[lg policy] ‘How to Speak Midwestern,’ a Heartland Dialect Guide

Mon Dec 5 15:44:21 UTC 2016

‘How to Speak Midwestern,’ a Heartland Dialect Guide

Books of The Times

By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER DEC. 4, 2016

Learning to speak Midwestern: Can there be any more urgent national task?

You wouldn’t think so from all the postelection commentary laying Donald J.
Trump’s surprise victory at the feet of disaffected white working-class
voters in the Rust Belt — or more specifically, the failure of coastal
elites to understand them.

Unto the breach steps Edward McClelland’s “How to Speak Midwestern,” a
dictionary wrapped in some serious dialectology inside a gift book trailing
a serious whiff of Relevance.

Not that Mr. McClelland, a native of Lansing, Mich., who now lives in
Chicago, set out to write a topical book. Hillary Clinton’s name appears
only once, when he notes that he stumped for Bernie Sanders in Iowa but
ultimately voted for Mrs. Clinton “because we haven’t had a president with
an Inland North accent since Gerald Ford.”

Still, the book can be read as questioning the resurgent notion — perhaps
strongest in the Midwest itself — that Midwesterners are the most
authentically American of Americans, starting with their allegedly neutral
speech.

“Accents are an important element of regional identity,” Mr. McClelland
writes. “And an important element of Midwestern identity is believing you
don’t have an accent.”

Full disclosure: Like Mrs. Clinton, I’m a white woman who grew up in the
Chicago suburbs. When it comes to pinched nasal vowels and strongly
pronounced r’s (a phenomenon linguists call rhoticity), I’m With Her.

That “white” part is important. The heavily industrialized (and segregated)
Inland North — as dialectologists call the region stretching roughly from
central New York across the Great Lakes — “has a wider divergence between
white and black speech than anywhere in the country,” Mr. McClelland
writes, with African-Americans largely maintaining speech patterns brought
from the South. (Mr. McClelland notes the existence of various Midwestern
“blaccents,” though he doesn’t explore them.)
Photo
Edward McClelland

“How to Speak Midwestern” is a product of Belt Publishing, a three-year-old
Cleveland start-up that promotes a kind of progressive Rust Belt pride
without succumbing to cliché or hipster irony. In addition to producing an
online magazine, Belt has put out anthologies dedicated to Akron, Buffalo,
Pittsburgh, Youngstown and other cities, along with titles like “How to
Live in Detroit Without Being a Jackass.”

Mr. McClelland, whose previous books include “Young Mr. Obama: Chicago and
the Making of a Black President” and “Nothin’ but Blue Skies: The Heyday,
Hard Times and Hopes of America’s Industrial Heartland,” takes a
pan-Midwestern approach, offering a sweeping consideration of the broad
forces that have shaped the region’s speech, as well as glossaries
dedicated to 11 cities, states or subregions.

Readers will learn the lingo of Yinzers (Pittsburghers), Cheeseheads
(Wisconsinites), Baja Minnesotans (as those from the Land of 10,000 Lakes
derisively call people in Iowa) and Michiganders (a coinage often
attributed to Abraham Lincoln, who used it as an insult during the 1848
presidential campaign). But in addition to Midwestern, they will also pick
up a good bit of Linguist.

Monophthongization? That’s the turning of double-stepped vowels into a
single sound, as in Steeler fans waving their “Terrible Tahhls” (towels) as
they head “dahntahn” (downtown).

Final obstruent devoicing? The tendency to pronounce final consonants
without vibrating the vocal cords, made famous by the “Saturday Night Live”
skit “Bill Swerski’s Superfans” and its paeans to “da Bearsss” (rather than
“da Bearzzz”).

Linguists divide the Midwest into three main regions, whose durable speech
patterns reflect different waves of European settlement. The Inland North,
initially settled by Yankees heading west from New England, is the most
consistent region, with an accent that largely sounds the same from
Rochester to Milwaukee. (It’s also a region whose speech pulled subtly away
from the rest of the country during the 20th century, thanks to a
mysterious phenomenon known as the Northern Cities Vowel Shift.) The
Midlands, which stretches from Pennsylvania and Ohio west to Kansas and
Nebraska, shows much greater dialect diversity among cities, thanks to the
clan-based social structure of the Scots-Irish, who began arriving via the
port cities of the Mid-Atlantic States.

And then there’s the North Central region (Minnesota, Northern Wisconsin
and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan), which has a strong German and
Scandinavian influence, though few people, Mr. McClelland reports, actually
sound like characters in “Fargo.” For superior Minnesotan, Mr. McClelland
prefers the “clipped, brisk, nasal” speech of Kurt Russell in the hockey
movie “Miracle.”

Mr. McClelland’s introductory chapters on these three regions dangle plenty
of fascinating tidbits. For example, studies have shown that working-class
women show less pronounced regional accents than their husbands, perhaps
because of greater contact with doctors, teachers and other professionals.

And who knew that the lack of verb endings in Minnesota’s remote Iron Range
might be traceable to the polyglot immigrant mineworkers who, in a region
lacking a base of native English speakers, had to cook up a mutually
intelligible pidgin?

The glossaries, on the other hand, may come as a bit of a letdown to
old-school wordniks. As a devotee of The Dictionary of American Regional
English, I was disappointed to find Mr. McClelland’s glossaries light on
entries like “devil strip” (as the grassy area between the sidewalk and the
street is known in Akron, Ohio) and “n’ at” (a Pittsburghism, short for
“and that,” which is tacked on to the end of a sentence to mean “et
cetera”).

Instead, Mr. McClelland offers lots of place nicknames, sports-related
slang and local delicacies. Not that they aren’t useful: I, for one, plan
to seek out mettwurst, a homemade cold-smoked ring sausage, next time I’m
in western Iowa. But the word lists come off less as language guides than
cheery tourist-bureau advice.

So, whither the Midwestern tongue? One scholar Mr. McClellan interviews
sees an erosion of its specific varietals, as young people identify more as
Midwesterners than as Chicagoans or Buffalonians. Others see a weakening of
the Northern Cities Vowel Shift.

As for Mrs. Clinton, in addition to heeding other portents, she might have
taken note of the claim, cited here, that her native Inland North is losing
linguistic dominance to the Midlands, which has become the “great swing
region of American accents.”

As the Scandinavians in my Midwestern family tree might have put it (using
an allegedly Norwegian term that, Mr. McClelland writes, is “seldom heard
in Norway”): Uff da!

NYtimes 12/5/16

-- 
**************************************
N.b.: Listing on the lgpolicy-list is merely intended as a service to its
members
and implies neither approval, confirmation nor agreement by the owner or
sponsor of the list as to the veracity of a message's contents. Members who
disagree with a message are encouraged to post a rebuttal, and to write
directly to the original sender of any offensive message.  A copy of this
may be forwarded to this list as well.  (H. Schiffman, Moderator)

For more information about the lgpolicy-list, go to
https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/
listinfo/lgpolicy-list
*******************************************
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lgpolicy-list/attachments/20161205/2b6d0176/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
This message came to you by way of the lgpolicy-list mailing list
lgpolicy-list at groups.sas.upenn.edu
To manage your subscription unsubscribe, or arrange digest format: https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/lgpolicy-list