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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2016

Matthew J. Gordon  and
Christopher Strelluf
Matthew J. Gordon*
Affiliation:
University of Missouri, 114 Tate Hall, Columbia, MO 65211-1500, 573-882-6421
Christopher Strelluf
Affiliation:
Northwest Missouri State University, 2920 Colden Hall, Maryville, MO 64468-6015, 660-562-1997
*
*Address for correspondence: English Department, 114 Tate Hall, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, 65211, Email: gordonmj@missouri.edu
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Abstract

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.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Linguistic Geography , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , March 2016 , pp. 31 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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