Recent acoustic analyses examining English in the North American great lakes region show that the area’s characteristic vowel chain shift, the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), is waning. Attitudinal analyses suggest that the NCS has lost prestige in some NCS cities, such that it is no longer regarded as ‘standard American English’. Socio-cultural and temporal accounts of capital loss and dialect decline remain unexplored, however. This paper examines F1, F2, and diphthongal quality of TRAP produced by 36 White speakers (18 women) in one NCS city—Lansing, Michigan—over the course of the 20th century. I show that TRAP realization is conditioned by gender and birth year, such that women led the change towards NCS realizations into the middle of the 20th century and then away from them thereafter. I discuss these findings against the backdrop of deindustrialization during this time of linguistic reorganization in Lansing. I show that as the regional industry—(auto) manufacturing—loses prestige, so does the regional variant—raised TRAP. This paper adds to our understanding of North American dialectology the importance of deindustrialization and the Baby Boomers to Generation Xer generational transition to our discussion of regional dialect maintenance.

中文翻译：

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北方城市的兴衰转变

最近对北美五大湖地区英语进行的声学分析表明，该地区特有的元音链转移，即北方城市转移 (NCS) 正在减弱。态度分析表明，NCS 在一些 NCS 城市已经失去声望，不再被视为“标准的美式英语”。然而，关于资本损失和方言衰落的社会文化和时间解释仍未探索。本文研究了 20 世纪期间，在一个 NCS 城市（密歇根州兰辛），由 36 位白人演讲者（18 名女性）制作的 TRAP 的 F1、F2 和双元音质量。我表明，TRAP 的实现受性别和出生年份的限制，因此女性在 20 世纪中叶引领 NCS 实现的变化，然后远离它们。我在兰辛语言重组时期的去工业化背景下讨论了这些发现。我表明，随着区域性行业——（汽车）制造业——失去声望，区域性变体——提高了 TRAP 也是如此。本文增加了我们对北美方言学的理解，即去工业化和婴儿潮一代向 Xer 一代过渡的重要性，以及我们对区域方言维护的讨论。