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Midwestern or Upper Northern dialects or accents of American English are any of those associated with the Midwestern region of the United States, and they include: . General American English, the most widely perceived "mainstream" American English accent, sometimes considered "Midwestern" in character, particularly prior to the Northern Cities Vowel Shift.
The Linguistic Atlas of the Upper Midwest (LAUM), directed by Harold B. Allen, is a series of linguistic maps describing the dialects of the American Upper Midwest. LAUM consists of 800 maps over three volumes, with a map for each linguistic item surveyed.
North-Central American English is an American English dialect, or dialect in formation, native to the Upper Midwestern United States, an area that somewhat overlaps with speakers of the separate Inland Northern dialect situated more in the eastern Great Lakes region. [1]
Northern Cities Shift as a vowel chart, based on image in Labov, Ash, and Boberg (1997)'s "A national map of the regional dialects of American English". The Northern Cities Vowel Shift or simply Northern Cities Shift is a chain shift of vowels and the defining accent feature of the Inland North dialect region, though it can also be found ...
The dialect region "Midland" was first labeled in the 1890s, [13] but only first defined (tentatively) by Hans Kurath in 1949 as centered on central Pennsylvania and expanding westward and southward to include most of Pennsylvania, and the Appalachian regions of Kentucky, Tennessee, and all of West Virginia.
English-language scholar William A. Kretzschmar Jr. explains in a 2004 article that the term "General American" came to refer to "a presumed most common or 'default' form of American English, especially to be distinguished from marked regional speech of New England or the South" and referring especially to speech associated with the vaguely-defined "Midwest", despite any historical or present ...
Regional dialects in North America are historically the most strongly differentiated along the Eastern seaboard, due to distinctive speech patterns of urban centers of the American East Coast like Boston, New York City, and certain Southern cities, all of these accents historically noted by their London-like r-dropping (called non-rhoticity), a feature gradually receding among younger ...
North-Central American or Upper Midwestern English, based around Minnesota, northern Wisconsin, and North Dakota, may show some elements of the Northern cities vowel shift and the ANAE classifies it as a transitional dialect between the Inland North, Canada, and the West.