The North
The dialect area of the United States north of Pennsylvania and the Midland is distinguished from the Midland by a collection of linguistic features whose isoglosses all largely coincide, despite not being directly structurally related to each other. Dialectologists in the first half of the 20th century distinguished the North from the Midland on the basis of a large collection of lexical isoglosses, mostly dealing with differences in agricultural terms that are now largely obsolete (such as the use of ko-day in the north versus sheepie in the Midland to call sheep from the pasture). Despite the obsolescence of these lexical differences, the boundary between the North and Midland is maintained in the same place by phonological and phonetic isoglosses.
- Where the Midland has fronting of /aʊ/ and /oʊ/, in the North the nucleus of /aʊ/ is further back than that of /aɪ/ and /oʊ/ remains a back vowel. Similarly, although /uː/ is fronted to the point of being a mid or front vowel in most of the United States and Canada, in the North the allophone of /uː/ after non-coronal consonants remains back. Indeed, in part of the north (much of Wisconsin and Minnesota), /uː/ remains back in all environments.
- Where the Midland has /ɔ/ (as in dawn) in on, the North has /ɑ/.
- Canadian raising of /aɪ/—i.e., the use of a raised allophone such as for /aɪ/ before voiceless consonants—is very common in the North but infrequent in most of the Midland.
- There is no cot–caught merger in the North (as defined in the Atlas of North American English), although the merger is in progress in the Midland.
The North is also separated from the Midland by the presence of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCVS), on which see below; although the NCVS is not found in all parts of the North, it is present in the part of the North most closely adjacent to the Midland and thus helps to define the boundary.
Read more about this topic: North American English Regional Phonology
Famous quotes containing the word north:
“I felt that he, a prisoner in the midst of his enemies and under the sentence of death, if consulted as to his next step or resource, could answer more wisely than all his countrymen beside. He best understood his position; he contemplated it most calmly. Comparatively, all other men, North and South, were beside themselves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When the Somalians were merely another hungry third world people, we sent them guns. Now that they are falling down dead from starvation, we send them troops. Some may see in this a tidy metaphor for the entire relationship between north and south. But it would make a whole lot more sense nutritionally—as well as providing infinitely more vivid viewing—if the Somalians could be persuaded to eat the troops.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)