Yankee Cultural Imperialism and the Northern Cities Shift

1. Yankee Cultural Imperialism and the Northern Cities Shift William Labov October 20, 2008 Yale University

2. PowerPoint can be downloaded fromwww.ling.upenn.edu/~labov

3. Ch. 1. Introduction Part A. Cross dialectal comprehension Ch. 2. Natural misunderstandings Ch, 3. Replication of the Peterson-Barney Experiment Ch. 4. The Gating Experiments Part B. The life history of linguistic change Ch. 5. Triggering events Ch. 6. Governing principles Ch. 7. Forks in the road Ch, 8. Divergence Ch. 9. Driving forces Ch. 10. Yankee cultural imperialism and the Northern Cities Shift Ch. 11. Experimental evidence on evaluation of the NCS Ch. 12. Endpoints Part C. The unit of linguistic change Ch. 13. The binding force in linguistic change. Ch. 14. Words floating on the surface of sound change Part D. Transmission and diffusion Ch. 15. The diffusion of language from place to place Ch. 16. The diffusion of language from group to group¯ Principles of Linguistic ChangeVol III: Cognitive and cultural factors

4. The argument (1) • The Northern Cities Shift is a rotation of six vowels which has radically altered the vowel systems of the Great Lakes region. • The triggering event for this shift took place in western New York during the construction of the Erie Canal, when a variety of dialect differences were leveled in a general raising and fronting of short-a words. • The direction of the changes that followed can be accounted for by general principles of chain shifting of vowels, as well as by the tendency to maximum dispersion in vowel sub-systems. • Yet the coincidence of the Northern Cities Shift territory with the Blue States of the last two presidential elections leads us to look further into the cultural patterns of Northern settlement history .

5. The argument (2) • The formative period of the sound changes coincided with the Second Great Awakening, a period of intense evangelical activity with a strong focus on the abolition of slavery. • Although the cultural style of these Yankee evangelists was similar to that of the New Christian Right today, the region defined by their modern linguistic legacy is now dominated by liberal Democratic voting. • The reversal of Republican and Democratic voting patterns in the North and South appears to have been motivated by the Democratic Party’s endorsement of civil rights legislation. If so, the same ideological opposition may be associated with the Northern Cities Shift and the sharp linguistic differentiation across the North/ Midland line.

6. The Northern Cities Shift

7. Project on Cross-Dialectal Comprehension: Gating Experiment Word Phrase Sentence 1. _________ ________________ ___________________________ 2. _________ ________________ ___________________________ 3. _________ ________________ ___________________________ 4. _________ ________________ ___________________________ 5. _________ ________________ ___________________________ 6. _________ ________________ ___________________________

8. The Northern Cities Shift desk busses mat head boss block socks

9. The Northern Cities Shift

10. General principles of chain shifting In chain shifts, I. Tense nuclei rise along a peripheral track II. Lax nuclei fall along a non-peripheral track

11. Means of 14 vowels in peripheral/nonperipheral phonological space. IN = Inland North IN /æ/ IN /ʌ/ IN /e/ IN /o/

12. Sabrina K., 37, Detroit MI, TS 176 • short o fronting • short a raising • oh lowering The--the way I got hired for this one job was really weird, ‘cause I went in for a . . . secretarial position is what I went in for, and they had hired. . .ah-- somebody else that didn’t know anything, but it was a buyer’s daughter, so then she got the job. And uh--they called me because I had done shipping and receiving as far as--the paper work, and they had asked me if I‘d help out ‘cause their--shipper had just had a heart attack and she wasn’ comin’ back for a while.

13. Social factors

14. Gender and social category determination of five elements of the Northern City Shift in a Detroit suburban high school æ ^ Source: Eckert 2000

15. A large scale phenomenon The Northern Cities Shift is found throughout the Inland North, an area of 88,000 square miles. A population of over 34,000,000 speakers of American English are participating in this shift.

16. The U.S. at night

17. U.S. at Night The Inland North Grand Rapids Milwaukee Syracuse Chicago Rochester Flint Buffalo Detroit Cleveland Kenoshat Joliet Toledo Omaha Columbus St. Louis CIncinnati Indianapolis Kansas City

18. The North and the Inland North defined by the Northern Cities Shift: the raising of short-a in MAT and the backing of short-u in BUS

19. Map 11.15. Dialect regions defined by the Atlas of North American English.

20. Age distribution of F2 of /^/ in the North and the Midland North Midland age coefficient = - 2.05 p = .026 age coefficient = 1.39 p = .033

21. Two questions to be resolved (1) Why is the North/Midland line located where it is? (2) Why do the cities of the Inland North all follow the Northern Cities Shift, while dialects of Midland cities--Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, St. Louis -- differ considerably from each other? Matters of settlement history. . .

