Philadelphia shifts to a Northern accent, research indicates
Monday, March 25, 2013 - 23:00
in Earth & Climate
The traditional Southern inflections associated with the Philadelphia regional accent are increasingly being displaced by Northern influences. A recent study supported by the National Science Foundation documents this trend through an analysis of Philadelphia neighborhood speech patterns over more than a century. The study, "A Hundred Years of Sound Change," to be published in the March 2013 issue of the scholarly journal Language, is authored by University of Pennsylvania linguists William Labov, Ingrid Rosenfelder and Josef Fruehwald.