The Midland dialect of American English was first defined by Hans Kurath (A Word Geography of the Eastern United States, 1949) as being the dialect spoken in an area centered on Philadelphia and expanding westward to include most of Pennsylvania and part of the Appalachian Mountains. Kurath and McDavid (The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States, 1961) later divided this region into two discrete subdivisions: the "North Midland" beginning north of the Ohio River valley area, and the "South Midland". Craig M. Carver (American Regional Dialects: A Word Geography, 1987) essentially renamed the North Midland the Lower North and the South Midland the Upper South. All these classifications were mostly based on lexical features.
Labov, Ash, and Boberg (The Atlas of North American English, 2006), based solely on phonology and phonetics, defined the Midland area as a buffer zone between the Inland North and the South; this area essentially coincides with Kurath and McDavid's North Midland, the "South Midland" being now reckoned as part of the South. Indeed, while the lexical and grammatical isoglosses follow the Appalachian Mountains, the accent boundary follows the Ohio River.
The (North) Midland is arguably the major region whose speech most closely approximates General American.[1]
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The North Midland and South Midland are both characterized by:[2]
The North Midland region stretches from east to west across central and southern Ohio, central Indiana, central Illinois, Iowa, and northern Missouri, as well as Nebraska and northern Kansas where it begins to blend into the West. Major cities of this dialect area include Kansas City, St. Louis, Columbus, Ohio, Cincinnati, and Indianapolis.
In addition to the fronting of the diphthongs /oʊ/ and /aʊ/, the North Midland exhibits the following distinctive features:[3]
The /æ/ phoneme (as in cat) shows most commonly a so-called "continuous" distribution: /æ/ is raised and tensed toward [eə] before nasal consonants and remains low [æ] before voiceless stop consonants, and other allophones of /æ/ occupy a continuum of varying degrees of height between those two extremes.
The dialect of Western Pennsylvania is, for many purposes, an eastern extension of the North Midland; it is spoken also in Youngstown, Ohio, ten miles west of the state line. Like the Midland proper, the Western Pennsylvania accent features fronting of /oʊ/ and /aʊ/, as well as positive anymore. The chief distinguishing feature of Western Pennsylvania as a whole is that the cot–caught merger is almost complete here (it is complete in Pittsburgh), whereas it is still in progress in most of the Midland. The merger has also spread from Western Pennsylvania into adjacent West Virginia, historically in the South Midland dialect region.
The city of Pittsburgh is considered to have a dialect of its own often known as "Pittsburghese". This region is additionally characterized by a sound change that is unique in North America: the monopthongization of /aʊ/ to [aː]. This is the source of the stereotypical Pittsburgh pronunciation of downtown as "dahntahn". Pittsburgh also features an unusually low allophone of /ʌ/ (as in cut); it approaches [ɑ] (/ɑ/ itself having moved out of the way and become a rounded vowel in its merger with /ɔ/).
Erie, Pennsylvania was described as being in the Northern dialect region in the first half of the 20th century. However, unlike other cities in the North, Erie underwent the caught–cot merger and not the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, and now Erie has at least as much in common linguistically with the rest of Western Pennsylvania as with the North. For this reason, Erie has been described as the only major city to change its affiliation from the North to the Midland.
The South Midland dialect region follows the Ohio River in a generally southwesterly direction, moving across from Kentucky, Southern Indiana, and Southern Illinois to southern Missouri, Arkansas, southern Kansas, and Oklahoma, west of the Mississippi river. Although historically more closely related to the North Midland speech, this region shows dialectal features that are now more similar to the rest of the South than the Midland, most noticeably the smoothing of the diphthong /ɑɪ/ to [ɑː], and the second person plural pronoun "you-all" or "y'all." Unlike the coastal South, however, the South Midland has always been a rhotic dialect, pronouncing /r/ wherever it has historically occurred. South Indiana is the northernmost extent of the South Midland region, forming what dialectologists refer to as the "Hoosier Apex" of the South Midland; the accent is locally known there as the "Hoosier Twang" where Interstate 64 is usually referred to as Sixty-For or U.S. 41 is casually referred to as Forty-One.
The phonology of the South Midland is discussed in greater detail in Southern American English.
St. Louis, Missouri is historically one among several (North) Midland cities, but it has developed some unique features of its own distinguishing it from the rest of the Midland.
Cincinnati has a phonological pattern quite distinct from the surrounding area (Boberg and Strassel 2000).