Злобина Ирина Сергеевна

г.Киров, ВГГУ, доцент кафедры иностранных языков неязыковых спец-тей

The Midland accent of American English

Not all people who speak a language speak it the same way. A language can be subdivided into any number of dialects, each dialect vary in some way from the parent language. The term “accent” is often incorrectly used in its place, but an accent refers only to the way words are pronounced, while a dialect has its own grammar, vocabulary, syntax, and common expressions as well as pronunciation rules that make it unique from other dialects of the same language. It is known that three things are needed for a new dialect to develop: a group of people living in close proximity to each other; this group living in isolation (either geographically or socially) from other groups; and the passage of time. Given enough time, a dialect may evolve to the point that it becomes a different language from the one it started as.

The fact is that there is no such thing as “correct English”. Any manner of speaking that is following the rules of a dialect is equally “correct”. Words like ain't are “real” words in some dialects and perfectly acceptable to use. However, people are judged by the way they speak, and dialects carry different levels of social prestige with them based on the prejudices within a society. Generally, the southern dialects of American English carry a lower prestige, at least among northerners who will assume that a person speaking a southern dialect is less intelligent and less educated than they are. Some educated southerners even feel this way and will “correct” their speech to meet northern standards. The New York City dialect carries the lowest prestige of all, while Received Standard, a dialect of British English used by the BBC and the royal family, carries the highest prestige - even among Americans. For this reason, schools try to rid children of the local dialects they learned from their family and friends in favor of a more prestigious one.

The scientists conclude that settlement and migration are two major factors that have shaped the linguistic landscape of the U.S. Different regions of America were settled by different groups from the British Isles, who brought with them their unique ways of speaking. Some of these differences have been preserved and can be heard in the major regional dialects of the U.S. Early settlement occurred along the East coast, from North to South, with people from different dialect areas of Britain establishing themselves in different areas. As settlers moved further inland, they took their dialects with them. Thus, dialect differences are greater from North to South than from East to West. It is stressed that isolation, whether geographical or social, is also important to the development and preservation of dialectal differences. Geographically isolated groups include those who have lived for generations on islands, and those who are separated from the surrounding area by mountains. All of these groups have developed distinctive speech varieties—subdialects of the major regional dialects.

It has been found that one difference among regional dialects is vocabulary: pop vs. soda, pail vs. bucket, lightning bug vs. firefly. Even the second person plural pronoun can vary: you, y’all, you guys, youse guys, you’uns, or yinz. Linguistics maps such as those in the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) identify many regional vocabulary differences. DARE was compiled by analyzing interviews conducted in the late 1960s with people all over the country.

A mention should be made about grammatical differences in the speech of regional dialects. For example, some Southerners use two modal verbs—I might could mow the lawn tomorrow, which means something like, “It’s possible that I’ll mow the lawn but I’m not committing to it”. In parts of Pennsylvania, people typically say the car needs washed instead of the car needs washing or the car needs to be washed.

As for pronunciation, it is reported that the regional accents of English speakers show great variation across the areas where English is spoken as a first language. Many identifiable variations in pronunciation usually derived from the phoneme inventory of the local dialect, of the local variety of Standard English between various populations of native English speakers. Local accents are part of local dialects. Some regional accents are easily identified by certain characteristics. Further variations are to be found within the regions. For example, towns located less than 10 miles from the city of Manchester such as Bolton, Oldham and Salford, each have distinct accents, all of which form the Lancashire accent, yet in extreme cases are different enough to be noticed even by a non-local listener. There is also much room for misunderstanding between people from different regions, as the way one word is pronounced in one accent (for example, petal in American English) will sound like a different word in another accent (for example, pearl in Scottish English).

The Midland dialect of American English was first defined by Hans Kurath as the dialect spoken in an area centered on Philadelphia and expanding westward to include most of Pennsylvania and part of the Appalachian Mountains. Kurath and McDavid later divided this region into two discrete subdivisions: the “North Midland” beginning north of the Ohio River valley area, and the “South Midland”. Craig M. Carver essentially renamed the North Midland the Lower North and the South Midland the Upper South. All these classifications were mostly based on lexical features.

