The University Next Door: Sound Change in an Urban Rochester Neighborhood

Recent studies have documented the retreat of the Northern Cities Shift (NCS) in the Inland North, as well as the advance of a split between pre-nasal and pre-oral /æ/ (B at/Ban Split) and a merger of /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ ( cot and caught , Low-Back Merger) in dialects throughout North America. The present study investigates the status of these three changes-in-progress for fifteen speakers in an urban neighborhood of Rochester, New York, located in close proximity to a university. Our analysis draws on a series of oral history interviews collected in collaboration with a neighborhood organization, alongside participant observation in the community. We describe the clear progression in apparent time of the three dialect features within one Rochester family, then zoom out to the sample as a whole. In the larger sample we find evidence for the presence of both the “new” and “old” dialect features but find that it is not as simple as advance and retreat in apparent time. Rather, we conclude that the social meaning of the NCS is undergoing incipient change and displays a great deal of variability as a marker of localness in the community. Our findings also highlight an underexplored social factor in the study of language change: interaction with higher education, particularly as it relates to sense of place. Rather than analyzing education as a proxy for social class, we propose that higher education impacts sound change in a more nuanced way: through its impact on local culture and social networks, as well as its influence on speakers’ access to and awareness of local and supralocal features and evaluation of what it means to be local.