It is conducted by the University of Illinois at Chicago and Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania. This page will present information and updates related to the 5 Generations of Language Change in Chicago, IL Research Project. This Project is managed by David Durian, PhD, Department of English, Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania, and Richard Cameron, PhD, Department of Linguistics, University
of Illinois at Chicago. By 5 Generations, we mean here that we will be analyzing and investigating vowel variation and language change trends in the actual, real-world speech of 5 generations of Chicagoans born 1875 and later (to roughly 1990, or so). This will be done via the analysis of audio recordings of Chicagoans born during this time window and recorded for a variety of linguistics projects since 1960. These recordings include interviews conducted by linguists Lee Pederson, Roger Shuy, John Willis, Edward Callary, and Robin Herndobler, as well as recordings made by various interviewers for DARE (Dictionary of Regional English). In addition, both Richard Cameron and David Durian are including interviews recorded for their own studies of Chicago, conducted since 1997, in addition to analyzing the work of these others. In doing so, Durian and Cameron hope to analyze the speech of more than 100 Chicagoans and trace the inception and development of the Northern Cities Shift [NCS] in Chicago in real and apparent time. The NCS is an important series of rotations to the vowel system involving 5-6 vowel classes in modern English. These include the BAT, BET, BOT, BOUGHT, and BUT vowel classes, as well as, in some accounts, BIT (Labov, 1994; Eckert, 2000). In addition, Durian and Cameron will investigate such important questions as:
- When did the NCS first "start" in Chicago (and the Inland North more generally)?
- What is the true chronology of the order of the changes making up the NCS during the later half of the 19th and the early part of the 20th Century?
- What is the relationship of the development of the earliest stages of the NCS in Chicago to earlier patterns of vowel variation recently revealed in new instrumental re-studies of US English outside the Inland North among speakers born in the late 1800s and early 1900s (e.g., Thomas, 2006; Durian, 2012; Johnson & Durian, 2014)?
- Is the NCS beginning to show signs of "dissolving" in the Chicagoland area among younger speakers (b. 1975 and later) today? In later research, Durian and Cameron also hope to do some comparative analysis of the vowel systems of African American speakers and European American speakers born throughout much of this time period. This work will present the first detailed comparison of vowel systems among speakers of these groups since Pederson's (1965) study "The Pronunciation of English in Metropolitan Chicago," as well as the first detailed comparative instrumental analysis of vowel system differences and similarities among the speaker groups.