22. What makes the water move? An image of the swimmer in the bay. . . who does the Australian crawl, the breast stroke, backstroke, the butterfly, back to the crawl again and thinks to himself, “I am really making this current move!”

23. The Inland North and the Blue States

24. Red States and Blue States in U.S. 2004 Presidential election

25. States for Kerry in 2004 and dialect areas: solid line = Northern dialect region: dashed line = Inland North and Northern Cities Shift

26. Democratic vs. Republican vote for counties surveyed by dialect in presidential election of 2004. Inland North Midland New North England Kerry majority 20 15 8 12 Bush majority 6 7 13 2

27. County vote for Kerry 2004 by county size and dialect Kerry Bush

28. Regression analyses of county percent vote for Kerry in 2004 by dialect groups with and without total votes as independent variable. Residual group: Midland

29. Where did the Northern Cities Shift come from?

30. Settlement patterns, 1840-1860, as reflected in house construction North Midland Upland South --Kniffen & Glassie 1966. Fig. 27

31. The Erie Canal, constructed 1817-1825

32. The impact of the Erie Canal The impact on the rest of the State can be seen by looking at a modern map.  With the exception of Binghamton and Elmira, every major city in New York falls along the trade route established by the Erie Canal, from New York City to Albany, through Schenectady, Utica and Syracuse, to Rochester and Buffalo.  Nearly 80% of upstate New York's population lives within 25 miles of the Erie Canal. The Erie Canal: A Brief History No established village had ever mushroomed so rapidly [as Rochester], growing from 1507 to 9207 within a ten year span - Blake McKelvey, A Panoramic View of Rochester History. Rochester History 11:2-24.

33. Growth of population along the Erie Canal Erie canal

34. The formation of a koine among settlers of western New York State

35. Nasal short-a system of Diane S., 37 [1996], Providence, RI back bag cash laugh ask

36. Continuous short-a system of Jesse M., 57[1996], New Britain CT, TS465

37. Short-a/broad-a system of Denise L., 21[1995], Boston MA, TS 427

38. Split short-a system of Nina B., 62 [1996], New York City, TS 495

39. Input of short-a systems to cities on the Erie Canal, 1817-1825 nasal (W.N.E) broad (Boston) continuous (SW N.E). split (NYC)

40. General raising of /æ/ for Sharon K., 35 [1995], Rochester, NY, TS 359

41. The general raising of short-a as a koine formation is not a theory but a summary of the facts • none of the input dialects have a general raising of short-a • the general raising is consistent throughout the central and western New York State • the general raising is consistent in all the speech communities created by the westward expansion from New York State

42. The westward expansion

43. The North/Midland lexical isogloss

44. Coincidence of the North/Midland lexical line and NCS isoglosses

45. Three stages of the NCS for Martha F., 28 [1992], Kenosha, WI TS 3 mat handy sock talk dawn hot

46. Yankee and Midland settlement patterns

47. Settlement patterns, 1840-1860, as reflected in house construction North Midland Upland South Kniffen & Glassie 1966. Fig. 27

48. The Upland South Contiguous area in which persons of German, African, French, or Hispanic ancestry do NOT constitute majorities of pluralities, 1980 Terry G. Jordan-Bychkov, The Upland South 2003, p. 13.

49. Community movement in the migration from New England Mass migrations were indeed congenial to the Puritan tradition. Whole parishes, parson and all, had sometimes migrated from Old England. Lois Kimball Mathews mentioned 22 colonies in Illinois alone, all of which originated in New England or in New York, most of them planted between 1830 and 1840. --Richard L. Power, Planting Corn Belt Culture: The Impress of the Upland Southerner and Yankee in the old Northwest, 1953. P. 14.

50. The individualism of the Upland Southerner The Upland Southerners left behind a loose social structure of rural “neighborhoods” based on kinship; when Upland Southerners migrated--as individuals or in individual families--the neighborhood was left behind. Tim Frazer, “Heartland” English., ed. T. Frazer, U. of Alabama Press, 1993. p. 63.