Heard on local NE PA news

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Jan 25, 2010, at 3:20 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:

> Reporter covering flooding of Toby(sp?) Creek, caused by day-long,
> heavy rains in Wyoming County:
>
> "What's it been like, today?"
>
> Forty-ish local:
>
> "It's just been awful. I've never seen the creek _[krIk]_ like this
> before!"
>
>
> The first time that I've ever that pronunciation in the wild.

it's sort of famous with dialectologists:

from the 6/10/08 language column in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

.....
Our dictionary, Webster's New World College, Fourth Edition, lists
both creek and crick as acceptable pronunciations for creek. But we
turned to the experts at the Dictionary of American Regional English
in Madison for the regional breakdown.

"Creek is common everywhere but New England and the Northwest; crick
is more common in the West, North Midland, and the North except for
New England," Luanne von Schneidemesser, the dictionary's senior
editor, wrote in an e-mail. "Both are common in Wisconsin."

http://blogs.jsonline.com/language/archive/2008/06/10/creek-or-crick.aspx

.....

i grew up in eastern Pa., outside of Reading, a mile or so away from
the Tulpehocken Creek (which flows into the Schuylkill), which was
locally almost always pronounced /krIk/.

i know it only from white speakers.

arnold

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