From an indicator to a marker

Abstract

Abstract One of the most distinctive regional dialects of North American English – the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), situated in the Inland North dialect area – is receding. Recent work suggests that it has risen as a linguistic marker in upstate New York – at the dialect area’s periphery. This paper reports the results of an online implicit attitudes survey which indicates that Michiganders also negatively evaluate the NCS, rating it accented, and nasally, but indicative of a hard worker. I also find that when listeners hear NCS features in the speech of a young speaker, there are added meanings of uneducated and incorrect/bad English. These results suggest that perhaps changing attitudes and rising awareness can account for NCS recession in the dialect area – a finding that appears to echo recent reports of dialect decline in other areas of North America.

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