Linguistic Diversity in the North American Midland

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Over the past four years, the Telsur Project at the Linguistics Laboratory of the University of Pennsylvania has made a national survey of the phonological patterns of North American English through tape recorded interviews, conducted by telephone, of speakers native to their present places of residence. The major focus of Telsur research has been the most active sound changes in progress: the Northern Cities Shift of short vowels, which affects all of the Inland North; the Southern Shift, which affects to one degree or another the regions of the Southern States, including Appalachian areas; and the low back merger of short /o/ and long open /oh/ in Eastern New England, Western Pennsylvania, the West and Canada. The region of greatest heterogeneity is the Midland, which extends from Pennsylvania to Kansas. Research so far shows that each of the seven major Midland cities Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, St. Louis and Kansas City have distinct and different systems, and they appear to be moving in different directions. The current project is designed to investigate the Midland region in much greater detail, to discover whether there is any overall direction of sound change, and to provide both the linguistic and social explanations as to why the various urban dialects are following their distinct paths. Despite the indications of Northern influence on the Midland, the boundary between North and North Midland seems to be fixed just where it was first established by the settlement patterns of the mid nineteenth century. The northern boundaries of all the Midland city dialect regions will be traced in detail, as well as their southern limits and the east west boundaries between them. To accomplish this, the telephone survey will be extended to intermediate and satellite cities, a range of smaller communities that will define these boundaries. The overall goals of the research are to develop the theory of chain shifting by a close examination of such mixed systems and to search for a general explanation as to how dialect boundaries are maintained long after the original defining features have disappeared.