Distribution
The Inland North consists of western and central New York State (Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Binghamton, Jamestown, Olean); northern Ohio (Akron, Cleveland, Toledo); Michigan's Lower Peninsula (Detroit, Flint, Grand Rapids, Lansing); northern Indiana (Gary, South Bend); northern Illinois (Chicago, Rockford); and southeastern Wisconsin (Kenosha, Racine, Milwaukee). This is the dialect spoken in America's chief industrial region, an area sometimes known as the Rust Belt.
A corridor of cities along Interstate 55 southwest of Chicago as far as St. Louis, Missouri, which historically belong to the Midland region, have also begun taking on features of the Inland North's Northern Cities Shift in recent decades. On the other hand, Erie, Pennsylvania was regarded as an Inland North city by researchers in the first half of the 20th century, but it never underwent the Northern Cities Shift and now shares many features with the rest of Western Pennsylvania.
In suburban areas, the dialect may be less pronounced, for example, native-born speakers in Kane, McHenry, Lake, and DuPage Counties in Illinois may sound slightly different from speakers from Cook County and particularly those who grew up in Chicago.
Many African-Americans in Detroit are multidialectal and also or exclusively use AAVE, but some do use this dialect, as do almost all people of non-African descent in and around the city.
Read more about this topic: Inland Northern American English
Famous quotes containing the word distribution:
“The question for the country now is how to secure a more equal distribution of property among the people. There can be no republican institutions with vast masses of property permanently in a few hands, and large masses of voters without property.... Let no man get by inheritance, or by will, more than will produce at four per cent interest an income ... of fifteen thousand dollars] per year, or an estate of five hundred thousand dollars.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There is the illusion of time, which is very deep; who has disposed of it? Mor come to the conviction that what seems the succession of thought is only the distribution of wholes into causal series.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)