The Midland accent of American English (an compared with GA)

M ajor cities of this dialect area include Kansas City, St. L ouis, Columbus, Ohio, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis. In addition to the fronting of the diphthongs /oʊ/ and /aʊ/, the North Midland exhibits the following distinctive features: cot-caught merger in transition: this area is currently undergoing a vowel merger of the «short o» /ɑ/ (as in cot) and 'aw' /ɔ/ (as in caught) phonemes. M any speakers show transitional forms of this so-called cot-caught merger, which is complete in approximately half of North America. advanced fronting of/ʌ/: among younger speakers, the «wedge» /ʌ/ (as in strut) is shifting strongly to the front. The /æ/ phoneme (as in cat) shows most commonly a so-called «continuous» distribution: /æ/ is raised and tensed toward [eə] before nasal consonants and remains low [æ] before voicelessstop consonants, and other allophones of /æ/ occupy a continuum of varying degrees of height between those two extremes. South MidlandThe South Midland dialect region follows the Ohio River in a generally southwesterly direction, moving across from Kentucky, southern Indiana, and southern Illinois to southern Missouri, Arkansas, southern Kansas, and Oklahoma, west of the Mississippi river. A lthough historically more closely related to the North Midland speech, this region shows dialectal features that are now more similar to the rest of the South than the Midland, most noticeably the smoothing of the diphthong /ɑɪ/ to [ɑ], and the second person plural pronoun «you-all» or «y'all.» Unlike the coastal South, however, the South Midland has always been a rhotic dialect, pronouncing /r/ wherever it has historically occurred.

S outh Indiana is the northernmost extent of the South Midland region, forming what dialectologists refer to as the «Hoosier Apex» of the South Midland; the accent is locally known there as the «Hoosier Twang» .Western PennsylvaniaThe dialect of Western Pennsylvania is, for many purposes, an eastern extension of the North Midland; it is spoken also in Youngstown, Ohio, ten miles west of the state line. L ike the Midland proper, the Western Pennsylvania accent features fronting of /oʊ/ and /aʊ/, as well as positive anymore. T he chief distinguishing feature of Western Pennsylvania as a whole is that the cot-caught merger is almost complete here (it is complete in Pittsburgh), whereas it is still in progress in most of the Midland. T

he merger has also spread from Western Pennsylvania into adjacent West Virginia, historically in the South Midland dialect region. The city of Pittsburgh is considered to have a dialect of its own often known as «Pittsburghese». T his region is additionally characterized by a sound change that is unique in North America: the monopthongization of /aʊ/ to [a]. T

his is the source of the stereotypical Pittsburgh pronunciation of downtown as «dahntahn». P ittsburgh also features an unusually low allophone of /ʌ/ (as in cut); it approaches [ɑ] (/ɑ/ itself having moved out of the way and become a rounded vowel in its merger with /ɔ/).Erie, Pennsylvania was described as being in the Northern dialect region in the first half of the 20th century. H

owever, unlike other cities in the North, Erie underwent the caught-cot merger and not the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, and now Erie has at least as much in common linguistically with the rest of Western Pennsylvania as with the North. F or this reason, Erie has been described as the only major city to change its affiliation from the North to the Midland.St. L ouis and vicinitySt. L ouis, Missouri is historically one among several (North) Midland cities, but it has developed some unique features of its own distinguishing it from the rest of the Midland. A historical feature of the St.

L ouis dialect is the merger of the phonemes /ɔɹ/ (as in for) and /ɑɹ/ (as in far), while leaving distinct /oɹ/ (as in four). T his merger is less frequently found in younger speakers, and leads to the stereotypical exaggeration of the St. L

ouis accent as «Interstate Farty-Far» .Some speakers, usually older generations, have /eɪ/ instead of Standard English /ɛ/ before /ʒ/: thus measure is pronounced /ˈmeɪʒ.ɚ/. Wash (as well as Washington) gains a /ɹ/, becoming /wɔɹʃ/ («warsh»).The diphthong /ɔɪ/ in standard English becomes more like [ɑɪ]. For example, words such as «oil» and «joint» are commonly pronounced awyul and jawynt, particularly among older speakers within the city and immediate suburbs. The phoneme /ð/ is often replaced with /d/, especially among the white working-class urban populace. F or instance, Get in that car over there sounds like Get in dat car over dere. T

his speech characteristic is common in most large, old cities of the East and Midwest, reinforcing St. L ouis’s cultural evolution alongside other northern industrial urban centers. Some younger speakers have picked up features of the first stages of the Northern Cities shift; this vowel shift causes, among other changes, raising and tensing of the vowel /æ/, so that words like cat/kæt/ to become more like [kɛət]. A

corridor of communities between Chicago and St. L ouis is the only place that features of the Inland North have penetrated noticeably into the Midland, despite the long boundary the two regions share. H

owever, St. L ouis remains a Midland city in other respects. F or example on rhymes with dawn rather than don, unlike the North. I

ndeed, the fact that on rhymes with dawn is more distinctive in St. L ouis than in the rest of the Midland, since the cot-caught merger is prevented in St. L

ouis by the presence of the Northern Cities shift. Some words as examples (vowel pronunciation):GAMidlandkitɪɪtrapæælotɔαstrutʌɜchoiceɔɪoɪfaceeɪεipriceαɪai > əɪnorthɔɚ®obathæ /aæthoughtɔanurseɚəmouthaʊəʊConclusionSumming up the results of the conducted analyses, based on the research of three main specialists in this field of linguistics (H. Kurath, C. M. C arver and W. Labov), we can say that three major dialects of American English (Northern, Midland and Southern) have a lot of differences in grammar, phonology and phonetics comparing with General American. A G eneral American accent is considered to be most «neutral» and free of regional characteristics. I t is not a specific well-defined standardized accent in the way that Received Pronunciation has historically been the standard, prestigious variant of the English language in England; rather, accents with different features can all be perceived as General American provided they lack certain non-standard features. A

s for the Midland accent, here following variants can be distinguished: North Midland, South Midland, Western Pennsylvania, St. L ouis and vicinity. A ll these accents are spoken in the middle part of USA, and their structure of the language have a lot in common in general, but still phonetics of each district has some peculiarities and differs from one region to another.

I n conclusion it should be noted that the Midland regional accent of American English, especially its North variety, is most closely approximates General American. SourcesCarver, Craig M.(1989).American Regional Dialects: A Word Geography, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cassidy, F. G.(1985). T he Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE). C ambridge: Belknap Press. Kortman, B.(2005).English Linguistics: Essentials (Anglistik — Amerikanistik), Cornelsen Verlag. Kortmann, B., Schneider, E.

W. (2004).A handbook of Varieties of English, Vol. 1, Phonology, Mouton de Gruyter. Labov, W., Sharon A., Charles B. (2006). T he Atlas of North American English. B

erlin: Mouton-de Gruyter. Metcalf, A. (2000).How We Talk, Houghton Mifflin, Boston. Wolfram, W., Schilling-Estes, N. (1998). A

merican English: Dialects and variation. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.

8. www.wikipedia.org9. www.evolpub.com/Americandialects10. www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/ 11. www.wisegeek.com