Labovian road trip

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 3/17/06, Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
> http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/03/17/travel/escapes/17accent.html
[snip]
"Nobody with the Chicago-Rochester dialect makes a fuss about it,"
Professor Labov said. "They aren't as self-conscious or aware of it.
Give a New Yorker or a Southerner a piece of paper with a word on it
and ask them to say it, they'll start sweating."

Those Inland North folk may start getting self-conscious if there are
many more articles like this one:

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http://www.democratandchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060316/NEWS01/603160373/1002/NEWS
Vowels speak volumes among 'funny-talking' Raachesterians
(March 16, 2006) — We may not know it, we may deny it and we might
even be embarrassed about it, but a Pennsylvania linguist insists we
talk funny in Raachester.
William Labov, a linguistics professor at the University of
Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, calls our dialect the "northern city
shift," claiming we say our vowels a bit more oddly than other parts
of the country.
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--Ben Zimmer

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