Yankee Cultural Imperialism and the Northern Cities Shift

Monday, 20 October 2008, Colloquium

Abstract

The Northern Cities Shift is a rotation of six vowels which radically altered the vowel systems of the Great Lakes region of the Inland North, affecting the cities from Utica and Syracuse in New York State to Madison and Milwaukee in southeastern Wisconsin. The triggering event for this shift took place in western New York during the construction of the Erie Canal, when a variety of short-a configurations were leveled to a general raising and fronting of short-a followed by the fronting of short-o, the backing and lowering of short-e and the backing of wedge. The direction of these changes can be accounted for by general principles of chain shifting and the tendency to maximum dispersion in vowel sub-systems.

In order to explain why the short vowels of English should undergo such radical change after several thousand years of stability, it may be necessary to consider ideological factors as driving forces behind the change. Although the shift has been shown to be sensitive to local differentiation in social networks, small group interaction cannot account for the extraordinary uniformity of the shift over 88,000 square miles and 34 million speakers. It is possible that the early stages were associated with the intense religious and political ferment in western New York State at the time of the Second Great Awakening, an ideology centered on temperance and the abolition of slavery. Although the cultural style of the radical Yankee ministers and politicians was close to that of the Christian Far Right today, the Northern Cities Shift that is the modern linguistic legacy of this region coincides closely with the territory of the Blue States. The sudden reversal of Republican and Democratic voting patterns in the North and South beginning in 1960 appears to have been motivated by the legislative reification of opposing attitudes towards racial equality. It is possible that the same ideological differences are associated with the Northern Cities Shift and opposing linguistic changes south of the North/Midland line.