Midland American English is a regional dialect or supradialect of American English, geographically lying between the traditionally defined Northern and Southern United States.Labov, William; Ash, Sharon; Boberg, Charles (1997). "Dialects of the United States." A National Map of The Regional Dialects of American English. University of Pennsylvania. The boundaries of Midland American English are not entirely clear, being revised and reduced by linguists due to definitional changes and several Midland sub-regions undergoing rapid and diverging pronunciation shifts since the early-middle 20th century onwards.: "The Midland does not show the homogeneous character that marks the North in Chapter 14, or defines the South in Chapter 18. Many Midland cities have developed a distinct dialect character of their own[....] Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and St Louis are quite distinct from the rest of the Midland[....]"Bierma, Nathan. "American 'Midland' has English dialect all its own." Chicago Tribune.
As of the early 21st century, these general characteristics of the Midland regional accent are firmly established: fronting of the , , and vowels occurs towards the center or even the front of the mouth; the cot–caught merger is neither fully completed nor fully absent; and short-a tensing evidently occurs strongest before nasal consonants. The currently documented core of the Midland dialect region spans from central Ohio at its eastern extreme to central Nebraska and Oklahoma City at its western extreme. Certain areas outside the core also clearly demonstrate a Midland accent, including Charleston, South Carolina; the Texan cities of Abilene, Austin, and Corpus Christi; and central and some areas of southern Florida.
Early 20th-century dialectology was the first to identify the "Midland" as a region lexically distinct from the North and the South and later even focused on an internal division: North Midland versus South Midland. However, 21st-century studies now reveal increasing unification of the South Midland with a larger mid-20th-century Southern accent region, while much of the North Midland retains a more "General American" accent. The region north of the Midland uses Great Lakes accents.Matthew J. Gordon, "The West and Midwest: Phonology,” in Edgar W. Schneider, ed., Varieties of English: The Americas and the Caribbean (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008), 129–43, 129.
Early 20th-century boundaries established for the Midland dialect region are being reduced or revised since several previous subregions of Midland speech have since developed their own distinct dialects. Pennsylvania, the original home state of the Midland dialect, is one such area and has now formed such unique dialects as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh English.
Original and former Midland The dialect region "Midland" was first labeled in the 1890s, but only first defined (tentatively) by Hans Kurath in 1949 as centered on central Pennsylvania and expanding westward and southward to include most of Pennsylvania, and the Appalachian regions of Kentucky, Tennessee, and all of West Virginia.Kurath, Hans (1949). A Word Geography of the Eastern United States. University of Michigan.) A decade later, Kurath split this into two discrete subdivisions: the "North Midland" beginning north of the Ohio River valley area and extending westward into central Indiana, central Illinois, central Ohio, Iowa, and northern Missouri, as well as parts of Nebraska and northern Kansas; and the "South Midland", which extends south of the Ohio River and expands westward to include parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, southern Ohio, southern Missouri, Arkansas, southern Kansas, and Oklahoma, west of the Mississippi River.Kurath, Hans; McDavid, Raven Ioor (1961).The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States. University of Michigan Press. Kurath and then later Craig Carver and the related Dictionary of American Regional English based their 1960s research only on lexical (vocabulary) characteristics, with Carver et al. determining the Midland non-existent according to their 1987 publication and preferring to identify Kurath's North Midland as merely an extension of the North and his South Midland as an extension of the South, based on some 800 lexical items.
Conversely, William Labov and his team based their 1990s research largely on phonological (sound) characteristics and re-identified the Midland area as a buffer zone between the Inland Southern and Inland Northern accent regions. In Labov et al.'s newer study, the "Midland" essentially coincides with Kurath's "North Midland", while the "South Midland" is now considered as largely a portion, or the northern fringe, of the larger 20th-century Southern accent region. Indeed, while the lexical and grammatical isoglosses encompass the Appalachian Mountains regardless of the Ohio River, the phonological boundary fairly closely follows along the Ohio River itself. More recent research has focused on grammatical characteristics and in particular a variable, possible combination of such characteristics.
The original Midland dialect region, thus, has split off into having more of a Southern accent in southern Appalachia, while the second half of the 20th century has seen the emergence of a unique Western Pennsylvania accent in northern Appalachia (centered on Pittsburgh) as well as a unique Philadelphia accent.
Mid-Atlantic region
The dialect region of the Mid-Atlantic States—centered on Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Baltimore, Maryland; and Wilmington, Delaware—aligns to the Midland phonological definition except that it strongly resists the cot–caught merger and traditionally has a short-a split that is similar to New York City's, though still unique. Certain vocabulary is also specific to the Mid-Atlantic dialect, and particularly to its Philadelphia sub-dialect.
