[Ads-l] Listening to Chicagoans talk, etc.

[Wilson Gray]

I'm watching a reality-TV show that's taking place in Chicago.

I may be the only person on earth who feels this way, but, to me, the most
salient phonetic feature of Chicago speech, regardless of race, creed,
etc., is what I call the "syllabic_r_," for lack of a better term, in
pronunciations like, in my best eye-phonetics, "cah-ur, stah-urt, hee-ur,
skuh-urt."

This feature has grabbed my attention, more than anything else about the
Chicago dialect, since I was a pre-teen. It's like hearing Canadians say
"bean" and "agane" stedda "bin" and "agin."

>From a blog on Chicagoan:

"Flustrated" instead of "frustrated."

That pronunciation is used by the colored *everywhere*, IME.

Though I had intended to search YouTube for support of my impression of
Chicagoan, I was immediately distracted by comments WRT the "Louie lingo,"
a.k.a. "St. Louis dialect of BE."
-- 
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org