Linguistic Diversity in the North American Midland

在过去的四年里，宾夕法尼亚大学语言学实验室的Telsur项目通过电话录音采访，对北美英语的语音模式进行了全国性的调查。 Telsur研究的主要焦点是正在进行的最活跃的声音变化：短元音的北方城市转移，影响了整个内陆北方;南方转移，在某种程度上影响了南方各州的地区，包括阿巴拉契亚地区;以及短/o/和长开/oh/在东部新英格兰，宾夕法尼亚州西部，西部和加拿大的低位合并。异质性最大的地区是从宾夕法尼亚州延伸到堪萨斯的米德兰。到目前为止的研究表明，七个主要的米德兰城市费城、匹兹堡、哥伦布、辛辛那提、印第安纳波利斯、圣路易斯和堪萨斯城都有不同的系统，而且它们似乎正朝着不同的方向发展。目前的项目旨在更详细地调查米德兰地区，以发现是否有任何声音变化的总体方向，并提供语言和社会解释，为什么各种城市方言遵循其独特的路径。 尽管有迹象表明北方对米德兰有影响，但北方和北米德兰之间的边界似乎被固定在世纪中期定居模式最初建立的地方。 所有米德兰城市方言区的北方边界将被详细追踪，以及它们的南部界限和它们之间的东西边界。为了做到这一点，电话调查将扩大到中间城市和卫星城市，一系列较小的社区将确定这些边界。 研究的总体目标是通过对这种混合系统的仔细研究来发展链转移理论，并寻找一个一般性的解释，即在原始的定义特征消失之后，方言边界是如何长期保持的。

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.