Job talk Monica Nesbit

Lansing speech corpus:

• 106 interviews
• Sociolinguistic interviews conducted every 2 years
  • Examining different situations
• Oral histories
  • collected during early 2000's
  • only casual conversation

Had to exclude people

• Non-white
• Rural people
• These groups do not normally show the northern city shift

none of the younger speakers show the hallmarks of the northern city shift.

is ash [+tense]?

People generally don't want to have syllables without codas for lax vowels. What do people from Lansing, Michigan do?

Younger northern inland speakers pattern more closely to the candian model.

Widespread perception that inland northern speech is 'correct'

• More recently, there have been discussions that are less positive towards the northern city shift.

• Interviewed people have some strong negative comments when they hear older Norther City speakers.

• Perception that people with northern city shift are uneducated but hard working.

Lansing: auto town

• original home of oldsmobile
• headquarters of gm for 20 years.
• many factories closed after the move from Lansing
  • Shift to service type industry
• With the shift to a service industry, blue collar workers went from being prestigous to marked
• Dialect attrition is happening across the northern inland region

Low back merger shift is a western change shift. Does the chain shift happening in California match the northern city shift? Turns out no not really? Loss of local dialects paralleled in New England as well (rsearch at Dartmuth).