The Foot of the Lake

Abstract

In 2013, Dinkin reported an unexpectedly sharp dialect boundary in northern New York between the communities of Ogdensburg and Canton in St. Lawrence County: Ogdensburg exhibited the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCS) and very little evidence of the low back merger, while Canton showed low back merger nearing completion and no NCS. This article investigates the nature of this dialect boundary via new sociolinguistic interview data from eight neighboring communities: four along the St. Lawrence River and four 25 miles south of it. An east-west division is observed in merger incidence: the four communities to the west, including Ogdensburg, show relatively robust lot-thought distinction, though apparent-time trends toward merger exist; east of Ogdensburg, the merger is much more advanced. A similar sharp boundary may hold for the NCS raising of trap (though the data are spottier due to the NCS’s obsolescence). The geographical sharpness of this boundary suggests that it is not due merely to socioeconomic differences between communities. It may be due to historical patterns of transportation: in the nineteenth century, Ogdensburg was the easternmost navigable point of the upper St. Lawrence River, meaning communities east of Ogdensburg were not directly accessible to the Great Lakes shipping network. keywords: low back merger, Northern Cities Shift, dialect geography, Inland North, North Country The inland north of the United States is a dialect region in flux. Labov, Ash, and Boberg’s Atlas of North American English (2006) portrayed the region, stretching along the Great Lakes from Upstate New York to Wisconsin, as maintaining or even increasing its distinctiveness from other dialect regions. While the merger of the low back lot and thought vowel phonemes was in progress or complete in the majority of North American dialect regions, the Inland North appeared to show “stable resistance” to the merger in the Atlas data, collected in the 1990s. The characteristic chain shift of the region, the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), involving the fronting of lot, the fronting and raising of trap, the lowering of thought, and other changes, was in progress in apparent time to the extent that it was one of Labov, Ash, and Boberg’s most prominent examples of North American dialect regions diverging from each other. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/95/3/321/815823/0950321.pdf by SAN DIEGO STATE UNIV, ajd@post.harvard.edu on 07 August 2020 american speech 95.3 (2020) 322 In the years since the publication of Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006), however, it has become clear that the Inland North’s stable distinctiveness was short-lived. The backing of lot across all of Upstate New York, documented in Dinkin (2011), is both a retreat from the NCS and progress toward the low back merger. Driscoll and Lape (2015) find nearly all of the NCS features retreating in apparent time in Syracuse, New York; Milholland (2018) finds the same in Buffalo. Wagner et al. (2016), Morgan et al. (2017), and Nesbitt (2018), among others, have reported retreat from both raised trap and fronted lot in Michigan. McCarthy (2011), D’Onofrio and Benheim (2018), and Durian and Cameron (2018) have all reported the loss of some or all NCS features in Chicago among at least some groups of speakers. Several studies, including Driscoll and Lape (2015), Nesbitt and Mason (2016), and Thiel and Dinkin (2017), have suggested that retreat from the NCS features is due to growing negative social evaluation of its features. With regard to lot, I have proposed (Dinkin 2011) that the backing of lot is spreading into the Inland North from adjacent regions where the low back merger is well established, such as Canada; this argument is based on data collected in 2006–8 showing that the Inland North communities displaying the most evidence of low back merger in progress are those closest to the Canadian border, at the northern edge of New York State. Also at the northern edge of New York is a dialect region termed the North Country,1 which lacks the NCS and is the only dialect region in upstate New York where the merger appeared to be well established at the time of that fieldwork. An outstanding conundrum in the dialectology of the NCS is the nature of the border between the Inland North and the North Country. In data collected in 2008, I found a sharp dialect border in St. Lawrence County, New York (Dinkin 2013), between the city of Ogdensburg and the village of Canton, near the northern border of the state. Ogdensburg is an Inland North city, in which the majority of speakers sampled showed substantial NCS raising of trap and fronting of lot, and none had full merger of lot and thought. In Canton, nearly all speakers sampled had lot and thought at least partially merged in minimal-pair judgments, and no NCS raising of trap was in evidence; on the basis of this, Canton was assigned to the North Country. The apparent dialect boundary between these two communities is quite sharp; Ogdensburg and Canton are only 20 miles apart, in a sparsely populated rural region with no settlements of appreciable size between them, so it is not possible for there to be a gradual geographic transition from the Inland North pattern to the North Country pattern. In an earlier article (Dinkin 2013), I was not able to completely explain the presence of this sharp dialect boundary, describing it as a topic that “would benefit from additional data collection” (28). Elsewhere in New York State, the geographical limit of the Inland North dialect region was found to Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article-pdf/95/3/321/815823/0950321.pdf by SAN DIEGO STATE UNIV, ajd@post.harvard.edu on 07 August 2020 The Foot of the Lake 323 be determined by early-nineteenth-century settlement patterns: communities that were principally founded by westward migration from western New England exhibit the NCS (see also Boberg 2001 on the relationship between western New England and the NCS), while communities in which New England settlement played little to no role belong to a different dialect region, the Hudson Valley. This explanation, however, is not fully satisfying for the boundary between Ogdensburg and Canton, inasmuch as their settlements both apparently derive from western New England.2 Now that the gradual loss of the NCS has been documented throughout the Inland North region, however, an alternative possibility presents itself: perhaps the dialect boundary between Ogdensburg and Canton is illusory. If the NCS is being lost and trends toward the low back merger are initiated throughout the Inland North, perhaps Canton was once an Inland North community as well and is merely an early adopter of trends that are now beginning to be visible throughout the region. If the loss of the NCS is driven by social stigma associated with it or by contact with speakers from non–Inland North regions, Canton’s status as a college town with a more middle-class population might account for the absence of the NCS there in 2008. The principal research questions of this article are thus: What is the nature and cause of the dialect difference between Ogdensburg and Canton? Do they differ linguistically because they truly lie in separate regions or because of socioeconomic and demographic differences within a single region? To answer this question, we must examine the region surrounding Ogdensburg and Canton. A secondary question of interest is whether the advancement of lot-thought merger in northern New York is a result of diffusion from nearby Canada, and so the principal focus of analysis in this article will be the lot and thought vowels; but the most distinctive feature of the NCS, the raising of trap, will be examined as well.