Midland American English

According to Labov et al.'s (2006) ANAE, the strict Midland dialect region comprises the cities represented here by circles in red (North Midland) and orange (South Midland). In the past, linguists considered the Midland dialect to cover an even larger area, extending eastward through Pennsylvania to the Atlantic Ocean. The color blue on this map indicates the Inland North dialect, which is intruding southward into the middle of this region towards St. Louis, Missouri, and Peoria, Illinois, which show variation between the Midland and Inland North dialects.[1] The distinction between the North and South Midland regions is that the South Midland shows a tendency for extra features usually associated with Southern American dialects: notably, strong /oʊ/ fronting, a pin–pen merger, and a glide weakening of /aɪ/ before sonorant consonants.
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Midland American English is a regional dialect or super-dialect of American English,[2] geographically lying between the traditionally-defined Northern and Southern United States.[3] The boundaries of Midland American English are not entirely clear, being revised and reduced by linguists due to definitional changes and several Midland sub-regions undergoing rapid and diverging pronunciation shifts since the early-middle 20th century onwards.[4][5]

As of the early 21st century, these general characteristics of the Midland regional accent are firmly established: fronting of the /oʊ/, /aʊ/, and /ʌ/ vowels occurs towards the center or even the front of the mouth;[6] the cot–caught merger is neither fully completed nor fully absent; and short-a tensing evidently occurs strongest before nasal consonants.[7] The currently-documented core of the Midland dialect region spans from central Ohio at its eastern extreme to central Nebraska and Oklahoma City at its western extreme. Certain areas outside the core also clearly demonstrate a Midland accent, including Charleston, South Carolina;[8] the Texan cities of Abilene, Austin, and Corpus Christi; and central and some areas of southern Florida.[9]

Early 20th-century dialectology was the first to identify the "Midland" as a region lexically distinct from the North and the South and later even focused on an internal division: North Midland versus South Midland. However, 21st-century studies now reveal increasing unification of the South Midland with a larger mid-20th-century Southern accent region, while much of the North Midland retains a more "General American" accent.[10][11]

Early 20th-century boundaries established for the Midland dialect region are being reduced or revised since several previous subregions of Midland speech have since developed their own distinct dialects. Pennsylvania, the original home state of the Midland dialect, is one such area and has now formed such unique dialects as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh English.[12]

  1. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:277)
  2. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:5, 263)
  3. ^ Labov, William; Ash, Sharon; Boberg, Charles (1997). "Dialects of the United States." A National Map of The Regional Dialects of American English. University of Pennsylvania.
  4. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:263): "The Midland does not show the homogeneous character that marks the North in Chapter 14, or defines the South in Chapter 18. Many Midland cities have developed a distinct dialect character of their own[....] Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and St Louis are quite distinct from the rest of the Midland[....]"
  5. ^ Bierma, Nathan. "American 'Midland' has English dialect all its own." Chicago Tribune.
  6. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:137, 263, 266)
  7. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:182)
  8. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:259)
  9. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:107, 139)
  10. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:263, 303)
  11. ^ Matthew J. Gordon, “The West and Midwest: Phonology,” in Edgar W. Schneider, ed., Varieties of English: The Americas and the Caribbean (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008), 129–43, 129.
  12. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:135)