It should be noted that Labov, Ash and Boberg, based solely on phonology and phonetics, defined the Midland area as a buffer zone between the Inland North and the South; this area essentially coincides with Kurath and McDavid's North Midland, the “South Midland” being now reckoned as part of the South. Indeed, while the lexical and grammatical isoglosses follow the Appalachian Mountains, the accent boundary follows the Ohio River.

The (North) Midland is arguably the major region whose speech most closely approximates General American. Midland dialects retain R in all positions, and long I is not flattened (monophthongized) as uniformly as in the South, but the Midland is otherwise not very easy to describe as a whole, since “each of the Midland cities - Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City - has its own local character”. More southerly Midland cities have a typically Southern fronted nucleus in ow, e.g. aout (out); more northerly Midland cities tend not to. Labov on this basis divides the area horizontally into a North Midland and South Midland. Previous researchers have also seen east-west distinctions, separating the Pennsylvania dialect from those of the Lower Midwest. It should be mentioned that the South Midland described in Kurath 1949 and Kurath and McDavid 1961 is wholly different from Labov's, referring to the area here termed Mountain Southern. Kurath's “North Midland” is called here, as in Labov, simply Midland. Particularly Thomas merges the Midland with a large part of the West, while cordoning off the Northwest and Southwest Coast with, as he admits, “ill-defined” boundaries. Modern linguists have been sharply critical of the now disused term “General American” but it seems that in the early 20th century a huge area of the country used a quite similar phonology.

Phonology

1) Midland speech is firmly rhotic.

2) A well-known phonological difference between the Midland and the North is that the word on contains the phoneme /ɔ/ (as in caught) rather than /ɑ/ (as in cot).

3) In some areas, words like "roof" and "root" (which in many other dialects have the GOOSE vowel /u/) are pronounced with the FOOT vowel /ʊ/.

Phonetics

The North Midland and South Midland are both characterized by:

1) advanced fronting of /oʊ/: the phoneme /oʊ/ (as in boat) is fronter than in many other American accents, particularly those of the North; the phoneme is frequently realized as a diphthong with a central nucleus, approximating [ɵʊ].

2) advanced fronting of /aʊ/: the diphthong /aʊ/ (as in mouth) has a fronter nucleus than /aɪ/, approaching [æʊ].

Grammar

1) A common feature of the greater Midland area is so-called “positive anymore”: It is possible to use the adverb anymore with the meaning “nowadays” in sentences without negative polarity, such as Air travel is inconvenient anymore.

2) Many speakers, especially in the Western Pennsylvania area, use the construction need + past participle, as in the car needs washed, where speakers of other dialects would say needs to be washed or needs washing.

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 General American accent is considered to be most “neutral” and free of regional characteristics. It 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. As for the Midland accent, it is spoken in the middle part of USA, and the structure of this accent have a lot in common in general, but still phonetics of each district has some peculiarities and differs from one region to another. In conclusion it should be noted that the Midland regional accent of American English, especially its North variety, is most closely approximates General American.

Sources

1. Carver, Craig M. (1989). American Regional Dialects: A Word Geography, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

2. Cassidy, F. G. (1985). The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE). Cambridge: Belknap Press.

3. Kortman, B. (2005). English Linguistics: Essentials (Anglistik – Amerikanistik), Cornelsen Verlag.

4. Kortmann, B., Schneider, E. W. (2004). A handbook of Varieties of English, Vol. 1, Phonology, Mouton de Gruyter.

5. Labov, W., Sharon A., Charles B. (2006). The Atlas of North American English. Berlin: Mouton-de Gruyter.

6. Metcalf, A. (2000). How We Talk, Houghton Mifflin, Boston.

7. Wolfram, W., Schilling-Estes, N. (1998). American English: Dialects and variation. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.