7. A Tale of Two Shifts: Movement Toward the Low-Back-Merger Shift in Lansing, Michigan

MONICA NESBITT is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College. Her research interest is in phonological variation and change across varieties of North American English. She has published her work in the University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics and presented at various international conferences, including New Ways of Analyzing Variation, the Urban Language Research Conference, and the annual meeting of the Linguistics Society of America. Email: [email protected].

SUZANNE EVANS WAGNER is associate professor of linguistics at Michigan State University. Her primary research interest is in age and language change, especially language change across the lifespan, with a recent secondary focus on sound change in the English of the Midwest. She has published her work in journals such as Language in Society, Language Variation and Change, and American Speech. With Isabelle Buchstaller, she is the coeditor of Panel Studies of Variation and Change (Routledge, 2018) and of the Routledge Studies in Language Change series. Email: [email protected].

ALEXANDER MASON is a Ph.D. candidate at Michigan State University. His main research is focused on the variation and change in the vowel system of Michiganders and Inland Northerners, especially as it relates to furthering theories of chain-shifts and mergers. He is also interested in perceptual dialectology, language attitudes, and syntactic variation in comparative constructions. Email: [email protected].