page_title: Midland American English
hierarchical_section_title: Midland American English
caption_attribution_description: English: This map show the Atlas of North American English's major studied cities in the Midland dialect region.
context_page_description: Midland American English is a regional dialect or super-dialect of American English, geographically lying between the traditionally-defined Northern and Southern United States. The boundaries of Midland American English are not entirely clear, being revised and reduced by linguists due to definitional changes and several Midland sub-regions undergoing rapid and diverging pronunciation shifts since the early-middle twentieth century onwards.
  These general characteristics of the Midland regional accent are firmly established: fronting of the, and vowels occurs towards the center or even front of the mouth; the cot–caught merger is neither fully completed nor fully absent; and short-a tensing evidently occurs strongest before nasal consonants. The currently-documented core of the Midland dialect region spans from central Ohio at its eastern extreme to central Nebraska and Oklahoma City at its western extreme. Certain areas outside of this core also clearly demonstrate a Midland accent, including Charleston, South Carolina; the Texan cities of Abilene, Austin, and Corpus Christi; and central and southern Florida.
context_section_description: Midland American English is a regional dialect or super-dialect of American English, geographically lying between the traditionally-defined Northern and Southern United States. The boundaries of Midland American English are not entirely clear, being revised and reduced by linguists due to definitional changes and several Midland sub-regions undergoing rapid and diverging pronunciation shifts since the early-middle twentieth century onwards.
  These general characteristics of the Midland regional accent are firmly established: fronting of the /oʊ/, /aʊ/, and /ʌ/ vowels occurs towards the center or even front of the mouth; the cot–caught merger is neither fully completed nor fully absent; and short-a tensing evidently occurs strongest before nasal consonants. The currently-documented core of the Midland dialect region spans from central Ohio at its eastern extreme to central Nebraska and Oklahoma City at its western extreme. Certain areas outside of this core also clearly demonstrate a Midland accent, including Charleston, South Carolina; the Texan cities of Abilene, Austin, and Corpus Christi; and central and southern Florida.
  Twentieth-century dialectology was the first to identify the "Midland" as a region lexically distinct from the Northern and Southern U.S., later even focusing on an internal division (North Midland versus South Midland); however, twenty-first-century studies now reveal increasing unification of the South Midland with a larger, newer Southern accent region, while much of the North Midland retains a more "General American" accent. Early twentieth-century boundaries established for the Midland dialect region are being reduced or revised, since several previous sub-regions of Midland speech have since developed their own distinct dialects. Pennsylvania, the original home state of the Midland dialect, is one such area, having now formed such unique dialects as Philadelphia and Pittsburgh English.
caption: According to Labov et al.'s (2006) ANAE, the strict Midland dialect region comprises the cities represented here by circles colored red (North Midland) and orange (South Midland). In the past, linguists considered the Midland dialect to cover an even larger area, extending eastward through Pennsylvania to the Atlantic Ocean.  The color blue on this map indicates the Inland North dialect, which is intruding southward into the middle of this region towards St. Louis, Missouri, Peoria, Illinois, and St. Louis, Missouri, show variation between the Midland and Inland North dialects.[1] The distinction between a North and a South Midland region is that the South Midland shows a tendency for extra features usually associated with Southern U.S. dialects: notably, strongest /oʊ/ fronting and a glide weakening of /aɪ/ before certain sonorant consonants.
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