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Short of internalizing the IPA symbols and being able to "hear" them in my head as I read, I find my only avenue to really comprehend articles on this and alike subjects is to use the helpfully-provided rhymes. This article is a prime example of one that would benefit from recordings, because the subject matter is wholly auditory and the two current methods of explaining the subject matter are either inaccessible to the layperson, or a halfway measure dependent on the reader's own awareness of their distance from General American. 108.54.168.177 (talk) 15:27, 17 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]
You can't use rhymes on such pages because:
Dialects differ in the amount of vowels, and sometimes their distribution. As a non-native near-RP speaker, I differentiate /ɑː/ (as in "father") from /ɒ/ (as in "lot") and /ɔː/ (as in "thought"). Such three-way distinction is impossible in most US accents, where either /ɑː/ and /ɒ/ merge into [ɑː] (called father–bother merger) or, as in Boston, /ɒ/ and /ɔː/ merge into [ɒː] (called cot-caught merger). Furthermore, many US speakers have bothfather-bother and cot-caught mergers, and therefore use only one vowel, namely /ɑː/. See how complicated this is? And this is not even the end: some non-cot-caught-merged US accents have /ɔː/ in some words (like "dog"), which I (as well as most UK/Australian/New Zealand speakers) pronounce with /ɒ/.
Dialects differ considerably in the realization of vowels. It is also not unusual for realizations of one vowel from a certain accent to overlap the realization of another vowel in another accent - even in speakers within the same city. For instance, Cockneysoup may sound identically to RPsoap - [səʊp].[1]
At present this article cites only one article specifically about the Northern Cities Shift, Gordon 2001. Most of the citations appear to be descriptions of specific dialects (Hillenbrand 2003; Mannell 2009), though some do specifically mention Northern Cities Shift (e.g. Labov, Ash, and Boberg 1997). A quick skim of the article doesn't show anything I know to be false, but I'd prefer to see more citations of work specifically dealing with the chain shift in question. Cnilep (talk) 03:55, 1 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]
