THE PHONOLOGICAL STATUS OF WESTERN NEW ENGLAND

Abstract

�The variety of American English spoken in western New England has received relatively little attention compared to other regional varieties of American English. In fact, though Western New England (WNE) has been identified as a separate dialect area in major studies of the dialect geography of American English, this status has been promulgated in part on data of limited quantity or problematic quality, and the character of WNE speech has remained essentially unknown (except, of course, to those who live there). The obscurity of WNE English is likely due to the absence of major cities in the region, as well as to its small geographic size. While most Americans have at least a stereotypical idea of what the speech of other dialect regions sounds like—for instance, the South, the West, the MidAtlantic, the Inland North, or Eastern New England (ENE)—few would have any idea at all of how people from WNE sound. Even many dialectologists would be hard pressed to identify a set of features that define and unify WNE as a region distinct from those around it; a commonly held view is that it is really part of the Inland North or a transition zone between ENE and the Inland North. This paper seeks to rectify this situation by presenting new data on the phonology of WNE, specifically on its phonemic inventory and the status of its low vowels. These data motivate a revised view of the place of WNE in the taxonomy of North American dialect regions and of its internal dialect geography. Moreover, because of the historical importance of WNE as the staging ground for settlement of the Inland North, these data have an added interest in that they might illuminate the origins of Inland Northern speech and particularly of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift. They suggest that the initial conditions from which the Northern Cities Vowel Shift developed originate in WNE, rather than in the Inland North itself.