North[edit]

The traditional and linguistically conservative North (as defined by the Atlas of North American
English) includes /r/ being often raised or fronted, or both, as well as a firm resistance to the cot-
caught merger. Maintaining these two features, but also developing several new ones, a younger
accent of the North is now predominating at its center, around the Great Lakes and away from the
Atlantic coast: the Inland North.
Inland North[edit]
Main article: Inland Northern American English

This map shows the approximate extent of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, and thus the approximate area
where the Inland North dialect predominates. Note that the region surrounding Erie, Pennsylvania is excluded.

The Inland North is a dialect region once considered the home of "standard Midwestern" speech that
was the basis for General American in the mid-20th century. However, the Inland North dialect has
been modified in the mid-1900s by the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCS), which is now the region's
main outstanding feature. The Inland North is centered on the area on the U.S. side of the Great
Lakes, most prominently including central and western New York
State (including Syracuse, Binghamton, Rochester, and Buffalo), much of Michigan's Lower
Peninsula (Detroit, Grand Rapids), Toledo, Cleveland, Chicago, Gary, and
southeastern Wisconsin (Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha), but broken up by the city of Erie, whose
accent today is non-Inland Northern and even Midland-like. The NCS itself is not uniform throughout
the Inland North; it is most advanced in Western New York and Michigan, and less developed
elsewhere. The NCS is a chain shift involving movements of six vowel phonemes: the raising,
tensing, and diphthongization of // towards [] in all environments (cat being pronounced more like
"kyat"), then the fronting of // to [a] (cot sounding like cat), then the lowering
of // towards [] (caught sounding like cot, but without the two merging due to the previous step),
then the backing and sometimes lowering of //, toward either [] or [], then the backing and
rounding of // towards [], so that (cut sounding like caught), then lastly the lowering and backing
of // (but without any pinpen merger).

New England[edit]
New England does not form a single unified dialect region, but rather houses as few as four native
varieties of English, with some linguists identifying even more. Only Southwestern New England
(Connecticut and western Massachusetts) neatly fits under the aforementioned definition of "the
North". Otherwise, speakers, namely of Eastern New England, show very unusual other qualities. All
of New England has a nasal short-a system, meaning that the short-a vowel most strongly raises
before nasal consonants, as in much of the rest of the country.
Northeastern New England[edit]
Main article: Eastern New England English
Further information: Boston accent and Maine accent
The local and historical dialect of the coastal portions of New England, sometimes called Eastern
New England English, now only encompasses Northeastern New England: Maine, New
Hampshire (some of whose urban speakers are retreating from this local accent), and
eastern Massachusetts (including Greater Boston). The accents spoken here share the Canadian
raising of /a/ as well as often /a/, but they also possess the cot-caught merger, which is not
associated with rest of "the North". Most famously, Northern New England accents (with the
exception of Northwestern New England, much of southern New Hampshire, and Martha's Vineyard)
are often non-rhotic. Some Northeastern New England accents are unique in North America for
having resisted what is known as fatherbother merger: in other words, the stressed vowel
phonemes of father and bother remain distinct as /a/ and //, so that the two words do not rhyme as
they do in most American accents. Many Eastern New England speakers also once had a class of
words with "broad a"that is, /a/ as in father in words that in most accents contain //, such
as bath, half, and can't, similar to their pronunciation in London and southern England. The
distinction between the vowels of horse and hoarse is maintained in traditional non-rhotic New
England accents as [hs] for horse (with the same vowel as cot and caught) vs. [hos] for hoarse,
though the horsehoarse merger is certainly on the rise in the region today. In other words,
the // phoneme has highly distinct allophones before nasal consonants. /r/ fronting is usual.
Rhode Island[edit]
Rhode Island, dialectally identified as "Southeastern New England", is sometimes grouped with the
Eastern New England dialect region, both by the dialectologists of the mid20th century and in
certain situations by the Atlas of North American English; it shares Eastern New England's traditional
non-rhoticity (or "R Dropping"). A key linguistic difference between Rhode Island and the rest of the
Eastern New England, however, is that Rhode Island is subject to the fatherbother merger and yet
neither the cotcaught merger nor /r/ fronting. Indeed, Rhode Island shares with New York and
Philadelphia an unusually high and back allophone of // (as in caught), even compared to other
communities that do not have the cotcaught merger. In the Atlas of North American English, the city
of Providence (the only Rhode Island community sampled by the Atlas) is also distinguished by
having the backest realizations of /u/, /o/, and /a/ in North America. Therefore, Rhode Island
English aligns in some features more with Boston English and other features more with New York
City English.
Western New England[edit]
Recognized by research since the 1940s is the linguistic boundary between Eastern and Western
New England, the latter settled from the Connecticut and New Haven colonies, rather than
the Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies. Western New Englanders settled most upstate New
York the Inland North. Dialectological research has revealed some phonological nuances separating
a Northwestern and Southwestern New England accent. Vermont, sometimes dialectally identified
as "Northwestern New England", has the full cot-caught merger and /r/ fronting of Boston or Maine
English, and yet none of the other marked features of Eastern New England, nor much evidence of
the NCS, which is more robustly documented, though still variable, in Southwestern New England.
Rhoticity predominates in all of Western New England, as does the fatherbother merger of the rest
of the nation. Southwestern New England merely forms a "less strong" extension of the Inland North
dialect region, and it centers on Connecticut and western Massachusetts. It shows the same general
phonological system as the Inland North, including variable elements of Northern Cities Vowel Shift
(NCS)for instance, an // that is somewhat higher and tenser than average, an // that is fronter
than //, and so on. The caughtcot merger is approximated in western Massachusetts but usually
still resisted in Connecticut. The "tail" of Connecticut may have some character diffused from New
York City English.

North Central[edit]
Main article: North-Central American English
The North Central or Upper Midwest dialect region of the United States extends from the Upper
Peninsula of Michigan westward across northern Minnesota and North Dakota into the middle
of Montana. Although the Atlas of North American English does not include the North Central region
as part of the North proper, it shares all of the features listed above as properties of the North as a
whole. The North Central is a linguistically conservative region; it participates in few of the major
ongoing sound changes of North American English. Its /o/ (GOAT and /e/ (FACE) vowels are
frequently even monophthongs: [o] and [e], respectively. The movie Fargo, which takes place in the
North Central region, famously features strong versions of this accent.[32] Unlike most of the rest of
the North, the cotcaught merger is prevalent in the North Central region.