Northern Cities Shift in the movies

[Wilson Gray]

How about William Peterson of CSI? I bet my wife that he's from
Chicago and lost on a technicality: he's actually a native of
Evanston, IL, which is, of course, a suburb of Chicago.

I use two criteria, 1) whether the speaker pronounces "decade" as
"dekkid," a la St. Louisans; or 2) whether the person pronounces /ar/
as nearly two syllables, almost as [ka- at r] for "car." I first noticed
the second criterion in the speech of black Chicagoans visiting Saint
Louis, back in the early '50's. But it also works for white Chicagoans
heard in the movies or on TV, nowadays.. So far, the closest that I've
come to being wrong was betting that Peterson was from Chicago itself,
as opposed to betting that he was from the greater Chicago
metropolitan area.

Note that I'm *not* claiming that this feature *originated* in the
speech of black Chicagoans, only that I first became aware of it in
their speech.

-Wilson

On 8/18/06, Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Northern Cities Shift in the movies
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On 8/18/06, Matthew Gordon <gordonmj at missouri.edu> wrote:
> >
> > I hope you got some useful replies to this offlist.
> >
> > A couple of actors come to mind:
> >
> > Dennis Farina, who's currently on Law and Order and has done some movies, is
> > a fairly shifty Chicagoan (at least for the low vowels in the NCS).
> > http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001199/
> >
> > Robert Forster, who was in Jackie Brown a number of years back and in other
> > stuff since, is also fairly shifty and IMDB tells me he's from Rochester NY
> > http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001233/
>
> And let's not forget Dennis Franz of NYPD Blue fame. Aaron Dinkin
> recently posted this to alt.usage.english:
>
> -----
> http://groups.google.com/group/alt.usage.english/msg/46af8f3eb7f61f37
>
> For what it's worth, Bill Labov uses Dennis Franz as his standard example
> for telling journalists what a Chicago accent sounds like. (I have no
> opinion on the matter, since I've never seen anything Dennis Franz was
> in.)
>
> http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/0506/feature4_2.html
> "Tell me who doesn't fit in. It's Dennis Franz, who's from Chicago. He
> has a very strong Northern Cities Shift. So when Dennis Franz says, 'What
> he-appened?' Americans say, 'What's he doing in the New York City police
> department?'"
>
> http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/03/17/travel/escapes/17accent.html
> "If you're not sure what Chicagoan sounds like," he said, "watch old
> episodes of 'NYPD Blue' and wait for Detective Sipowicz to ask, 'What
> hee-appened?' Having Dennis Franz, a Chicago native, portray a New York
> City cop is like trying to put a square peg in a round hole."
> -----
>
>
> --Ben Zimmer
>
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>


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