I had classes about Labov and sociolinguistics at college, so it's very cool to see him "in person". Vowel shifts are fascinating to me. Every time I read about the Great Vowel Shift, I wonder if it has actually ended, since English vowels seem to be changing all the time.
It's really interesting how the study and change of linguistics is being taken here by some viewers as something that shouldn't really be happening simply due to national television, etc. I've barely begun studying this and I find the entire field completely fascinating in how language varies, how it changes, etc. Labov has really developed some great stuff!
I'm from Michigan. I haven't heard the busses/bosses merge, but I've been away for a long time. I think it's the younger people saying it like that. I've heard it in Illinois from college students from Chicago when I was there. I definitely don't say it like that; neither does my mother, who has a pretty pure Detroit sound. The really flat way of saying short o's, however, is spot on. I say it like that too if I'm not paying attention. Black is said with almost two syllables --- blayack.
Unfortunately, most midwesterners think they have no accent ("eeyaccent"). Record some of your speech and listen to it. You might be surprised how it sounds.
It's not a merger but a shift. The vowel in BOSS is moving forward, so it sounds like BASS, while the vowel in BUSS is moving to where BOSS used to be.
I was born in southeastern Michigan but I've been living in the south. And I agree with some of what u said. I don't really pronounce my O's like that or sometimes A's. I think that we get a little bit ofvour pronunciation from everywhere! And I have recorded myself and I sound nothing like that computer lady! Her accent sounded very flat and nasally!
Yeah, I was thinking it might be a teenagery thing that people grow out of. Adults don't speak that way and no one's gonna tolerate it in the workplace.
anyone denying the existence of the vowel shift hasn't hung around these cities enough. most people in upstate ny say "black." I had a friend who pronounced her brother's name "scatt" and only when she got made fun of by some outsiders did I realize I did the same thing.
As someone who lives in the Cincinnati area, I've noticed a lot of people migrating here from Wisconsin and Illinois. And I've even started noticing some natives of Ohio and Indiana who have a more Chicago-esque accent. It'll defintely be interesting to see if this accent spreads throughout the southern part of the Midwest and even the northern parts of the South. Great video!
There is another vowel shift, that I call the NPR Vowel Shift. If you listen to news reporters and socio-political commentators on TV and radio--especially on NPR--you'll notice they pronounce the long "A" sound as long "E": "seam" for "same," etc. They're also pronouncing long "O" more and more often as short "U": "uppening" for "opening," etc. Short "U" often becomes short "E": "must" becoming "mest". Short "E" in "sex" becoming short "A" in "sax".
yeah my grandparents live in Chicago and thats how they talk. My grandmother says dall instead of doll. im used to somethings but sometimes i have to think about what shes saying because i dont understand some words
As another article pointed out, the people who are making the sounds, don't think they have an accent. I think that's key in the development of it. I think Boston losing it's accent is less to do with television, than people feeling like they are somehow less than for having a boston accent. It's like learning Received Pronunciation, you were basically told you were low class if you had a regional English accent. So you lost it if you could. Children are just purposefully losing their accents. Instead, we should allow diverse accents on networks (local and national)
True. I'm originally from southeastern Michigan land we do not pronounce words like this. Those are our neighbors across Lake Michigan! But I now live in the south, and people think I sound normal, but they also think that I don't sound southern!
@@melaninqueen2413 we don't use that pronunciation on our side of the lake, either. If soneobe said they missed their 'boss' I would assume something was going on in their office, not that they had transportation problems.
I'm from Buffalo too, I guess we pronounce words closest to their proper pronunciation. The only words I heard variation on is egg (eh-gg vs ay-gg) and "the" becomes "da" (da Bills)
Having lived near Syracuse, NY for many years, this "shift" is not new. It has been happening for at least 90 years, as even the old people I knew spoke this way.
I've read about this shift before but never actually heard it. It doesn't sound like anything I've heard before, not even in a stereotype. It sounds completely alien.
This issue which no one discusses is that there are pools of linguistic pronunciations. One area is not as standard as one would think. I am from northern Macomb County. While a student at Oakland University, I was often mistaken as Canadian because of my pronunciations. My father in law, who is from Roseville, makes fun of my "accent" all the time.
I live in Western NY and it sounds like a lot of his examples are more from the Chicago area. If so this is a common problem. People will focus on the biggest city in a given region and insist it's representative of the whole region.
@xorasel , he meant that the vowels that English words have had for that period of time haven't changed. An example would be ''bed'', where the ''e'' sounded the same 1000 years ago.
This is an accent that has existed since at least the 1930s in upstate NY, so I don't think they can claim that newscasters go their "standard American accent" from this area. That is more likely somewhere like Iowa.
They mean the late 19th century. In the 18th century, a standard accent of American English was being developed and it was based on the accent of the wealthy and influential New England region, but New England has shifted from that while many Midwestern states like Ohio still have that general accent. Californians are also thought to have an accent that's close to the General American accent and much like Midwesterners, the original American settlers of the region came from New England This is why Californians and many Midwesterners are said to have a more neutral.
This guy is spot on. Most of the RUclips videos with "vowel shift" in the title are not about the shift. They are about syllabation (extending the vowel, so "dad" becomes "deeyad" and "happy" becomes "heeyappy"). I have been annoyed by Great Lakes pronunciation for many years. Younger folks, especially women, also pronounce "had" to rhyme with sod. That part is more the California shift, not Great Lakes shift.
