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Inland Northern American English


Inland Northern (American) English, also known in the United States as the Inland North or Great Lakes dialect, is an American English dialect spoken in a geographic band reaching from Central New York westward along the Erie Canal, through most of the U.S. Great Lakes region, to eastern Iowa. The most advanced Inland Northern accents are spoken in the cities of Chicago, Illinois; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Detroit, Michigan; Cleveland, Ohio; and Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse, New York. A geographic corridor that extends across a section of Illinois, reaching from Chicago into St. Louis, Missouri, has also been infiltrated by features of the Inland Northern accent, though not historically part of the Inland North dialect region.

The Inland North geographic region was once the home of a standard American pronunciation in the early 20th century,, though the regional dialect has since altered away from General American speech since the 1960s, due to its now-defining, innovative, mid-20th century "Northern cities" vowel shift.

The dialect region called the "Inland North" consists of western and central New York State (Utica, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Binghamton, Jamestown, Fredonia, Olean); northern Ohio (Akron, Cleveland, Toledo); Michigan's Lower Peninsula (Detroit, Flint, Grand Rapids, Lansing); northern Indiana (Gary, South Bend); northern Illinois (Chicago, Rockford); southeastern Wisconsin (Kenosha, Racine, Milwaukee); and, largely, northeastern Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley/Coal Region (Scranton, Wilkes-Barre). This is the dialect spoken in part of America's chief industrial region, an area sometimes known as the Rust Belt.


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