The Inland North

Many Americans might assume a description of Inland Northern speech to be unnecessary since in popular consciousness this region is known for its supposed lack of distinctive accent features. Together with the rest of the Midwest and West it represents the home of the “General American” accent. This label originally served to mark an accent lacking the features of the South and the Northeast. Dialectologists today have largely rejected the grouping of the area from Pennsylvania across the Great Lakes and the Midwest and westward to the Pacific as a single dialect, noting rightly the great diversity in speech habits within the region. Still, the notion of a General American dialect remains active in folk perceptions of American speech and represents a norm, a way of speaking that is unmarked regionally and socially. In fact, Inland Northern speech was actively promoted as a national standard. It is the variety described by John Kenyon in his popular textbook American Pronunciation, first published in 1924 (with multiple editions following). The dialect also became a model for the broadcast media, serving as the basis for the NBC Handbook of Pronunciation which first appeared in 1943. This sense that their speech represents a national standard remains strong today among Northerners despite the introduction there of a number of pronunciation features that distinguish Inland Northern voices from those heard in the national media.