I had never heard of him before, but his theory is correct! I am from the Great Lakes region and I have made a film about it as well, see video resonses, "The Ever Evolving English Language.
Midwesterners (Great Lakes states specifically), STOP DENYING that you have a non-standard accent, because YOU DO! Stop claiming these must be people from Boston or "northern Michigan, not southern MI". NO!!! They are from Meeyuhshigan, Menuhsoda, Wiskansun, Detroit, and Shi-kagg-oh, even Buffalo (on the Great Lakes). Southerners, NYC folks, Bostonians all accept that they have an accent. Why are you so disturbed that you have an accent????????
Say what?! I was born and raised in southeastern Michigan and nobody talks like that. When I say nobody, i mean no one in our area!! Now our neighbors that live over in the next state do pronounce words like that, not us! We're in between how New Yorkers pronounce words and how everyone else in Wisconsin and Minnesota pronounce words. And I can say that I don't not sound like that!
"In a separate experiment, Nancy Niedzielski, an associate professor of linguistics at Rice University, told 50 NCS speakers that she was going to play a recording of a speaker from Michigan saying the word B-A-G, which she spelled out for them. She then asked the test subjects to identify whether the signal they heard sounded like byag (the NCS pronunciation), bag (the “standard” pronunciation), or baahg (a vaguely British pronunciation). Not one of the 50 subjects said that they heard the NCS pronunciation."
What you're calling the NCVS sounds, to my ears, like a Chicago or maybe a Detroit accent going back as far as the EARLY 20th century. Maybe the folks in Rochester and Cleveland are starting to flatten their As more, but Chicagoans have been speaking this way for 100 years.
Vergie Morrison: @St37One is correct in his/her description. I was born in Buffalo and have lived here most of my life. I hear that type of accent all the time. For decades, it’s been generally recognized and quite common to joke about it.
@@vergiemorrison928 I am from Buffalo and moved away within last few years. You don't ever notice in your head until you meet people from elsewhere in the country and it really stands out to them.
@@iMeeped Idk which part of Buffalo you people are from but I was born and raised on the east side 🤣 and never once has anyone ever spoken like that. Not from the East side to the west side to south Buffalo. Maybe it’s a north Buffalo thing. I even tried showing this to other people from the town and we all have similar reactions
@@chuckbflo I was born in Buffalo a and still live here. No one talks like this . But the only part of town I can’t speak for is the north side cause 1 I don’t know anyone form there and 2 I don’t go there often
Chicago and Minnesota accents sound completely different. Hard vowels with the chicago accent, rounded "o's" and long "a's sounding like long "e's" with Minnesota. Usually if you can't figure out if they're from Chicago or Minnesota then it's because they're from the Milwaukee area.
Lifelong Michigan resident of one of the more northern areas supposedly affected by this shift, and I can honestly say I've never heard anyone around here pronouncing words like this. I associate this accent with Chicago.
missmr94 I used to live in Windsor, and I’d notice this ‘vowel shift’ in young women from Michigan (at least the Detroit area). It’s like their version of ‘creaky voice’
I am guessing some of the people commenting on this video have only heard people speak with accents from where they are from.. However, this northern accent is not "unusual" to me, and I am from the South. The DEEP south! lol..
England was already recognisable, but using a different alphabet, and had a much more Germanic words. However, I've read a transliterated passage from 900AD that I, being a northern Englishman (where the dialect still uses many older words), understood pretty well. Granted, I didn't understand it ALL, but it was definitely English.
Where I live in British Columbia, Canada. The pronunciation is different the Eastern Canada. I pronounce the CH with a guttural sound somethings because CH was meant to have a guttural sound.
I'm from the Maritimes (Eastern to you probably means Toronto?) and I find people in Ontario sounding different each year. One word that really bugs me is southern I heard people from Ontario say "sow-thern" instead of "suh-thern". I also noticed many people US and Canada who now say "bur-reed" instead of "bare-reed".
@graaaaaagh Point taken, while Id contend that in modern society we could maintain a static language, you are right that they have always changed in the past so it probably wouldnt be practical to even try That said English is actually descended for Proto-Germanic, just as the English people are a Germanic people ethnically having developed in lower Denmark and northern Germany before migrating and forming Old English which was mutually intelligible with Old Norse and several others of the time
I definitely don't talk that way, but people from the east coast do think pretty much *everyone* from the midwest pronounces coffee and chocolate wrong. I don't know anybody that says "caaaffe," or "chaakolate", but if the first vowel is too high to match the "bought" sound it can be mocked in an exaggerated nasal fashion as "caaffee", just like people from the US mock Canadians with the exaggerated "aboot" for about when it's actually more like "a-boat" with a very slight "u" diphthong on the end at most.
No, shortly after the vikings invaded they introduced many words which had previously not been part of the language. By this point our grammar was already set to pretty much as it is today, and especially in the North where I live, the Vikings' influence shaped the language into something reasonably intelligible today. Granted, it was the French invasion, and Elizabethan England which truly changed it to what we have today, but it was 'intelligible' even back then. Dan
Using Chaucer's tale as a landmark for the whole English language at that time isn't strictly fair. In those days, there was no written consensus on how to spell, so he wrote in his dialect and accent, not to mention he stressed on some words for poetic effect. There are other written documents, though not literature, dating back to 800AD/ 900AD which are still somewhat intelligible to an English speaker (so long as they're transliterated to latin letters). The /e/ sound is pretty uniform. Dan
My mother tongue is Serbian, and when I speak English, I never say "block", but I always say "black". It is funny that block is the same word in Serbian for block.
