over a very large geographic area, and it’s been gaining speed for a long
time.
In my mid-twenties I moved from Chicago (where I was born and raised)
to New Jersey. It was at that point that my own participation in the NCCS
was terminated. By that I mean that because I was no longer living in a
NCCS community, I was no longer exposed and thus I was immune to the
social forces and pressures behind the shifts. Now, some twenty-five years
later, I talk to friends still living on the Northwest side of Chicago once in a
while, and it’s always a bit of a surprise – even a shock – to hear how far the
NCCS has progressed in the time I’ve been gone. I pronounce block with /α/,
but the people I grew up with now say it with /æ/, which to me sounds like
the word black.
It’s important to remember that a series of shifts like the NCCS rolls
along well below the level of consciousness. No one makes a decision to
participate or not participate. Of course, changes (in whole or part) can be
and will be resisted, but by groups rather than individuals. For example,
race and ethnicity have something to do with whether an individual
participates in the NCCS, as Gordon established in a study of speakers in
North-West Indiana (2000: 122). He found evidence that participation in the
chain shift “generally serves to distinguish the speech of whites from that of
Mexicans and African Americans.”
Changes in progress proceed in tiny steps that go unnoticed by the
participants until large-scale restructuring of the vowel system has become
so distinctive that it begins to be identified with a particular geographic
area. For example, many people today would say that Chicago has a
distinctive accent; twenty-five years ago, it did not. That is, the NCCS has
advanced to the point that people have come to notice it;^5 before this point,
Chicago was just “Midwestern” English.
The NCCS is a hugely complex set of changes distributed over time,
space and a dozen different social categories. You may be deeply invested in
it, yourself.
Lexical variation