When trying to research about where the accent that is in the Midwest originated, it was very hard to find anything - mainly because most people believe that those who live in the Midwest do not have an accent at all. However, it is possible to find distinct characteristics of the Midwestern accent.
For instance, the words "caught" and "dawn". The vowel sound at the beginning of these words are pronounced with the tongue low and back in the mouth - while the vowel at the end has a slightly higher tongue position and a rounding of the lips. For those in the Midwest, caught would sound like cot and dawn would sound like don - but the rest of the country would say that they are missing a vowel in their pronunciation.
This phenomenon is known as the "lower back vowel merger" or the "Northern Cities Shift". It basically means that the two vowels are mixed together and somewhere one of them is lost in the process. Mergers are fairly common in the history of English and many other languages. It has been around the Pittsburgh and New England area for a long time as well as parts of Canada, but is fairly new to the Midwest.
Although there may not be as much of an accent as other areas, there is still one. Remember, accent is all up to perception - so it may not seem as if the people that you see every day have an accent - but those in other regions may think so.
Sources:
Gordon, Matthew. "The Midwest Accent." Do You Speak American? (blog), http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/americanvarieties/midwest/ (accessed December 16, 2013).
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