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Abstract

The Northern Cities Shift, a chain shift of the short vowel of American English by speakers of and around the major cities in the American North, is the most prominent change in progress in the field of sociolinguistics today. While a number of studies have been conducted on the shift, most of them focus on the major cities and many neglect the effect this change in pronunciation has on smaller towns. The eastern boundary of the geographical span of the shift is located somewhere in Massachusetts, a state with distinctly different pronunciations in its western and eastern parts. In the present study the effects of the Northern Cities Shift are being analyzed in a community that is located on the boarder of the area the shift has affected. Amherst, MA, as a small town with strong academic influence does not appear to harbor a speech community that shows elements of the shift. Yet, traces of the shift have already been found in a pilot project conducted in 2009/2010. The present study expands the previous study both in the number of informant and the extent to which the data collected is analyzed. The extraction of data from speech samples is a complex and highly discussed endeavor, as a reliable way of numerically representing spoken sounds is sought. Different methods have been tested and are discussed, and the most reliable one, in the eyes of the author, is executed. The sociolinguistic variable Gender yields that women tend more toward the standard pronunciation of American English, i.e. men display more features of the Northern Cities Shift. The sociolinguistic variable Age shows strong variation. Based on apparent-time analysis it can be deducted that elements of the NCS infiltrated the Amherst speech community already in the first half of the 20th century and the shift progressed in the second half. However, the youngest informants show that the recently there has been a trend away from the shifted variety back toward the standard pronunciation.