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Three isoglosses identifying the NCVS. In the brown areas /ʌ/ is more retracted than /ɑ/. The blue line encloses areas in which /ɛ/ is backed. The red line encloses areas in which /æ/ is diphthongized to [eə] even before oral consonants. The areas enclosed by all three lines may be considered the "core" of the NCVS; it is most consistently present in Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Detroit, and Chicago. From Labov et al. 2006: 204. See: Inland Northern American English.

The Northern cities vowel shift is a chain shift in the sounds of some vowels in the dialect region of American English known as the Inland North.

It is called northern cities because it is taking place mostly in a broad swath of the United States around the Great Lakes, beginning some 50 miles west of Albany and extending west through Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Madison, and north to Green Bay (Labov et al. 187–208).

In this shift, the vowels in the words cat, cot, caught, cut, and ket have shifted from IPA: /[æ],[ɑ],[ɔ],[ʌ],[ɛ]/ toward [ɪə],[a],[ɑ],[ɔ],[ə], and, in addition, the vowel in kit (IPA [ɪ]) becomes more mid-centralized. Like most chain shifts, it is not complete in all areas at the same time: some but not all aspects of the shift can be found further afield. For example, the backing of /ɛ/ is found as far south as St. Louis and as far west as Cedar Rapids, and the diphthongization of /æ/ before oral consonants is found in parts of Minnesota (St. James, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Brainerd). Accents in which /ʌ/ is more retracted than /ɑ/ (whether by backing of /ʌ/, fronting of /ɑ/, or both) are encountered as far east as Providence, as far south as St. Louis, as far north as Bemidji, and as far west as Aberdeen (Labov et al. 204).

The trigger of this shift is the diphthongization of /æ/ into /ɪə/ (æ-tensing), a change identified as early as the 1960s. Then, /ɑ/ is pulled forward toward [a], occupying a position very close to the position of former /æ/, and in some very advanced speakers an identical position. The third stage is another pull, namely the lowering of /ɔ/ toward [ɑ]. The fourth stage is the backing of /ɛ/, a phonetic shift seen in some other accents, although less markedly and in fewer contexts; this is a push stage, because former /ɛ/ and fronted /æ/ sound similar, especially when /æ/ is not fully raised to [ɪə] but only to [eə]. The fifth stage is the backing of /ʌ/, pulled by /ɔ/ and at the same time pushed by /ɛ/. Finally, /ɪ/ is lowered and backed, although it is still distinct from /ɛ/ in all contexts. The shift is in progress throughout the Great Lakes cities, so some speakers might only have, for instance, the first two stages only, but none have, say, only the last stage.

The shift is found in mainly white speakers. Speakers of African American Vernacular English show little to no evidence of adopting the Northern Cities Shift. The shift has also not been adopted by Canadian speakers, despite the geographic proximity of millions of Canadians living near the United States border in the Great Lakes region and along the St. Lawrence.

• Great Vowel Shift

• Northern Cities Shift
• A National Map of The Regional Dialects of American English
• PBS resource from the show "Do you Speak American?"
• Detroit Area Vowels (bottom part of page) Sound files at Penelope Eckert's website
• The Guide to Buffalo English
• NPR interview with Professor William Labov about the shift

• Boberg, Charles (2000). "Geolinguistic Diffusion and the U.S.-Canada Border". Language Variation and Change 12:1–24
• Dinkin, Aaron (2007) and William Labov (2007). "Bridging the Gap: Dialect Boundaries and Regional Allegiance in Upstate New York". Paper presented at Penn Linguistics Colloquium 31.
• Gordon, Matthew J. (2001). Small-town Values and Big-city Vowels: A Study of the Northern Cities Shift in Michigan. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. ISBN 0-8223-6478-6. 
• Labov, William, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg (2006). The Atlas of North American English. Berlin: Mouton-de Gruyter. ISBN 3-11-016746-8.