@PolitcalIslam It's not just an inner-city sound. It hasn't affected AAVE. Here's video with an example of a woman with the accent a while ago: ruclips.net/video/G6op3b-NhzY/видео.html Listen to the 1stwoman. Most of the people have the accent, but hers is strong. I think being from a place makes it harder to hear the accent (if you moved there at a young age it may explain it). Most people don't perceive subtle shifts in the early states of the shift. If it keeps getting stronger people will notice it.
@@Wee162 I still don’t agree with you. I’ve never heard anyone speak that way. I’ve been all over the country. In Cleveland black is black block is block boss is boss and bus is bus.
Besides saying "bosses" for "busses", she said "tap" for "top". This researcher finds it surprising. Not me. People don't listen to themselves, so these midwesterners don't realize their pronunciation is weird.
This doesn't really seem to apply to the Milwaukee region. When I heard the whole boss vs. bus thing, I heard them say "boss" and have probably never met someone who does say it like that. However, I agree that "cot" and "caught" are pronounced the same here.
@PolitcalIslam Are you FROM Buffalo? The problem with Labov's research is the he exaggerates all speech patterns until they sound quite different, and then people deny they exist. These things also happen far more often mid-sentence and when speaking quickly.
Labov only slightly exaggerates the accent to make a clear point, and also seems to use extreme real-life examples for the same reason. But any honest and attentive listener should be able to recognize the accent. These speech phenomena have certainly been recognized for decades in the Buffalo area, where this is a common subject of self-deprecating jokes.
George A. I'm also from Syracuse and I don't notice it either. I have noticed some people will say "cot," when they mean "caught," or "stock," rather than "stalk." But that's it.
6 лет назад
Nathan Basch the northern cities shift does NOT have the cot/caught merger
something about this interview seems construed. Being a Clevelander, that sounds like an accent from the east coast. The only vowel shifting we have is whether your drinking "melk" while lying on a "pellow"
I lived in Michigan all my life and I've never encountered that voeel shift. Chicago, sure. Milwaukee, yep. Cleveland, perhaps. But I think this research is flawed and the scope of this "discovery" far narrower than as advertised. It is really a Chicagoland phenomenon.
The vowel shift certainly extends from Chicago eastward to Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse. I’ve lived in Buffalo most of my life, and people in the region generally recognize that the accent exists-and it is very common to self-deprecatingly joke about it. As a kid, I recognized and rather disliked it, and have continually made a conscious effort to minimize it in my own speech.
The exception to those above, like 'wee', 'aye', and perhaps 'bairn' Americans generally only know from films about pirates, if at all. For some reason, most dialectal terms have completely died out in America, and all the dialects you have now are filled with words invented in the last few hundred years, or adopted not from English, but from other cultures. Which is why to you many older texts are unintelligible, but for me, I can at least make 'some' sense of them.
And in case you weren't satisfied ;-) "Let him ealne weg þæt weste land on þæt steorbord, ond þa widsæ on þæt bæcbord þrie dagas." As you can see, many of the words from this 9th century text are pretty much as they are today. And even the ones that aren't, aren't too difficult to decipher. þ - is a 'th' sound, and 'æ' is 'ee'. Steorbord - Starboard, þrie dagas - Three days, weste - west, ond - and, widsæ - wild sea (open sea). Dan
"Tot" and "taught"...there's your missing vowel...completely gone in upper-midwest lexicon is any difference in the way these two words are pronounced.
+Tannz0rz Black instead of block? Bosses instead of buses? I grew up in Minnesota and never heard anyone sound like this. If I had, I might have killed them.
Linguistically, the typical Minnesota accent is markedly different than the NCVS described here-the vowel pronunciations, as well as other tendencies, are not the same.
I'm just correcting you, you don't need to ask my opinion, I give it for free, pet ;-). Pictland? I'm from Darlington in the Cleveland area of North Yorkshire/Teesside, a good 40 minutes drive yet from the border of Scotland. Americans don't understand any of the English dialectal words like 'bairn', 'spelk', 'Gannyn', 'hyem', 'aye', 'betwixt', 'whay', 'hawey', to name only a few. Many words like this date back to 600AD and such times, and may once have been popular throughout the country.
You need to visit the outer banks of North Carolina, where folks talk about the "sand soid" (sound side) of the islands. They talk like folks from Devon, England.
i assume you're from the area? if you go listen closely to an accent from say, california or georgia or texas, you'll hear where we would often say "ah" they say "aw." to their ear our "aw" sounds like "ah" and our "ah" as in bother sounds like "a" as in apple. to our ear their "a" as in apple tends to sound closer to an "e" as in bet or "ah" as in bother.
When they say these are clips from people in Northern America, do they mean Boston? This sounds like an accent from places in New York. I disagree that this accent is true for all people in Northern America.
...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.
