page_title: Midland American English
section_title: Western Pennsylvania
hierarchical_section_title: Midland American English / Original and former Midland / Western Pennsylvania
caption_attribution_description: The vowel space of Western Pennsylvania; based on data from Labov et al., The Atlas of North American English
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: The emerging and expanding dialect of western and much of central Pennsylvania is, for many purposes, an extension of the South Midland; it is spoken also in Youngstown, Ohio, ten miles west of the state line, as well as Clarksburg, West Virginia. Like the Midland proper, the Western Pennsylvania accent features fronting of /oʊ/ and /aʊ/, as well as positive anymore. Its chief distinguishing features, however, also make it a separate dialect than the Midland one. These features include a completed LOT–THOUGHT merger to a rounded vowel, which also causes a chain shift that drags the STRUT vowel into the previous position of LOT. The Western Pennsylvania accent, lightheartedly known as "Pittsburghese", is perhaps best known for the monophthongization of MOUTH to PALM (/aʊ/ to [aː]), such as the stereotypical Pittsburgh pronunciation of downtown as dahntahn. Despite having a Northern accent in the first half of the 20th century, Erie, Pennsylvania, is the only major Northern city to change its affiliation to Midland by now using the Western Pennsylvania accent.
caption: Based on Labov et al., averaged F1/F2 means for speakers from Western PA. The merger of /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ is complete for 11 out of 14 speakers;[10] /ʌ/ is backer and lower than in the rest of the North Midland.
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