Concluding remarks

In popular perception, the speech of the American Midwest and West is largely uniform and unremarkable. When asked to imitate the speech of a Southerner or a New Yorker, most Americans can comply even if they manage to offer only a stock phrase such as “Yall come back now, y’hear?” Asked to imitate the speech of someone from Kansas City or Denver or Portland, however, they are likely to reply with blank stares. The speech of these places does not draw comment, in part, because it is accepted as a kind of national norm. The accents of the West and Midwest tend to lack features that Americans perceive as regionally distinctive such as r-lessness. The fact that such regionally marked features are also very often avoided in the broadcast media contributes to this sense that “normal” speech is found in the West and Midwest. The label “General American” has been used to capture this notion of an unmarked accent that is heard across the nation outside of the South and the Atlantic Coast. Thus, the area originally associated with General American included not only those parts of the Midwest and West that are considered here but also the Great Lakes region. Nevertheless, with recent sound changes such as the Northern Cities Shift, the latter area, known to dialectologists as the Inland North, has grown more regionally distinctive and therefore has more difficulty passing for General American.

The description provided, serves to counter the popular sense of a monolithic General American accent. The speech of the West and Midwest is richly variable. We have discussed features that vary from one region to another as well as features that vary from one group of speakers to another within a given region. Many of these features involve active sound changes. Changes such as the low back merger or the fronting of back vowels, which already have a widespread distribution, appear to still be spreading. At the same time many localized features such as /æ/ tensing in Cincinnati or the merger of /ɔɹ/ and /ɑɹ/ in St. Louis are on the decline. These trends are characteristic of dialect leveling, a process that leads to the reduction of regional variation. It might appear, then, that the monolithic General American accent of popular perception will eventually become reality. However, the wheels of language change will keep turning, and new trends will emerge that will continue to contribute to the variable linguistic landscape.