So, why is this vowel shift happening? Is it because of a spread of the irritating "Boston" accent? Or is it due to a dumbing down of the society as a whole? When I was growing up, my father used to slap me any time he caught me speaking what he called "ghetto" english. He was adamant that speaking with a poor accent could be perceived as childish, thus holding me back from life's opportunities. The slaps worked, and I speak with a General English accent now.
"It was what the NBC standard was based on." WRONG!!! I was a Broadcasting major, and the standard was not geographically identified, but it sounds more like Nebraska and Missouri. No wee ("no way" vowel shift) the Great Lakes accent was ever standard, no matter what folks from Minuhsawda think.
It actually was, but back in the 1930s and 1940s. When the vowel shift became especially pronounced by the 1960s, the standard shifted to the near-accentless speech heard in Iowa and Nebraska, which is the new "standard." Missouri has been shifting towards a southern accent for the last 25 years, outside of St. Louis.
wow i'm glad that us central/north western ohioans still say things the way they're meant to be said. :) no offense to southern or north eastern ohioans. :/
@@lancebaker1374 nope he's right I live in Chicago and don't talk like that or never heard anyone in my life talk like that I did however literally hear southern US accents in Chicago but I didn't understand a word this lady said in the recording
I really don't understand the vowel shift hypothesis. I've lived in Buffalo, NY my whole life. If anyone pronounced "busses" as "bosses" we would look at them as if they had two heads. In 34 years of living here I've never heard anyone pronounce the word "bus" like "boss". This is not happening on any measurable level. We have an accent, absolutely. But this vowel shift theory that has been widely accepted as fact is for the most part, false.
I had classes about Labov and sociolinguistics at college, so it's very cool to see him "in person". Vowel shifts are fascinating to me. Every time I read about the Great Vowel Shift, I wonder if it has actually ended, since English vowels seem to be changing all the time.
It's really interesting how the study and change of linguistics is being taken here by some viewers as something that shouldn't really be happening simply due to national television, etc. I've barely begun studying this and I find the entire field completely fascinating in how language varies, how it changes, etc. Labov has really developed some great stuff!
I'm from Michigan. I haven't heard the busses/bosses merge, but I've been away for a long time. I think it's the younger people saying it like that. I've heard it in Illinois from college students from Chicago when I was there. I definitely don't say it like that; neither does my mother, who has a pretty pure Detroit sound.
The really flat way of saying short o's, however, is spot on. I say it like that too if I'm not paying attention. Black is said with almost two syllables --- blayack.
Unfortunately, most midwesterners think they have no accent ("eeyaccent"). Record some of your speech and listen to it. You might be surprised how it sounds.
It's not a merger but a shift. The vowel in BOSS is moving forward, so it sounds like BASS, while the vowel in BUSS is moving to where BOSS used to be.
I was born in southeastern Michigan but I've been living in the south. And I agree with some of what u said. I don't really pronounce my O's like that or sometimes A's. I think that we get a little bit ofvour pronunciation from everywhere! And I have recorded myself and I sound nothing like that computer lady! Her accent sounded very flat and nasally!
Yeah, I was thinking it might be a teenagery thing that people grow out of. Adults don't speak that way and no one's gonna tolerate it in the workplace.
@@lancebaker1374 I've never heard ANYONE say "eeyaccent" you've been watching too much Fargo
anyone denying the existence of the vowel shift hasn't hung around these cities enough. most people in upstate ny say "black." I had a friend who pronounced her brother's name "scatt" and only when she got made fun of by some outsiders did I realize I did the same thing.
Wow. Love this topic
with the transcript, i could understand the whole content. thank you very very much.
As someone who lives in the Cincinnati area, I've noticed a lot of people migrating here from Wisconsin and Illinois. And I've even started noticing some natives of Ohio and Indiana who have a more Chicago-esque accent. It'll defintely be interesting to see if this accent spreads throughout the southern part of the Midwest and even the northern parts of the South. Great video!
There is another vowel shift, that I call the NPR Vowel Shift. If you listen to news reporters and socio-political commentators on TV and radio--especially on NPR--you'll notice they pronounce the long "A" sound as long "E": "seam" for "same," etc. They're also pronouncing long "O" more and more often as short "U": "uppening" for "opening," etc. Short "U" often becomes short "E": "must" becoming "mest". Short "E" in "sex" becoming short "A" in "sax".
The shifted "maybe" and "baby" to sound like "meeby"and "beeby" is really noticeable in the Bernadette character on Big Bang Theory.
ameezing
I still can't get over "buossis withey untenniz uon taap." xD
In Dutch, another Germanic language we also prenounce vowels differently.
The English A sounds like the Dutch E for example
yeah my grandparents live in Chicago and thats how they talk. My grandmother says dall instead of doll. im used to somethings but sometimes i have to think about what shes saying because i dont understand some words
As another article pointed out, the people who are making the sounds, don't think they have an accent. I think that's key in the development of it. I think Boston losing it's accent is less to do with television, than people feeling like they are somehow less than for having a boston accent. It's like learning Received Pronunciation, you were basically told you were low class if you had a regional English accent. So you lost it if you could. Children are just purposefully losing their accents. Instead, we should allow diverse accents on networks (local and national)
That's so cool! I didn't even really notice that I did this!!
Where are you from?
I'm from Buffalo and these accents are very hard to understand 😂
True. I'm originally from southeastern Michigan land we do not pronounce words like this. Those are our neighbors across Lake Michigan! But I now live in the south, and people think I sound normal, but they also think that I don't sound southern!
