North-Central American English

North-Central American English is an American English dialect, or dialect in formation, native to the Upper Midwestern United States, an area that somewhat overlaps with speakers of the separate Inland Northern dialect situated more in the eastern Great Lakes region.^[1] In the United States, it is also known as the Upper Midwestern or North-Central dialect and stereotypically recognized as a Minnesota accent or sometimes Wisconsin accent (excluding Wisconsin's Milwaukee metropolitan area). It is considered to have developed in a residual dialect region from the neighboring Western, Inland Northern, and Canadian dialect regions.^[2]

If a strict cot–caught merger is used to define the North-Central regional dialect, it covers the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the northern border of Wisconsin, the whole northern half of Minnesota, some of northern South Dakota, and most of North Dakota;^[3] otherwise, the dialect may be considered to extend to all of Minnesota, North Dakota, most of South Dakota, northern Iowa, and all of Wisconsin outside of the southern portion of the eastern ridges and lowlands.^[4]