Just when we think we have language clipped, freeze-dried and shrink-wrapped, it starts to bubble and heave again, like a Horta. We keep saying this or that thing—Leave it to Beaver, Walter Cronkite, the computer, text messaging—is hemming in English, preventing it from turning into something else, but it does not work that way. Not with the spoken word.
There's logic in there somewhere. Mr. Spock tried to grok the protean Horta, and I attempt to understand why the language around me is changing.
Right out from under mass produced recordings and broadcast media, English keeps on changing. Nowhere more than in the Great Lakes states, it turns out. It began sometime around 1950 or so, and is still going on.
Shift happens
Of course, most native English speakers in the United States don't perceive themselves as speaking with an accent. Growing up in Milwaukee, then northwest Wisconsin, I never thought so, though I have, over the years, been told that I sound like a Canadian, like someone from Chicago, and (annoyingly and probably true) like the singsong "you bet" cast from
Fargo. And once, in a truck stop out west, somebody from back home picked my voice out of a crowd, saying he'd pegged me as somebody with a blend of southern and northern Wisconsin accents.
In fact, we all have accents, compared to the voices on radio and television. In the early days of broadcast, the standard announcer's speech was a quasi-British pronunciation often affected by actors. It is known as the transatlantic accent, and is difficult to attribute to any real place except pre-1960 American boarding schools. Think Katherine Hepburn or FDR. Then, sometime after World War II, the standard shifted decidedly toward what we hear today. These days, broadcasters are trained to speak a "General American" dialect, which probably resembles most the kind of language spoken in places like Omaha, Peoria and Des Moines. Meanwhile, everyday northern speech, especially in the inland urban ports, like Detroit and Chicago, began to mutate after the war into something markedly different from the broadcast standard. Previously stable short vowel sounds began to shift.
Ya hey. Shift happens. I can explain.
But first, a little background on phonology—the nerdy aspects of quantifying accents and pronunciation.
Phonology, scales and chain shifts
"The mouth opens more as you go through the vowels. i, e, ɛ; then y, ø, œ; then u, o, ɔ. `
J'ai un petit peur de feu ma sœur.'* C'est ça. Do you feel your jaw dropping as you say that?" That's what my French pronunciation professor taught me. The linkage seemed neat, elegant and organic, as many language mysteries are, when we look at them in terms of rules.
Vowels, in our case, move along certain scales in English, as well. Lip position, for one. Openness of mouth for another; front-back tilt of tongue, another. Here's an example, in regular English orthography, of a progressive scale that goes from least to more open mouth position, and from front to back tongue position: feed —> fade —> fed —> fad. Say them out loud. Can you feel the progression happening in your mouth and throat? Below is a chart that may be helpful in illustrating what I mean.
Here's a vowel chart, courtesy of Wikipedia, that shows the phonetic symbols and positions them according to how and where they are produced in the mouth. Click on the picture for a chart with recordings of the associated sounds.
What phonologists have found is that, over time, something called a "chain shift" can happen—forwards or backwards along these scales—and increasing numbers of speakers assign either the previous or the following sound to a given sound in a chain. The most famous example of that in English was the Great Vowel Shift, an ordered change in long vowels that occurred in England between 1450 and 1750, as Middle English segued into Modern English. If you delve into that, you'll find that it was, in part, responsible for the our crazy, illogical spellings in English, and you'll find that some words failed to make the jump, which is why we say "beach" and "ream" but also "steak" and "break." Or why most words words with "ou" have the vowel sound of "house," but then again we have stragglers like "soup," which reflect the Middle English pronunciation.
The Great Vowel Shift took place over 300 years and ended over 250 years ago. Migration of people, plague and many other factors are thought to have contributed to it. What we hear in the inland north of the United States is a vowel shift that is happening now, and probably far from finished.
Put on a druss and get on the boss
"The areas enclosed by all three lines may be considered the `core' of the NCVS; it is most consistently present in Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Detroit, and Chicago." —from Wikipedia
So, what is happening in the area pictured above is known, usually, as the Northern Cities Shift, and its main proponent is linguist William Labov. Big industrial ports all over the Great Lakes are the centers. Detroit, Chicago, Buffalo and other cities in New York seem to have the most features of the shift. Unlike England's Great Vowel Shift, the vowels are short ones, and have, says Labov, remain unchanged for something like 800 years. Chain shifts are pretty darn uncommon, in general. Now we have woken up to one in progress.
"What, exactly, is happening?" you might ask. Look below. Without bogging down in international phonetic symbols, this is what is happening:
This chart prepresents a lateral view of mouth and tongue, and where in the mouth these vowels are sounded, with the throat to your right and the teeth to your left.
Vowels that slid forward in the mouth
The first change was the "a" in cat slid forward and became a diphthong: "kee-at." And the next sound back slid forward, like a tooth shifting to fill a gap: "cot" now sounds more like the original "cat." Which makes room for the next vowel back to slide forward, and then "caught" starts sounding more like the original "cot."
Vowels that slid backward in the mouth
Meanwhile, the short "i" in "bit" starts sliding backward in the mouth and sounds more like "bet." (See the rotation of all these vowels?) Words with the short "e" in them, like "dress" slide backward and take on the next vowel sound, which is the "u" in "but." And in turn, words originally containing the short "u" slide all the way back and assume the sound once held by "caught."
Make sense?
That describes the basic mechanics of the vowel shift. One change sets off an anatomically based chain reaction. For some reason, one vowel changed, and the rest followed, moving forward or backward in rotation. But it begs the question why such a shift should happen.
The engines and brakes of linguistic change
My hunch is that it is the times, a-changin'. Look at the migrations of the Great Depression, the wealth shifts since then, the changes wrought by World War II. Migration from one socioeconomic stratum to another. The huge changes in who seeks a university education, and why they do. Suburbia, for goodness' sake, and all that it implies. Women, work and childrearing, and how that has all changed. It's as if America were a huge kaleidoscope, and someone around 1940 gave it a zealous shake.
There are basically two ways language change can spread, or "diffuse": contact diffusion or hierarchical diffusion. Contact is by mere proximity. The change starts in, say, Milwaukee proper and spreads slowly out to West Allis, Wauwatosa, Menominee Falls and other Milwaukee 'burbs. But this really does not seem to be the engine that drives this chain shift's spread. Look at the map again. It skips all over. How do they wind up saying "kee-at" clear over in the Twin Cities and Rochester, Minnesota, with no intervening bridge? And why do Canadians right across the border from Detroit not speak like this (they don't . . . not at all). The answer seems to be that this shift diffusion pattern is predominantly a hierarchical one; Over the bridge from Detroit there be Canadians, first and foremost. But people in other American cities identify, then adopt.
The change that lies ahead
Times are still changing—and there promises to be another big shake-up, soon. For instance, our banking system has died and is already attracting blowflies. College costs promise to become prohibitive for all but a small minority as state and federal subsidies dry up. Highly educated people tend to conserve older patterns of speech rather than adopt trends. What will happen to Great Lakes states speech when fewer have college educations, money-based status as we now know it, or mobility? It should be interesting.
There are other chain shifts at work in the United States: the Pacific Northwest, for example. And the long vowel shifts that happened much earlier in the South. I leave speculation for the reader. Does anyone care to prognosticate what the political and linguistic changes and divisions will be in the next 20 years?
* "I'm a little afraid of my late sister."