Style in Sound Change: Chicago Adolescents’ Social Evaluations of the Northern Cities Shift

Recent evidence from production studies and meta-linguistic commentary suggests that the Northern Cities Shift (NCS) is rising above the level of consciousness to become negatively evaluated, thus prompting its reversal in apparent time. This study probes Chicago-area adolescents’ social evaluations of salient NCS-implicated vowels via a matched guise task. Since the social meanings of linguistic features are determined through their co-occurrence with other features in styles, NCS vowels are examined in combination with (dh)-stopping, itself a cue to lower socioeconomic status. Results suggest that adolescents are aware of the community-level distribution of these variables, reflecting the class- and age-linked patterning of NCS reversal in Chicago, and that the social meanings of this change in progress are evaluated in the context of broader styles.