(North) Midland
The North Midland region stretches from east to west across central and southern Ohio, central Indiana, central Illinois, Iowa, and northern Missouri, as well as Nebraska and northern Kansas where it begins to blend into the West. Major cities of this dialect area include Kansas City, Omaha, St. Louis, Columbus, Ohio, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis.
In addition to the fronting of the diphthongs /oʊ/ and /aʊ/, the North Midland exhibits the following distinctive features:
- cot–caught merger in transition: parts of this area are currently undergoing a vowel merger of the "short o" /ɑ/ (as in cot) and 'aw' /ɔ/ (as in caught) phonemes. Many speakers show transitional forms of this so-called cot–caught merger, which is complete in approximately half of North America.
- advanced fronting of /ʌ/: among younger speakers, the "wedge" /ʌ/ (as in strut) is shifting strongly to the front.
The /æ/ phoneme (as in cat) shows most commonly a so-called "continuous" distribution: /æ/ is raised and tensed toward before nasal consonants and remains low before voiceless stop consonants, and other allophones of /æ/ occupy a continuum of varying degrees of height between those two extremes.
Read more about this topic: Midland American English