Western Pennsylvania
The emerging and expanding dialect of western and much of central Pennsylvania is, for many purposes, an extension of the South Midland; it is spoken also in Youngstown, Ohio, 10 miles west of the state line, as well as Clarksburg, West Virginia. Like the Midland proper, the Western Pennsylvania accent features fronting of and , as well as positive anymore. Its chief distinguishing features, however, also make it a separate dialect from the Midland one. These features include a completed – merger to a rounded vowel, which also causes a chain shift that drags the vowel into the previous position of . The Western Pennsylvania accent, lightheartedly known as "Pittsburghese", is perhaps best known for the monophthongization of ( to ), such as the stereotypical Pittsburgh pronunciation of downtown as dahntahn. Despite having a Northern accent in the first half of the 20th century, Erie, Pennsylvania, is the only major Northern city to change its affiliation to Midland by now using the Western Pennsylvania accent.
Phonology and phonetics
Rhoticity: Midland speech is firmly rhotic (or fully r-pronouncing), like most North American English. Cot–caught merger in transition: The merger of the vowel sounds in and is consistently in a transitional phase throughout most of the Midland region, showing neither a full presence nor absence of the merger. This involves a vowel merger of the "short o" (as in cot or stock) and "aw" (as in caught or stalk) phonemes. On boundary: A well-known phonological difference between Midland and Northern accents is that in the Midland, the single word on contains the phoneme (as in caught) rather than (as in cot), as in the North. For this reason, one of the names for the boundary between the dialects of the Midland and the North is the "on line". Epenthetic R: The phoneme sequence , as in wash, squash, and Washington, traditionally receives an additional sound after the , thus with Washington sounding like or . Likely inherited from Scots-Irish influence, this features ranges from D.C., Maryland, southern Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Arkansas, West Texas, and the Midland dialect regions within Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Kansas.Kelly, John (October 2004). "Catching the Sound of the City". The Washington Post. The Washington Post Company. . Studied best of all in southern Pennsylvania, this feature may be declining.Barbara Johnstone, Barbara; et al. (2015). Pittsburgh Speech and Pittsburghese. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KGp. p. 22. The short-a phoneme, , most commonly follows a General American ("continuous" and pre-nasal) distribution: is raised and tensed toward before nasal consonants (such as fan) but remains low in other contexts (such as fact). An increasing number of speakers from central Ohio realize the vowel as open front . Fronting of : the phoneme (as in goat) is fronter than in many other American accents, particularly those of the North; the phoneme is frequently realized as a diphthong with a central nucleus, approximating . Fronting of : the diphthong (as in mouth) has a fronter nucleus than , approaching . Fronting of : among younger speakers, (as in bug, strut, what, etc.) is shifting strongly to the front: . Lowering of : the diphthong (as in face, reign, day, etc.) often has a lower nucleus than the Northern accents just above Midland region. Phonologically, the South Midland remains slightly different from the North Midland (and more like the American South) in certain respects: its greater likelihood of a fronted , a pin–pen merger, and a "glideless" vowel reminiscent of the Southern U.S. accent, though monophthongization in the South Midland only tends to appear before sonorant consonants: . For example, fire may be pronounced something like far. Southern Indiana is the northernmost extent of this accent, forming what dialectologists refer to as the "Hoosier Apex" of the South Midland, with the accent locally known as the "Hoosier Twang".
Grammar Positive anymore: A common feature of the greater Midland area is so-called "positive anymore": It is possible to use the adverb anymore with the meaning "nowadays" in sentences without negative polarity, such as Air travel is inconvenient anymore, or The streets of the city are very crowded anymore.Shields, Kenneth. 1997. Positive Anymore in Southeastern Pennsylvania. American Speech 72(2). 217–220. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/455794.pdf "Need + participle": Many speakers use the construction "need + past participle". Some examples include: The car needs washed to mean the car needs to be washed They need repaired to mean they need to be repaired So much still needs said to mean so much still needs to be said To a lesser degree, a small number of other verbs have been reportedly used in this way too, such as The baby likes cuddled or She wants prepared. As seen in these examples, it is also acceptable to use this construction with the words want and like. "All the + comparative": Speakers throughout the Midland (except central and southern Illinois and especially Iowa) may use "all the [comparative form of an adjective]" to mean "as [adjective] as", when followed by a subject. Some examples include:"All the Further". Yale Grammatical Diversity Project English in North America. Yale University. 2017. I held all the tighter I could to mean I held as tight as I could That was all the higher she could jump to mean That was as high as she could jump This is all the more comfortable it gets to mean This is as comfortable as it gets These same speakers may also alternatively use this form to mean "as much [comparative form of that adjective] as", when followed by such a subject. The corresponding examples would be: I held all the tighter I could to mean I held as much tighter as I could That was all the higher she could jump to mean That was as much higher as she could jump This is all the more comfortable it gets to mean This is as much more comfortable as it gets