Competing Reflexive Models of Regional Speech in Northern Ohio

Campbell-Kibler (2012) argued that the “northern” or Cleveland accent has been developing as a register (Agha 2003, 2007) in Ohio, primarily positioned as an unstigmatized and idiosyncratic form of linguistic difference from an imagined central Ohio norm. The current study examines northern Ohioans’ orientation to this construct within a larger understanding of their sociolinguistic imagining of Ohio. Northerners are found to share many language ideologies with other Ohioans, including a focus on north-to-south variation, an emphasis on rural versus urban language difference, and a belief in the local existence of unaccented, educated, normative speech. They differ from other Ohioans in sometimes conceptualizing urban speech as standard, failing to mark central Ohio as a distinct region, and subdividing the northeast (their own region) in a Cleveland-centered small region and a larger northeast corner of the state.Most importantly, they differ from central Ohioans in their treatment of the linguistic diff...