Arab American Ethnicity and the Northern Cities Shift

The Northern Cities Shift in Real Time: Evidence from Chicago

One of the most important questions surrounding the Northern Cities Shift (NCS) is its chronology: which vowel was the first to move, and how long ago did these movements happen? Based on a large-scale apparenttime study, Labov, Ash and Boberg (2006) posit that /ae/ ‘cat’ shifted first, followed by /o~ah/ ‘cot’. The authors note, however, that this ordering is tenuous. Authors such as Thomas (2...

Reversal of the Northern Cities Shift in Syracuse, New York

Labov, Yaeger and Steiner (1972) describe the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), a chain shift involving the six lax vowels /ae/, /o/, /oh/, /e/, /uh/, and /ih/, in Upstate New York. We recorded 54 interviews with local speakers (ages 18-89) and extracted 14,026 tokens using FAVE (Rosenfelder et al. 2011), which we normalized in R using the Lobanov method (Kendall & Thomas 2010). Our study finds that...

Urban sound change beyond the cities: The spread of the Northern Cities chain shift

An ultrasound analysis of low back vowel fronting in the Northern Cities Vowel Shift

While the acoustic characteristics of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCVS) are well documented, research on the articulatory components of this shift is comparatively limited. This study combines acoustic, video, and ultrasound analysis to examine the productions of seven Metro Detroit speakers and determine the relative contributions of lip configuration and tongue position to the production...

Fear of a Black Phonology: The Northern Cities Shift as Linguistic White Flight

The geographic distribution and potential linguistic triggers of the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), a complex chain shift of vowel realizations in urban areas between Madison, WI and upstate New York, have been welldocumented (Labov, Yaeger and Steiner 1972; Labov, Ash and Boberg 2006). However, we are left with an actuation problem (Weinreich, Labov and Herzog 1968), especially with respect to s...