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I was recently in Tennessee, and I noticed how people, especially teenager girls, have taken up features of the California Vowel Shift. For example, they'd pronounce win /wEn/, in /En/, think /TiNk/, thing /TiN/, etc. The most peculiar thing was that it mixed with features of southern accents like the pin-pen merger.
Now, what I want to know is, is the California Vowel Shift common in the south? and is the California Vowel Shift spreading elsewhere?
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Eh, I don't think any of those is necessarily part of the CVS. I think the tensing of lax vowels before [N], for example, is a separate phenomenon that just happens to overlap with the CVS in California: it's not part of the basic chain shift of the CVS. And likewise, with "win" and "in", I've read that some pen-pin merged people pronounce the merged words with a vowel closer to [E] than to [I]; again, unless it's part of a chain shift that affects /E/ generally, then I wouldn't consider it a CVS feature.
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<<I think the tensing of lax vowels before [N], for example, is a separate phenomenon that just happens to overlap with the CVS in California>>
I've seen this in the literature and heard it myself from Southern Americans. It's part of the larger trend of glide-insertion before velars in SAE. I recently discovered that my own dialect does the same thing, but the resulting [Ii] isn't identified with /i:/ because the latter isn't a diphthong, unlike in the Southern US where it is.
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There are substantial numbers of Texans (especially teenage girls) that do speak similarly to those in Southern California, especially in larger cities. When I was in Germany a few of my friends were from Houston and Austin and they spoke with rather thick California-sounding accent.
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