page_title: Inland Northern American English
hierarchical_section_title: Inland Northern American English
caption_attribution_description: English: A map of the Inland North dialectal region according to Labov et al (2006) .
context_page_description: Inland Northern English, also known in American linguistics as the Inland North or Great Lakes dialect, is an American English dialect spoken primarily by White Americans in a geographic band reaching from Central New York westward along the Erie Canal, through much of the U.S. Great Lakes region, to eastern Iowa. The most innovative Inland Northern accents are spoken in Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse. A geographic corridor reaching from Chicago southwest along historic Route 66 into St. Louis, Missouri, has also been infiltrated by features of the Inland Northern accent, with the corridor today showing a mixture of both Inland Northern and Midland accents. Linguists often characterize the western Great Lakes region's dialect as the separate North-Central American English.
  The early 20th-century accent of the Inland North was the basis for the term "General American", though the regional accent has since altered, due to its now-defining chain shift of vowels that began as late as the 1930s.
context_section_description: Inland Northern (American) English, also known in American linguistics as the Inland North or Great Lakes dialect, is an American English dialect spoken primarily by White Americans in a geographic band reaching from Central New York westward along the Erie Canal, through much of the U.S. Great Lakes region, to eastern Iowa. The most innovative Inland Northern accents are spoken in Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse. A geographic corridor reaching from Chicago southwest along historic Route 66 into St. Louis, Missouri, has also been infiltrated by features of the Inland Northern accent, with the corridor today showing a mixture of both Inland Northern and Midland accents. Linguists often characterize the western Great Lakes region's dialect as the separate North-Central American English.
  The early 20th-century accent of the Inland North was the basis for the term "General American", though the regional accent has since altered, due to its now-defining chain shift of vowels that began as late as the 1930s. A 1969 study first formally showed lower-middle-class women leading the regional population in the first two stages (raising of the TRAP vowel and fronting of the LOT vowel) of what, since the 1970s onward, has been documented as the five-stage Northern Cities Vowel Shift. Some recent evidence has suggested a reversal of some of the shift's features in certain locations.
caption: This map shows, with red circles, the exact cities identified within the Inland North dialect region, according to Labov et al.'s (2006) ANAE.
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