Overview

‘I can remember, vaguely, when we had the bosses with the antennas on the top’ (Labov 1972). This is what you may hear if you go to Chicago, Detroit, Rochester or in any big city near the Great Lakes area. What they mean is not ‘bosses’ but ‘buses’. This phenomenon is usually referred to as the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCVS), a speech process by which the vowels /ɪ/, /e/, /ʌ/, /ɔ/, /ɑ/ and /æ/ in words are changing their phonetic values as they are caught in a chain shift. Within the Great Lakes area, also known as the Inland North, the NCVS isogloss splits Michigan in two parts: north and south. Some studies have shown that Northern Michigan and its Peninsula were not affected by the shift in the 1960s, as confirmed by our analyses of speech data from that period. Yet, the results, analyses and conclusions of our study of more recent speech data from Northern Michigan do not tell the same story. Since language is in constant evolution, shift has most probably spread to Northern Michigan since the 1960s and what is at stake today is the relevance of such a dividing line in Michigan. With the help of speech data included in a first corpus composed of Northern Michiganders’ recordings from the 1960s and a second one comprising recordings made in 2005, 2008 and 2016, we used speech analysis tools to extract and plot the formant values of the vowels under study. These values offer evidence of a clear spread of the shift in Northern Michigan and its Upper Peninsula. The results of our analyses and our conclusions lead us to further question the nature of this ongoing change in Northern Michigan as well as its extent. Ultimately, the very name of this phenomenon may also be put into question, especially the ‘C’ that stands for ‘Cities’ in the acronym NCVS since we show that the shift is not circumscribed to urban centres anymore. Indeed, the number of inhabitants in the largest Northern Michigan towns does not exceed 10,000 so that this part of the state is mostly rural.