U.S. dialectological and sociolinguistic research has frequently centered more ideologically prominent, or prototypical, populations’ identities and language. White, nonurban, older, rural men were historically the primary focus of U.S. dialectologists, and regional dialects were defined by their language (Wolfram & Schilling, 2015). In the absence of an ideologically prominent population or language variety, populations like Asian Americans are left understudied in sociolinguistics and other fields (Lo & Reyes, 2007). Instead of an ethnolect, Asian immigrants are linguistically associated with non-English languages and imperfectly acquired L2-accented English, while Asian Americans are considered to have fully assimilated to white (middle class) culture and language (Lo & Reyes, 2007; McGowan, 2015). Additionally, the emphasis on ethnically East Asian, coastal (especially Californian), and middle or upper middle class Asian Americans in social sciences leaves out non-East Asian, non-coastal, and working class Asian Americans (Lee, 2009; Lo & Reyes, 2007; Sumida, 1998). Work on less prototypical populations will expand paradigms of Asian American identity and language, diversifying the breadth of identity and language captured within “Asian American.” This project will examine whether speakers who are ethnically less prototypical in their region and regionally less prototypical among their ethnic group produce linguistic features associated with their regional identity. To this end, this project will focus on examining Chicago-area Japanese Americans’ regional, ethnic identities and their production of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift.

Though Chicago’s Asian American and Japanese American populations are not ideologically prominent and Asian Americans and Japanese Americans are not strongly associated with Chicago (Yuh, 2026), Chicago has a respectable Japanese American history and houses the 9th largest Japanese American population in the U.S. (Brooks, 2000; “Top 10 U.S. Metropolitan Areas by Japanese Population, 2019,” 2021). Linguistically, Chicago falls within the Inland North dialect region and is associated with production of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCS), which is associated with a particular white Chicagoan persona (D’Onofrio & Benheim, 2020; Labov et al., 2006). Recent work on the production of the NCS in Chicago has found that some Chicagoans, are reversing the NCS through apparent time (D’Onofrio & Benheim, 2020; McCarthy, 2011), which may be driven by speakers orienting away from the NCS-linked persona (D’Onofrio & Benheim, 2020). This project asks, do Chicago-area Japanese Americans exhibit reversal of the NCS through apparent time? Additionally, what particular Chicagoan JA identities are indexed by the NCS?

Following from projects with similar aims (Becker, 2010; Hall-Lew, 2009; King, 2018; Wong, 2015; et al.), I will collect sociolinguistic interviews with Chicago-area Japanese Americans to evaluate their production of NCS vowels. The first and second formants of KIT, DRESS, STRUT, THOUGHT, LOT, and TRAP will be extracted at the midpoint, then linear mixed effects models will be fit to these data to predict the formant values by speaker age, generation, and gender. In addition, qualitative data from participant observation and the sociolinguistic interviews will be used to interpret the intricacies of Chicagoland JAs’ regional and ethnic identities and the more nuanced and locally contextualized social meanings they index through the NCS. I will conduct a thematic analysis to parse out common “codes” that can be grouped into different “themes” in the qualitative data (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Dibbern, 2024). I expect to find a range in vowel production and identification with Chicagoan and Japanese American identity, but it remains to be seen how the two may be linked. This project will contribute to sociolinguistic theories on the relationships between language, race, and place by investigating the identities and language production of a population that is regionally less prototypical for its ethnic identity and ethnically less prototypical for its region. It will provide a broader picture of the kinds of speakers and the social meanings that are connected to the NCS in Chicago, extending beyond the most prototypical white residents who formed the basis for its description.