Do speakers' beliefs about language impact the variants they produce? Investigating style shifting in the Northern Cities Shift

Whereas previous studies show that language attitudes influence the use of dialectal features in production (see Preston, 2011), little is known about how language attitudes influence language change. This study probes the role of language attitudes on production during dialect attrition by investigating two of the Northern Cities Shift (NCS) vowels in the English of Lower Michiganders: the raising and fronting of /æ/ and the fronting of /ɑ/. The NCS dialect is receding in Lower Michigan (Nesbitt, 2021a) and some Michiganders are aware that it is a regional marker (Nesbitt, 2021b). In this study, 41 participants completed two tasks: (1) production (spontaneous speech and wordlist) and (2) attitudes elicitation (NCS talker versus “Standard American English” talker). Our results show that as participants increasingly rate the NCS talker as speaking a lesser-quality English than the non-NCS talker, participants have increasingly lower /æ/ vowels (p = 0.0451) and increasingly posterior /ɑ/ vowels (p = 0.0057) in wordlist speech than spontaneous speech. There is no impact of attitudes on /æ/ fronting. This study is the first to suggest that some Michiganders style shift away from the NCS. Furthermore, we argue that speakers with the greatest preference for “Standard American English” are the drivers of this sociolinguistic conditioning.