“The Bad School on the Northwest Side”: Indexical Order and High School Choice in Chicago1

ABSTRACT Research throughout the United States has found that the type of high school a speaker attended can impact linguistic variation. However, this work has largely focused on adult alumni of schools. This paper examines high school students’ reversal of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, an ongoing sound change in Chicago, through a qualitative analysis of interview content and quantitative analysis of vowel production. Results show that students from varied socioeconomic backgrounds who attend “elite” high schools produce more reversed variants of the highly salient TRAP and LOT vowels than those at other schools. This suggests that variants originally associated with class have taken on higher‐order indexical meanings as students use them to reflect their positions in a status‐based hierarchy.