I grew up in Kalamazoo, MI, where (according to Wikipedia and other sources), many speakers have something called the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCS). So I'm trying to figure out if I'm one of them.
I'm running into two difficulties with this:
- The written descriptions of it all seem to be from the standpoint of, and written for, people who unambiguously don't have it; they'll say things like "they pronounce job like jab", meaning "NCS speakers' job is somewhere between non-NCS speakers' job and jab".
- According to everything I've read, one interesting difference between NCS and most other regional accents is that people from regions with NCS speakers don't notice the difference; NCS and non-NCS both sound the same to them. (And that's true of me; when I tried watching a Youtube video of examples of NCS speech, I found that several of the examples sounded completely normal to me, but I certainly don't notice anything strange about non-NCS speech, either!)
So, how would I go about figuring this out?