It’s all Whopperjawed in the Black Swamp

So you’re from the Toledo area and you hear about work being done on dialects and you ask yourself, “I don’t have one if I’m from Toledo, right?” Wrong. You do and just don’t realize how special your dialect is, especially if you are from Maumee, the city that I am studying.

Why is Toledo so special and why am I studying Maumee? Well, Toledo and its suburbs are from a specific region in the United States that is undergoing what is called the Northern Cities Sound Shift (NCS). This shift spans from all the way up in Saginaw down to right around Dayton, Ohio, and then all throughout the Great Lakes region. 

Toledo happens to fall smack in the middle of this shift. The best known sound shift (known as the Great Vowel Shift) started around the year 1400 and continued to morph into the English you know and love today. What makes the NCS different from the Great Vowel Shift is that our shift is relatively new and was hypothesized to have started right around 1900. It is the start of what is known in linguistics as a chain shift that will affect how English will sound hundreds of years from now. Some regions may only have the first of many stages in the chain, while others may have completed nearly 75 percent of it.

Since Toledo is a larger metropolitan area in the region of the shift, it will have some of it, but little work has been done to analyze exactly how much shifting is being done in Toledo. In my study, I am trying to rectify this research gap by studying a suburb of Toledo — Maumee. I am studying the phonetic features, or speech sounds, that characterizes the dialect of the Maumee speech community and am exploring whether the NCS has established itself within Maumee. 

My hypothesis is that since Maumee was historically isolated that it could be an isolated dialect of English unaffected by the NCS. If it is, then the permeability of the Northern Cities Sound Shift will need to be re-examined.

As evidenced by its history, Maumee was once isolated in terms of both diseases and geographical features which included the Black Swamp and the Maumee River. During the 1800s when Maumee was still a swamp land, it was fraught with diseases that included, but were not limited to malaria, yellow fever, cholera, smallpox, typhoid, and measles. As a result of the diseases, travelers heading west would avoid the area, and Maumee residents ostracized members of their community who were caught having any diseases. Their hope was that the diseases would not spread; however, they still spread as a result of sanitation problems and the rampant mosquito population. 

This ostracization was, in effect, good for the town. It not only helped to protect them from death, but also created what is known in sociolinguistics as solidarity, which is the feeling or action that binds a community together. With Maumee allowing itself to only communicate internally and with outsiders avoiding the area, it only further increased the bond that held the community together and isolated it from other speech communities. This historic isolation points to the possibility that Maumee could be a dialectal isolate. If Maumee is in fact an isolate, then the NCS is not as permeable as once thought.

In order to analyze the dialect, I will collect data on phonetic features, which can be a tricky process. First and foremost, the recording equipment needs to be cooperative. If the recorder somehow dies during a session, then all the data is lost. Secondly, you need to have participants that fit the schema. 

For Maumee, I’m collecting data from participants 18+ who have lived in Maumee essentially their entire lives. After collecting data from as many people as possible, I then have to spend hours analyzing the recordings. On a good day, processing a recording takes an hour for every minute of recording. The processing will focus on specific phonetic features known as formants. These formants when looked through a spectrogram (think of it as an x-ray of a sound wave) form bands at various frequencies. I will take the first formant band and compare it against the second formant band for every vowel and for every speaker. 

After comparing and crunching numbers, I will hopefully be able to determine whether the Maumee speech community is an isolate of the Northern Cities Shift and if it is, then there will need to be more studies done on its permeability.