@@melaninqueen2413 we don't use that pronunciation on our side of the lake, either. If soneobe said they missed their 'boss' I would assume something was going on in their office, not that they had transportation problems.
Same, I’m from Chicago.
I'm from Buffalo too, I guess we pronounce words closest to their proper pronunciation. The only words I heard variation on is egg (eh-gg vs ay-gg) and "the" becomes "da" (da Bills)
I'm from Kansas and went to a university there. I knew a girl from Wisconsin who would talk about a dog "wegging" its tale. Blew my mind!
She probably heeyas a beeby by now.
some individuals just have speech impediments... that's not how Wisconsinites pronounce 'wag'
@@Marcel_Audubon maybe her parents moved there from somewhere else
@@redpepper74 from The Land Where Wag is Pronounced Weg? Where is that, exactly?
Having lived near Syracuse, NY for many years, this "shift" is not new. It has been happening for at least 90 years, as even the old people I knew spoke this way.
In my experience, it's literally only senior citizens who talk like this.
Also in Syracuse.
I've read about this shift before but never actually heard it. It doesn't sound like anything I've heard before, not even in a stereotype. It sounds completely alien.
This was well underway when I moved from iA to MI as a school kid around 1980.
I'm from Metro Detroit and I have never heard any accent like in these recordings.
Same
Word.
You notice in the video they slow the sound down on the word they are reviewing. I’ve never heard anyone speak like this I’m in Cleveland.
I've heard all this in Milwaukee, Chicago, Buffalo, Rochester. Just listen to Jenna Marbles, it's in everything she says
This issue which no one discusses is that there are pools of linguistic pronunciations. One area is not as standard as one would think. I am from northern Macomb County. While a student at Oakland University, I was often mistaken as Canadian because of my pronunciations. My father in law, who is from Roseville, makes fun of my "accent" all the time.
Great video! Finally understand this vowel shift. And I'm from Cleveland, and never heard anyone speak this way.
Of course, you don’t notice it if you haven’t lived in other areas of the country!
Cleveland has an accent. Go to the south and they will tell you that you speak funny. I guarantee
Western New England (where I'm from) has this "distinctive" accent.
I live in Western NY and it sounds like a lot of his examples are more from the Chicago area. If so this is a common problem. People will focus on the biggest city in a given region and insist it's representative of the whole region.
What documentary was this, and where can I get it? Thanks
@xorasel , he meant that the vowels that English words have had for that period of time haven't changed. An example would be ''bed'', where the ''e'' sounded the same 1000 years ago.
This is an accent that has existed since at least the 1930s in upstate NY, so I don't think they can claim that newscasters go their "standard American accent" from this area. That is more likely somewhere like Iowa.
They mean the late 19th century.
In the 18th century, a standard accent of American English was being developed and it was based on the accent of the wealthy and influential New England region, but New England has shifted from that while many Midwestern states like Ohio still have that general accent. Californians are also thought to have an accent that's close to the General American accent and much like Midwesterners, the original American settlers of the region came from New England
This is why Californians and many Midwesterners are said to have a more neutral.
This guy is spot on. Most of the RUclips videos with "vowel shift" in the title are not about the shift. They are about syllabation (extending the vowel, so "dad" becomes "deeyad" and "happy" becomes "heeyappy"). I have been annoyed by Great Lakes pronunciation for many years. Younger folks, especially women, also pronounce "had" to rhyme with sod. That part is more the California shift, not Great Lakes shift.
I had never heard of him before, but his theory is correct!
I am from the Great Lakes region and I have made a film about it as well, see video resonses, "The Ever Evolving English Language.
William Labov is a genius!
Legendary video
Midwesterners (Great Lakes states specifically), STOP DENYING that you have a non-standard accent, because YOU DO! Stop claiming these must be people from Boston or "northern Michigan, not southern MI". NO!!! They are from Meeyuhshigan, Menuhsoda, Wiskansun, Detroit, and Shi-kagg-oh, even Buffalo (on the Great Lakes). Southerners, NYC folks, Bostonians all accept that they have an accent. Why are you so disturbed that you have an accent????????
Say what?! I was born and raised in southeastern Michigan and nobody talks like that. When I say nobody, i mean no one in our area!! Now our neighbors that live over in the next state do pronounce words like that, not us! We're in between how New Yorkers pronounce words and how everyone else in Wisconsin and Minnesota pronounce words. And I can say that I don't not sound like that!
@Lance calm thyself, sweetie, you sound like an angry nutcase
"In a separate experiment, Nancy Niedzielski, an associate professor of linguistics at Rice University, told 50 NCS speakers that she was going to play a recording of a speaker from Michigan saying the word B-A-G, which she spelled out for them. She then asked the test subjects to identify whether the signal they heard sounded like byag (the NCS pronunciation), bag (the “standard” pronunciation), or baahg (a vaguely British pronunciation). Not one of the 50 subjects said that they heard the NCS pronunciation."
What you're calling the NCVS sounds, to my ears, like a Chicago or maybe a Detroit accent going back as far as the EARLY 20th century. Maybe the folks in Rochester and Cleveland are starting to flatten their As more, but Chicagoans have been speaking this way for 100 years.
In Buffalo its pronounced "Baffalo", Socks are "Sax" and Boxes are "Baxes".
