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Figure 8.7 Carver’s dialect regions of the USA, based on vocabulary Source: Carver, 1987

Figures 8.6 and 8.7 may seem to suggest a rough equivalence between Carver’s regions (Upper North, Lower North, Upper South, Lower South) and Kurath’s (North, Midland and South), but Carver insists that the putative Midland is ‘split by the North–South linguistic divide’ and is not itself ‘a true unified dialect region’ (1987: 161). Considerable ink has been spilled arguing over the existence of a distinct Midland dialect, and even a president of the American Dialect Society has described Midland as ‘a pretty puny little critter’ (Preston, 2003: 239).

In the 1990s a major survey of pronunciation in North American urban centres was undertaken. Focussing on the vowel pronunciations of hundreds of respondents who identified themselves as born or raised in the speech community in which they were reached by telephone, it utilised impressionistic judgements of pronunciation, as had other dialect studies, but combined them with rigorous acoustic analysis. The investigators (Labov et al., 2005) acknowledge the skepticism of dialectologists concerning the boundaries between dialects and offer as one reason for such skepticism the fact that classifications of dialects and dialect boundaries relied on sets of isoglosses for individual vocabulary items, which are idiosyncratic and not systemically related to one another. By contrast, the telephone survey project (‘Telsur’) relied on vowel patterns, an integral part of every linguistic system, and explored a huge geographical area within a period of only a few years. Despite its focus on vowel systems and its non-traditional telephone

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Figure 8.9 Southern Shift

Source: Adapted from Labov et al., 2005

1./æ/ is raised and fronted to [iə ] so that man and bad are heard with the underscored vowel of idea: [miə n] and [biə d]

2./ɑ/ is fronted to [æ] so that block and stocks are heard as black and stacks

3./ɔ/ is lowered and fronted to [ɑ] so that cawed is heard as cod

4./ε/ is lowered and centred to [ ] so that Ked and steady are heard as cud and study

5./ / is backed to [ɔ] so that cud is heard as cawed

6./ / is lowered and backed

Southern Shift

Remarkably, in a large part of the American South, vowels are shifting in opposing directions to those of the Northern Cities Shift. This Southern Shift begins with a simple process in which the diphthong /ay/ loses its offglide, often with compensatory lengthening of the nucleus. Figure 8.9 provides a schematic of the shift in eight steps.

1./ay/ is monophthongised to [a] or [a ] so that hide is heard as [had] or [ha d]

2./e/ is lowered and centralised to [aj] so that slade is heard as slide

3./i/ is lowered and backed

4./ /, /ε/, /æ/ are raised and fronted so that kid is heard as keyed, red as rid, pat as pet

5./u/ is fronted so that cool is heard as ‘kewl’

6./o/ is fronted so that code and boat are heard as [kεod] and [bεot]