"Interested in regional and social differences in speech? We are too!"

Just got an email with that subject line for a study about how people identify speakers of different dialects:

Our research team at the University of Wisconsin is recruiting subjects for research on how people perceive and identify dialects of languages people speak. If you’d like to participate, just visit this link, and you’ll hear speech samples and can answer questions about them, e.g. where the speakers are from and whether you think they have strong accents.  The survey will not work on a smartphone; please only use a laptop, desktop, or tablet.
If you have any questions about the study, feel free to contact the study team by emailing jsalmons@wisc.edu. And you are welcome to contact us later if you would like to know about our findings as we learn more about the many ways our speech varies.

Could be fun.

Wisconsin Englishes update ...

Word on the street is that Wisconsin Englishes will be on Wisconsin Public Radio in western Wisconsin tomorrow, on Spectrum West with Al Ross.

And the Wisconsin Englishes Project website has been spiffed up a little ... various updates and a bunch of teaching materials, etc. You can check it out here.

Wisconsin words in the news

Well, now, the Appleton Post Crescent posted a quiz on Wisconsin words, here. A lot of the words are actually regional within the state and the Wisconsin born-and-bred folks I know who've taken it have scored as low as 40-60%.

The example below is the non-spoiler ... I'm guessing everybody from Wisconsin gets that one right, whether they use the term or not.

Have a go ...

Bakery

Luanne von Schneidemesser starts her fine chapter of Wisconsin Talk (the chapter is called 'Words used in Wisconsin') with a story of her daughter finding out, in the Pacific Northwest, that people didn't get the use of the word bakery to mean 'baked goods' rather than the place those goods are made. This is one of those terms that walks around in the open with no hint of stigma and sometimes surprisingly little awareness that it's a regional form. Stumblerette passed along this example from the local paper …

Wisconsin Talk: Linguistic diversity in the Badger State

We were pretty quiet there for a while, but Team Verb is back on the job. I suddenly realize that we never announced the above-mentioned book from a set of colleagues and collaborators here on campus. The book is available here and it's already getting reviews (like this one) and will be featured at the Wisconsin Book Festival (here). The co-editors assure me that an update of the old Wisconsin Englishes Project website (here) is coming within a few weeks.

Contact the editors or contributors if you want them to talk about stuff in the book ... they're basically on the road now doing that anyway.

Wisconsin English ... now on beer coasters

A new brewer here in Wisconsin. Wait, you can say that on any random day and be right. Let's start over. I've seen stuff recently for the Milwaukee Brewing Company, but haven't tried their stuff yet ... had ordered something else last time I had a beer before realizing that they had it. In fact, I realized the establishment was serving this beer when I looked at the coaster, shown below. (MKE is the code for the Milwaukee airport, General Mitchell International.) I'm hoping this is a series for the "MKEDictionary".

Let's go buy grocery!

It's perfectly normal for me to talk about the delicious stuff you buy at a bakery as "bakery."  As in, They sell the best bakery there!  Judging by Joe's reaction, this is not standard.  Just now I discovered it's not alone - here's a blurb about a place to buy food on campus:

Carson's Carryout will close for renovations at 1:30 p.m. on Friday, March 30. Carson's will reopen in fall 2013. Until then, there will be expanded services at Common Grounds in lower Frank's starting on Sunday, April 8, and will include grocery, pizzas, sandwiches and more.

"Grocery" works for me too - less usual, but acceptable. Joe looked it up in DARE but they don't list it.  (They do list this use of "bakery," though - and note "chiefly German settlement areas.")

I've been trying to figure out what this is - it's use of the name of the source as the name of the goods bought there.  Not quite metonymy, I don't think, although I never really learned the fine points of all those poetic terms.

And it's definitely a mass noun.  I bought bakery at Lane's but not *I bought five bakeries at Lane's.  (The latter could only refer to a massive real estate deal.)

So what's the range of this?  Anybody have any idea?

Verb + with

It's a known pattern in American English, often identified with the Upper Midwest but certainly found far and wide beyond it, that verbs of motion (like go, come, ride) can occur with with as what many would regard as a verbal particle. In other words, you get sentences like this:

We're going to the store. Wanna come with?

How far this pattern extends is something that folks here in Wisconsin have been wondering about. For instance, speakers give different reactions to something like this:

I'm calling from the park.
Oh, are the kids with?

This weekend, the missus and me heard a native Wisconsinite use something I hadn't heard before, namely:

Just a father taking a child on a trip and the mother not with.

I've only talked to one native speaker of Upper Midwestern English about this, and their response was 'I don't think I can get that.'

So, folks, is that grammatical for you or not?

Awareness of regional dialect: "Wisconsin accent"

A relatively recent topic in regional variation in speech is what's known as 'enregisterment' or 'enregistration'. Johnstone et al. (2006, 78) provide the classic definition:

on the basis of historical research, ethnography, discourse analysis, and sociolinguistic interviews, [to] describe how a set of linguistic features that were once not noticed at all, then used and heard primarily as markers of socioeconomic class, have come to be linked increasingly to place and ‘enregistered’ . . . as a dialect.

The topic has since led to a special issue of American Speech (here, and the quote above was pulled from Michael Paul Adams' intro to the issue). Along with work on Pittburghese and other cool stuff, the issue included work on Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, giving evidence that regional speech patterns have been recognized in Wisconsin increasingly over the last century, especially in recent decades. Instead of features that marked class, in the Upper Midwest it's typically features that were once associated with immigrant populations, like 'stopping' (using a d sound for 'th' sounds, for instance).

