Escaping theTrap: Losing the Northern Cities Shift in Real Time

Abstract

AbstractWe examine the loss of the Northern Cities Shift raising oftrapin Ogdensburg, a small city in rural northern New York. Although data from 2008 showed robusttrap-raising among young people in Ogdensburg, in data collected in 2016 no speakers clear the 700-Hz threshold for NCS participation in F1 oftrap—a seemingly very rapid real-time change. We find apparent-time change in style-shifting: although older people raisetrapmore in wordlist reading than in spontaneous speech, younger people do the opposite. We infer that increasing negative evaluation of the feature led Ogdensburg speakers to collectively abandon raisingtrapbetween 2008 and 2016. This indicates a role for communal change in the transition of a dialect feature from an indicator to a marker.