St37One as someone who lived in buffalo my entire life I’ve never once heard anything pronounced that way
Vergie Morrison: @St37One is correct in his/her description. I was born in Buffalo and have lived here most of my life. I hear that type of accent all the time. For decades, it’s been generally recognized and quite common to joke about it.
@@vergiemorrison928 I am from Buffalo and moved away within last few years. You don't ever notice in your head until you meet people from elsewhere in the country and it really stands out to them.
@@iMeeped Idk which part of Buffalo you people are from but I was born and raised on the east side 🤣 and never once has anyone ever spoken like that. Not from the East side to the west side to south Buffalo. Maybe it’s a north Buffalo thing. I even tried showing this to other people from the town and we all have similar reactions
@@chuckbflo I was born in Buffalo a and still live here. No one talks like this . But the only part of town I can’t speak for is the north side cause 1 I don’t know anyone form there and 2 I don’t go there often
Chicago and Minnesota accents sound completely different. Hard vowels with the chicago accent, rounded "o's" and long "a's sounding like long "e's" with Minnesota. Usually if you can't figure out if they're from Chicago or Minnesota then it's because they're from the Milwaukee area.
Lifelong Michigan resident of one of the more northern areas supposedly affected by this shift, and I can honestly say I've never heard anyone around here pronouncing words like this. I associate this accent with Chicago.
missmr94 I used to live in Windsor, and I’d notice this ‘vowel shift’ in young women from Michigan (at least the Detroit area). It’s like their version of ‘creaky voice’
Actually, it's just as thick if not moreso in men.
You are simply accustomed to the accent. I lived in Meeyuhshigan near Detroit for a year, and they all sounded weird to me.
I am guessing some of the people commenting on this video have only heard people speak with accents from where they are from.. However, this northern accent is not "unusual" to me, and I am from the South. The DEEP south! lol..
England was already recognisable, but using a different alphabet, and had a much more Germanic words. However, I've read a transliterated passage from 900AD that I, being a northern Englishman (where the dialect still uses many older words), understood pretty well. Granted, I didn't understand it ALL, but it was definitely English.
Where I live in British Columbia, Canada. The pronunciation is different the Eastern Canada. I pronounce the CH with a guttural sound somethings because CH was meant to have a guttural sound.
I'm from the Maritimes (Eastern to you probably means Toronto?) and I find people in Ontario sounding different each year. One word that really bugs me is southern I heard people from Ontario say "sow-thern" instead of "suh-thern". I also noticed many people US and Canada who now say "bur-reed" instead of "bare-reed".
Im from Toronto we saw Sow-thern its true and either buried form lol. It's weird haha
She's probably from Chicago... I live in the Upper Midwest; that's definitely the direction our accent is headed.
Chicagoans don't speak like that. She wouldn't be understood here.
I'm from Chicago and I didn't understand a word she said
@graaaaaagh Point taken, while Id contend that in modern society we could maintain a static language, you are right that they have always changed in the past so it probably wouldnt be practical to even try
That said English is actually descended for Proto-Germanic, just as the English people are a Germanic people ethnically having developed in lower Denmark and northern Germany before migrating and forming Old English which was mutually intelligible with Old Norse and several others of the time
@conweez I believe it's "Do You Speak American"
I definitely don't talk that way, but people from the east coast do think pretty much *everyone* from the midwest pronounces coffee and chocolate wrong. I don't know anybody that says "caaaffe," or "chaakolate", but if the first vowel is too high to match the "bought" sound it can be mocked in an exaggerated nasal fashion as "caaffee", just like people from the US mock Canadians with the exaggerated "aboot" for about when it's actually more like "a-boat" with a very slight "u" diphthong on the end at most.
No, shortly after the vikings invaded they introduced many words which had previously not been part of the language. By this point our grammar was already set to pretty much as it is today, and especially in the North where I live, the Vikings' influence shaped the language into something reasonably intelligible today. Granted, it was the French invasion, and Elizabethan England which truly changed it to what we have today, but it was 'intelligible' even back then.
Dan
Using Chaucer's tale as a landmark for the whole English language at that time isn't strictly fair. In those days, there was no written consensus on how to spell, so he wrote in his dialect and accent, not to mention he stressed on some words for poetic effect. There are other written documents, though not literature, dating back to 800AD/ 900AD which are still somewhat intelligible to an English speaker (so long as they're transliterated to latin letters). The /e/ sound is pretty uniform.
Dan
What show is this, things like the interest me greatly.
No longer available: www.pbs.org/speak/speech/sociolinguistics/labov/#
I live in michgian and have literally never heard this accent before. It sounds Canadian to me, if anything.
My mother tongue is Serbian, and when I speak English, I never say "block", but I always say "black". It is funny that block is the same word in Serbian for block.
I heard busses instead of bosses even though the accent in the full sentence isn't like those around me
I heard "blahg" and I thought she was talking about a blog
@PolitcalIslam It's not just an inner-city sound. It hasn't affected AAVE. Here's video with an example of a woman with the accent a while ago: ruclips.net/video/G6op3b-NhzY/видео.html
Listen to the 1stwoman. Most of the people have the accent, but hers is strong.
I think being from a place makes it harder to hear the accent (if you moved there at a young age it may explain it). Most people don't perceive subtle shifts in the early states of the shift. If it keeps getting stronger people will notice it.
