Generational Phases: Toward the Low-Back Merger in Cooperstown, New York

Abstract

This paper reports on a new sociolinguistic sample of Cooperstown, a village in rural central New York. Previous research suggested Cooperstown was losing the Northern Cities Shift (NCS) and acquiring the low back merger via koineization as a result of dialect contact among locally-born children of parents from other regions. The new data shows abrupt retreat from NCS patterns between the Baby Boom generation and Generation X. A “phase transition” pattern is observed in progress toward the low back merger: Millennial women are the first to describe low back minimal pairs as merged, despite no appreciable difference between Millennials and Generation X in production of the low back vowels. No evidence is found to support the hypothesis that koineization is responsible for these changes; it appears that Cooperstown is subject to the same trend away from NCS documented in many other communities, subject to many of the same constraints.