A shift of allegiance: The case of Erie and the North / Midland boundary

Erie holds a unique place in the dialectology of North America, since it is the only city to have switched its regional affiliation from the North to the Midland. The earliest dialectological records of the region (Kurath 1949, Kurath and McDavid 1961) show Erie to pattern together with the North with respect to nearly all lexical and phonological isoglosses. However, the recently completed Atlas of North American English, henceforth ANAE, shows that the phonology of Erie is clearly no longer Northern, and shares two crucial phonological traits with the Midland: the merger of /o/ (as in cot) and /oh/ (as in caught) and a pattern of raising /æ/ before nasals (Labov et al. 2006:205). This shift of allegiance from the North to the Midland is surprising, since the North is perhaps the most cohesive dialect region in North America (as evidenced by the high rate of homogeneity and consistency of its defining isoglosses (Labov et al. 2006:151)), and the boundary between the North and the Midland regions is the sharpest boundary in North America.