Small-Town Values, Big-City Vowels

This book presents a sociolinguistic study of the Northern Cities Shift, a complex pattern of vowel changes heard across the traditional Inland North dialect region of the United States. The study reports on how residents of small towns are reacting to these changes, which are associated with urban speech. Utilizing both quantitative and qualitative evidence, the author offers a richly detailed account of the sociolinguistic distribution of the changes in the communities investigated. This work sheds new light on this important pattern of change as well as on the processes involved in the diffusion of language change in general. Matthew J. Gordon is Assistant Professor of English at Purdue University Calumet.