I’m in southern Michigan and I don’t understand these, nor have I even heard them anywhere around me lol
It sounded like the Black/Block sentence was about to be followed by an "and." sooo yea... you put two and two together.
This sounds like more of a jersey thing than a midwest thing
@KnotBrian That's what I thought she said too, and I'm from the detroit area as well.
So people in this region pronounce erratic and erotic the same?
What show or documentary is this from?
how is it possible
I live in Cleveland and never hear this vowel shift. A bus is a bus and a boss is a boss. I think they are studying teenage girls.
I agree.
Yup
It’s very strong in Cleveland. You don’t hear it until you move to a different region, like any accent.
@@Wee162 I still don’t agree with you. I’ve never heard anyone speak that way. I’ve been all over the country. In Cleveland black is black block is block boss is boss and bus is bus.
@@Wee162 the best video I’ve seen on the Cleveland accent was done by Mike Polk. I’ll agree we do a crazy A sound but the rest of it is bunk.
Besides saying "bosses" for "busses", she said "tap" for "top". This researcher finds it surprising. Not me. People don't listen to themselves, so these midwesterners don't realize their pronunciation is weird.
@Lance ever think maybe you have hearing problems, Lance, baby?
Don't trust bosses with antennas.
This doesn't really seem to apply to the Milwaukee region. When I heard the whole boss vs. bus thing, I heard them say "boss" and have probably never met someone who does say it like that. However, I agree that "cot" and "caught" are pronounced the same here.
@PolitcalIslam Are you FROM Buffalo? The problem with Labov's research is the he exaggerates all speech patterns until they sound quite different, and then people deny they exist. These things also happen far more often mid-sentence and when speaking quickly.
I agree. I think the NCS is often more subtle.
You're wrong. They happen all the time, not just when speaking quickly. You simply are accustomed to the accent, so you seldom notice it.
Labov only slightly exaggerates the accent to make a clear point, and also seems to use extreme real-life examples for the same reason. But any honest and attentive listener should be able to recognize the accent. These speech phenomena have certainly been recognized for decades in the Buffalo area, where this is a common subject of self-deprecating jokes.
I'm from Syracuse and I've never met anyone from around here who speaks like that. From what I noticed we just have very nasally accents.
George A. I'm also from Syracuse and I don't notice it either. I have noticed some people will say "cot," when they mean "caught," or "stock," rather than "stalk." But that's it.
Nathan Basch
the northern cities shift does NOT have the cot/caught merger
I have a friend from Indiana who seems to say gat it for got it and Gad for God lol
Ahh, yes, thank you for pointing that out to me :)
something about this interview seems construed. Being a Clevelander, that sounds like an accent from the east coast. The only vowel shifting we have is whether your drinking "melk" while lying on a "pellow"
That's precisely the kind of shift they are describing.
Very noticeable in Cleveland
@mickeymouse12678 No, they mean the area around the Great Lakes.
"Bosses" = "busses"? Why would anyone pronounce it wrong like that? BUSSES! BUSSES!
I think that's the other way round
I lived in Michigan all my life and I've never encountered that voeel shift. Chicago, sure. Milwaukee, yep. Cleveland, perhaps. But I think this research is flawed and the scope of this "discovery" far narrower than as advertised. It is really a Chicagoland phenomenon.
I lived in "Meeyahchigan", for a year.
I don't even think Milwaukee - that accent was pure Chicago to me (grew up in MKE).
The vowel shift certainly extends from Chicago eastward to Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse. I’ve lived in Buffalo most of my life, and people in the region generally recognize that the accent exists-and it is very common to self-deprecatingly joke about it. As a kid, I recognized and rather disliked it, and have continually made a conscious effort to minimize it in my own speech.
That girl is from the Midwest? I thought she was from the Boston area since this video is supposed to be about vowel shifts in the northeast.
The title of the video is "Northern Cities Vowel Shift". Clean your glasses and take a second look.
The exception to those above, like 'wee', 'aye', and perhaps 'bairn' Americans generally only know from films about pirates, if at all. For some reason, most dialectal terms have completely died out in America, and all the dialects you have now are filled with words invented in the last few hundred years, or adopted not from English, but from other cultures. Which is why to you many older texts are unintelligible, but for me, I can at least make 'some' sense of them.
"Scatt" is a most unfortunate name... you do know what 'scat' means, right?!?
Vocal jazz improvisation?
I'm from Chicago and never hear the Northern cities vowel shift here. Ever.
Come down to Bridgeport and take in a Sox game when the plague is over.....
@@danielbliss1988 that isn't the Northern cities vowel shift, that's just the South side accent - hasn't changed for generations
The word top spoken by this vowel shift sufferer sounds exactly as the word tarp does when spoken by a Bostonian - "tap."
In Boston it’s more like tahp
And in case you weren't satisfied ;-)
"Let him ealne weg þæt weste land on þæt steorbord, ond þa widsæ on þæt bæcbord þrie dagas."
As you can see, many of the words from this 9th century text are pretty much as they are today. And even the ones that aren't, aren't too difficult to decipher. þ - is a 'th' sound, and 'æ' is 'ee'. Steorbord - Starboard, þrie dagas - Three days, weste - west, ond - and, widsæ - wild sea (open sea).
