Betsy Sneller
@betsysneller
Asst prof linguistics @ Michigan state. I like cats, fiber arts, people. I’ll finish the rest of this later.
Here's the isoglosses for the NCS. The upshot is: it's much broader than just Michigan, but Michigan is the central area where DRESS is lower than TRAP and COT is fronter than center. (that little tail follows the old Rte 66 down to St Louis) (15/n)
Okay. So the Northern Cities Shift (NCS for short) is a pattern of vowel shifts that are common in the Great Lakes area. There are 6, but the most important are the /æ/ vowel (the sound in "trap"), which is raised and often diphthongized, and the /ɑ/ vowel (sound in "cot"), which is fronted. (14/)
So we can plot a speaker's entire vowel space. In this case, I'm showing 7 vowels that are the most important for identifying Michigan English. I'll get to that in a second - the point here is to show that every speaker has a range for each vowel, but also a clear pattern of how the vowels relate.
Okay. Then we're going to take those F1 (Formant 1) and F2 values, and plot them. We put the axes going backwards, so that the result can match the shape of a vowel space, if we imagine a face facing left. So [i] is the vowel where your tongue is frontest and highest. [ɑ] is low and back. (12/n)
So let's zoom into one of those areas of dark bands. I'll highlight the first and second formants - those are the most important for vowel pronunciation. You can see I highlighted about 1/3 of the way through the vowel (red dashed line), and a Hz value is shown on the left (for the 1st formant)
So let's take a 2 word phrase. The top here shows the waveform - this will be familiar to most of you. The bottom is the spectrogram - it's a Fourier transform of the waveform. It shows us where energy is concentrated - those dark bands ("formants") show us where the vowels are. (10/n)
So anyway, we collect all these isoglosses, and see where they bundle. Some will be right on top of each other, others will be a little farther away. But the upshot is: we take the bundle of isoglosses and call that the dialect boundary. (6/n)
The way dialectologists define dialect areas is with bundles of isoglosses. An isogloss is a line between one dialect feature and another. So for instance: let's pretend this red line is the line between where people say "firefly" and where they say "lightning bug" (4/n)
This might have been more recognizable if I had brought my colored pencils with me to work but 🤷🏼♀️ BEHOLD THE QUEEN
Amazing! My version of this: left a pumpkin out too long after Halloween, now I’m growing my own 🎃
lol please enjoy the entirety of my chat history with microsoft copilot
Not to brag but I had a dazzling shower and musical mirror this morning - best day of #NWAV53??
RR gets *more* formal (more stylistic fronting) in 2009 after the economic crash - the opposite direction from her political party #NWAV53
Kiesling compares self-reported data from 2004 and 2023 - finding: 1) ppl use “dude” more with more close interlocutors 2) whether you’re talking w a man v woman matters less now (both similarly likely to be called “dude”) #NWAV53
“Dude” originally an insult (from “yankee doodle” in the 1880s), remaining w negative association in the 1940s/50s for zoot suiters #NWAV53
PVI (a measure of syllable vs stress timed speech - higher = more stress timed) Spkrs w more social groupings (eg friends from School, Home, Work) have higher PVI. regression on white spkrs also shows higher density networks = more stress timed #NWAV53
New day, new timeline cleanse. This time: names my toddler (3;0) has given her stuffies. She did this all on her own. I give you: Snow Leopard of the Valley
Not just bees! We also made friends with this moth #bloomscrolling
Look at this absolute unit hanging out on my bee balm #bloomscrolling
Timeline cleanse: some lil friends I made in my garden recently. #bloomscrolling