NCCS

This diagram illustrates the Northern Cities Chain Shift (a.k.a., Northern Cities Vowel Shift), as described in sociolinguistic literature (see the Wikipedia entry). If you click the blue buttons, you will hear monosyllabic words by a young Detroit male talker. If you click the little blue dots, you will hear a progression of /a/ ("job") and /ae/ ("dad") along a synthetic continuum created to mimic the actual movements of F1 and F2 of these vowels.