An Introduction to Midwest English

in American Voices
by Timothy C. Frazer 2006

The Midwest has many different accents; it is not homogenous Standard English. AAVE came up during the great migration, but there are differences in AAVE accents between north and south. SOutherners came to the Midwest and their descendants have a Southern accent and the perfective done.

Of Scots-Irish descent, people in Midwest with Southern accents will sometimes say "The baby wants fed" or "the car wants washed"

Low back vowel merger (dawn and Don are homophones) is observed in eastern Ohio.

The Northern dialect (elite and authoritative for dictionaries) is also spoken in the Midwest. This dialect is changing and undergoing a vowel shift: low central vowels are moving forward.

Upper Midwest will have "Canadian raising", syntactic changing ("I'm going Detroit. You want to go with?"), and words form recent SCandinavian migrations.

SPanish loanwords are on the rise in the Midwest.