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项目通过电话对目前居住地的母语人士进行了录音访谈，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发音变化：北部城市短元音的变化影响到整个北部内陆；南部变化不同程度地影响到南部各州的地区，包括阿巴拉契亚地区；以及新英格兰东部、宾夕法尼亚州西部、西部和加拿大的短/o/和长开放/oh/的低背部合并。差异最大的地区是从宾夕法尼亚州延伸到堪萨斯州的米德兰地区。到目前为止的研究表明，米德兰的七个主要城市费城、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，发现是否有任何总的发音变化方向，并提供语言和社会解释，解释为什么各种城市方言遵循其不同的路径。尽管有迹象表明北方对米德兰的影响，但北米德兰和北米德兰之间的边界似乎就在19世纪中期的聚落模式首次确立的地方固定下来。将详细追踪所有米德兰城市方言区域的北部边界，以及它们之间的南部边界和东西边界。为了实现这一目标，电话调查将扩展到中等城市和卫星城，这是一系列将界定这些边界的较小社区。这项研究的总体目标是通过对这类混合系统的仔细研究来发展链转移理论，并寻求关于方言边界在最初的定义特征消失后如何长期保持的一般性解释。

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.