stack and batch; e.g. coupon .
Lowering of The fronting of the vowel leaves a blank space that is filled by lowering the "aw" vowel in , which itself comes to be pronounced with the tongue in a lower position, closer to or . As a result, for example, people with the shift pronounce caught the way speakers without the shift say cot; thus, shifted speakers pronounce caught as (and cot as , as explained above). In defiance of the shift, however, there is a well-documented scattering of Inland North speakers who are in a state of transition toward a cot–caught merger; this is particularly evident in northeastern Pennsylvania, where this runs off of the Pittsburgh accent. Younger speakers reversing the fronting of , for example in Lansing, Michigan, also approach a merger.
Backing or lowering of The movement of to , in order to avoid overlap with the now-fronted vowel, presumably initiates the consequent shifting of (the "short e" in , in General American) away from its original position. Thus, demonstrates backing, lowering, or a combination of both toward , the near-open central vowel, or almost .
Backing of The next change is the movement of (the vowel) from a central or back position toward a very far back position . People with the shift pronounce bus so that it sounds more like boss to people without the shift.
Backing or lowering of The final change is the backing and lowering of , the "short i" vowel in , toward , or even toward the schwa . Alternatively, may be lowered to , without backing. This results in a considerable phonetic overlap between and .
Vowels before Before , only undergoes the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, so that the vowel in start varies much like the one in lot described above. The remaining , and vowels retain values similar to General American (GA) in this position, so that north , merry and near are pronounced , with unshifted , and (as close as in GA). Inland Northern American English features the north–force merger, the Mary–marry–merry merger, the mirror–nearer and – mergers, the hurry–furry merger, and the nurse–letter merger, all of which are also typical of GA varieties.
History of the Northern cities vowel shift William Labov et al.'s Atlas of North American English (2006) presents the first historical understanding of the order in which the Inland North's vowels shifted. Speakers around the Great Lakes began to pronounce the short a sound, as in , as more of a diphthong and with a higher starting point in the mouth, causing the same word to sound more like "tray-ap" or "tray-up"; Labov et al. assume that this began by the middle of the 19th century. After roughly a century following this first vowel change—general raising—the region's speakers, around the 1960s, then began to use the newly opened vowel space, previously occupied by , for (as in and ); therefore, words like bot, gosh, or lock came to be pronounced with the tongue extended farther forward, thus making these words sound more like how bat, gash, and lack sound in dialects without the shift. These two vowel changes were first recognized and reported in 1967. While these were certainly the first two vowel shifts of this accent, and Labov et al. assume that raising occurred first, they also admit that the specifics of time and place are unclear. In fact, real-time evidence of a small number of Chicagoans born between 1890 and 1920 suggests that fronting occurred first, starting by 1900 at the latest, and was followed by raising sometime in the 1920s.
During the 1960s, several more vowels followed suit in rapid succession, each filling in the space left by the last, including the lowering of as in , the backing and lowering of as in , the backing of as in (first reported in 1986), and the backing and lowering of as in , often but not always in that exact order. Altogether, this constitutes the Northern Cities Shift, identified by linguists as such in 1972.
Possible motivations for the shift