Dan
No, this ongoing set of changes is called the Northern Cities Shift, not "Northeastern".
Who are you saying "No" to?
"Tot" and "taught"...there's your missing vowel...completely gone in upper-midwest lexicon is any difference in the way these two words are pronounced.
A vowel shift does not men the vowel is missing. It means it is substituted, like "beeby" and "meeby" for "baby" and "maybe".
Whenever I'm in Detroit I hear a very distinctive accent that sounds like the old Saturday Night Live Chicago Bear fans Skit.
So it's like the common Minnesota accent but amplified in obnoxiousness.
+Tannz0rz Black instead of block? Bosses instead of buses? I grew up in Minnesota
and never heard anyone sound like this. If I had, I might have killed
them.
Minnesota accent is the same. We can't divide accents every 10 miles.
Linguistically, the typical Minnesota accent is markedly different than the NCVS described here-the vowel pronunciations, as well as other tendencies, are not the same.
I'm just correcting you, you don't need to ask my opinion, I give it for free, pet ;-). Pictland? I'm from Darlington in the Cleveland area of North Yorkshire/Teesside, a good 40 minutes drive yet from the border of Scotland. Americans don't understand any of the English dialectal words like 'bairn', 'spelk', 'Gannyn', 'hyem', 'aye', 'betwixt', 'whay', 'hawey', to name only a few. Many words like this date back to 600AD and such times, and may once have been popular throughout the country.
You need to visit the outer banks of North Carolina, where folks talk about the "sand soid" (sound side) of the islands. They talk like folks from Devon, England.
I'm from Detroit and no one talks like this, it sounds like a Boston accent to me.
When she says block that did not sound like black. She did not use hat vowel she used hot vowel. The busses did sound like bosses though.
i assume you're from the area? if you go listen closely to an accent from say, california or georgia or texas, you'll hear where we would often say "ah" they say "aw." to their ear our "aw" sounds like "ah" and our "ah" as in bother sounds like "a" as in apple. to our ear their "a" as in apple tends to sound closer to an "e" as in bet or "ah" as in bother.
If you are midwestern, it sounded fine. To those of us not from the midwest, it was black fer sure.
This doesn't happen in southern Michigan at all
Ha ha ha ha!!!! Oh, wait... you were kidding, right?
Who's here because of a linguistics class?
This isn't happening in Canada. Thank god.
I always make fun of the way people of Chicago say their vowels. Now I know why.
When they say these are clips from people in Northern America, do they mean Boston? This sounds like an accent from places in New York. I disagree that this accent is true for all people in Northern America.
Clean your glasses and look again. Nowhere is the term North America used. They are central northern U.S. cities near the Great Lakes.
stable for 1000 years? didn't the great vowel shift start around 1400?
I'm a Clevelander: a bus is not a "Boss", pillows are not "pellows", and milk is not "melk"
Good for you. Listen to your neighbors to learn they do have weird accents.
I drink melk, sleep on a pellow and, Call my dayad from tiem to tiem.
From Cleveland also and completely agree with you.
...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.
Huh??? Please chew them words up, and spit them out again. You need to work on your syntax.
The Inland North accent sounds horrible.
You're mean ;~;
Honest, not mean. Those yankees think southerners sound terrible, too.
You're wearing your accent on your sleave.
So, why is this vowel shift happening? Is it because of a spread of the irritating "Boston" accent? Or is it due to a dumbing down of the society as a whole? When I was growing up, my father used to slap me any time he caught me speaking what he called "ghetto" english. He was adamant that speaking with a poor accent could be perceived as childish, thus holding me back from life's opportunities. The slaps worked, and I speak with a General English accent now.
"It was what the NBC standard was based on." WRONG!!! I was a Broadcasting major, and the standard was not geographically identified, but it sounds more like Nebraska and Missouri. No wee ("no way" vowel shift) the Great Lakes accent was ever standard, no matter what folks from Minuhsawda think.
It actually was, but back in the 1930s and 1940s. When the vowel shift became especially pronounced by the 1960s, the standard shifted to the near-accentless speech heard in Iowa and Nebraska, which is the new "standard." Missouri has been shifting towards a southern accent for the last 25 years, outside of St. Louis.
wow i'm glad that us central/north western ohioans still say things the way they're meant to be said. :)
no offense to southern or north eastern ohioans. :/
God. This is a terrible thing that needs to be stopped. It's starting in Canada in the prairies and Newfoundland. Please stop this.
Im from Syracuse and no one here sounds like that
Ha ha ha! You are simply accustomed to it.
@@lancebaker1374 You're absolutely right. I just realized...
Bosses=busses? Nobody talks like that in either Chicago or Detroit.
WRONG! You just heard it, and i heard it when I lived near Detroit for a year. You are simply accustomed to the weird accent.
@@lancebaker1374 nope he's right I live in Chicago and don't talk like that or never heard anyone in my life talk like that I did however literally hear southern US accents in Chicago but I didn't understand a word this lady said in the recording
I really don't understand the vowel shift hypothesis. I've lived in Buffalo, NY my whole life. If anyone pronounced "busses" as "bosses" we would look at them as if they had two heads. In 34 years of living here I've never heard anyone pronounce the word "bus" like "boss". This is not happening on any measurable level. We have an accent, absolutely. But this vowel shift theory that has been widely accepted as fact is for the most part, false.