Northern Cities Vowel Shift

Bill Labov discusses the Northern Cities Vowel Shift in American English.
----
Transcript

While the language we speak on the streets of our cities is, by its very nature, changeable and shifting. For decades Bill Labov and his colleagues have been studying how Americans talk. The result is a whole library of recorded voices and a fascinating discovery. It's called the Northern Cities Vowel Shift. Labov believes there is a revolutionary shift in the pronunciation of short vowels that have been relatively stable for a thousand years.

BL: What we'll be looking at is this mass of cities around the Great Lakes. Here we have Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, and Cleveland, Detroit.

RM: How many people is that?

BL: It's about 34 million people. This area used to be the closest to network pronunciation. It was what the NBC standard was based on. And today it is moving further and further away.

RM: Let's go into that in some detail. Show us how that's happening.

BL: In these experiments, we played first of all an individual word.

Computer: "Black".

BL: And then, people had to write down what they thought they heard. So, you could do that yourself. What do you hear?

RM: "Black".

BL: And then, in another series they heard:

Computer: "Living on one black".

BL: Now what do you hear?

RM: "Block".

BL: Well, you change your mind.

Computer: "Old senior citizens living on one black".

BL: This person is saying the word "block" the way they say "black".

RM: The shift in this one vowel seems to have a domino effect on the other four vowels, and they all change too. The result can be serious misunderstandings.

BL: Now, this is spectacular.

Computer: "Bosses".

BL: Everybody writes down what?

RM: "Bosses".

BL: Right. The guy.

Computer: "The bosses with the antennas".

BL: Now you begin to wonder. What are these "bosses with antennas"?

RM: "Bosses with the antennas".

BL: Right.

Computer: "I can remember vaguely when we had the buses with the antennas on the top".

RM: So, "buses" has become "bosses".

BL: Right. And so, this is very hard for most people to recognize.

RM: So, is it fair to say that North Americans are, in different regions, are growing further apart from each other linguistically?

BL: It seems so. It's hard to believe. Everyone says to us, we all watch the same radio and television. How can that be? It's a very suprising finding.
----
From the documentary "Do you speak American?".

• Category

  Education

[bingobastard]

I moved to Chicago for a job, where one of my co-workers was named "Dan." He introduced himself as Dan, I called him Dan, everyone called him Dan. After a couple of months, i looked up his name in the phone directory, and I was surprised to find he was actually "Don."

At a catholic funeral mass in Chicago, I got horribly inappropriate (nervous) giggles when I heard the congregation reciting: "Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world ..." etc in those thick accents.

[grzesieksz]

i friggin like Labov

[ConstanceWhenever]

It must be hard for Easterners to teach their kids the phonetic method for spelling when they pronounce all of their words improperly.

[checkersf]

William Labov is a genius!

[PfctvsPontivsPilatvs]

I still can't get over "buossis withey untenniz uon taap." xD

[DrFramistan]

I was watching an Episcopal eucharist from a church in Detroit. At the end they seemed to say, "Thanks be to GAD."

[FM897]

Ahh, yes, thank you for pointing that out to me :)

[thnidu]

No, this ongoing set of changes is called the Northern Cities Shift, not "Northeastern".

[omfgpenguinz]

...then, those words will become homophones, and we'll have a whole new variation.

We'd be speaking PIE as of now if changes as such never came to occur, through existance; it's only natural.

[MnemonicHack]

I'm from west river South Dakota. That sure as hell ain't how things sound around here.

Ironically, my aunt, who lived for a time in Oklahoma, has that kind of accent.

[FellowDreamer]

I think that's the other way round

[geordieinjapan]

black as block? OK, thats just silly.