One bit of evidence bearing on this question hasn't, to my knowledge, been talked about: We've got ever-better corpora which we can search, like the Google NGram Viewer, which we've played with here in the past. If you search for 'Wisconsin dialect' you don't really get anything to speak of, but 'Wisconsin accent' yields an interesting pattern, shown here compared to 'Minnesota accent' (I start with 1940 because nothing shows for 'Wisconsin accent' before then; as always, click to embiggen):

So, our western neighbor's speech pattern was apparently talked about somewhat earlier and somewhat more in books than ours. But these numbers are all relative, so compare this to a state of roughly similar size (i.e. in population):

If we generalize to 'Southern accent' you see some real presence (and btw, 'Upper Midwest accent' doesn't get you anything really):

It's not surprising that Wisconsin (and Minnesota) lag behind the South in this regard, just given the historical demographics of European settlement.

Oh yeah, just because:

Update, 3:30: Was kinda in a hurry before and didn't check the Library of Congress "Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers". Checking 1836-1922 to see if yielded earlier attestation, I found only a few. A couple had 'Wisconsin' and a form of the verb 'accept' (i.e., these were OCR glitches). The others, it looks like, refer specifically to Wisconsin people with 'foreign', even specifically 'German' accents. That's highly consistent with the association of Wisconsin with immigrants and with immigrants who didn't speak English or, in this case, spoke it with an accent. Here's an early example, from the Omaha Bee:

Gee, there might be a little story in here.

Reference
Johnstone, Barbara, Jennifer Andrus, and Andrew E. Danielson. 2006. “Mobility, Indexicality, and the Enregisterment of ‘Pittsburghese.’” Journal of English Linguistics 34: 77–101.

Uff da! Recall edition

The fight against the de-democraticization of Wisconsin has been filled with good, clean humor of the sort that our state is known for. Of all the buttons around (and the pics below are a few samples from the collection of one member of Team Verb who's been buying them up, like lots of people.)

But for all the regional character and humor of the protest buttons, I don't think I'd seen one with regional language on it. Thanks to D.D., though, the Mr. Verb Blogal Archives now include the specimen pictured here.

If you live in Wisconsin or the Upper Midwest generally, you know the exclamation Uff da!  (If not, Wikipedia gives the basics). It's traced to Norwegian (though there are some wrinkles there), and means (following Wikipedia) "used when something is unpleasant, uncomfortable, hurtful, annoying, sad, or irritating". Well, Governor, finally a list where you can check every box!

Accent Discrimination

I guess Amy Dickinson is the new Ann Landers - who knew? Anyway today's column has the headline "'Fargo' Accent Bothers Her", and the advice-seeker says she's met a man online and he seems wonderful, but he has this dreadful northern Michigan accent: "And it really is a discordant note to my ears." The most interesting part of her letter, though, is where she says "I came from a rural area in Wisconsin, and the first thing I worked on when I went off to college was the sloppy diction, etc., that I grew up with. Now, no one would guess where I was born." How sad that she didn't get to go to UW and participate in the wonderful Wisconsin Englishes project! [Shameless plug]
I was pleasantly surprised, though, that Amy responds with "I fail to see what is so awful about this," and goes on to say "when everyone in North America starts to sound like an anchorman, we will have lost something important, not to mention charming." We need to let her know there's no danger of that, and we also need to work harder on PR for knowledge of basic linguistics!

Scott Walker's vowels, formant values

Long-time readers of this blog will recall that some linguists here at Wisconsin did a lot of analysis of Sarah Palin's speech when she appeared on the national scene. The same crew, now with a bunch of students, is following up with Governor Scott Walker's vowels. Based on the analysis of hundreds of tokens from the budget speech this week, they have assembled the vowel chart below:
It appears, in short, that for every measurement, NO VALUE was recorded. More to follow ...

Fun with Wisconsin placenames

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel did what's probably an obligatory SuperBowl piece: They interviewed people in Dallas, asking them to pronounce Wisconsin placenames, pretty much all ones of Alongonquian origin, I think. Here's the link.

If you need help with Wisconsin names of any sort, you can go to Mispronouncer. It's especially useful for people, since the site tends to have public figures saying their own names. So, you'll hear for example that State Rep. (and bane of UW's existence) Steve Nass uses the German-like vowel [a], not the [æ] people often use for his name.

The etymology of cheesehead

Basically since the first Mr. Verb started this blog back in the 1840s or whenever that was, there have been good intentions about posting on the origins and history of the word cheesehead, specifically referring to people fro Wisconsin. And that makes it all the worse that we've gotten a pretty steady stream of requests over the years (yup, we're an old blog) to address the topic and haven't yet done so.

Here goes, but you should consider this a discussion-starter and placeholder rather than a serious treatment.

Consulting with the Dictionary of American Regional English, the usual starting point for American dialect words, you find little, just the old meaning 'stupid or awkward person'. This is seriously outdated, especially here in Wisconsin, where people are bursting with cheesehead pride. Seriously.

Even asking the DARE brain-trust turned up little by their high standards, but provided the guts of the post below. (Multiple HTs to JH and LvS, of course.) They call attention to a discussion in the famous Jim Leary's Wisconsin Folklore (1998, 13):

"Cheesehead" is … double-edged. Wisconsin cheese is known throughout the country. Billboards across Wisconsin, and particularly along the southern border with Illinois, tout the cheese, which tourists purchase from specialty shops. In the mid-1980s, when designs were submitted to replace the state's butter-colored license plates, then governor Tony Earle parodied New Hampshire's "Live Free or Die" motto to suggest that Wisconsin's might be "Eat Cheese or Die." Meanwhile, diehard fans of the Green Bay Packers and Milwaukee Brewers began appearing at games wearing on their heads cardboard triangles that were painted to resemble wedges of Swiss cheese. . . . Such regalia sparked a goofy pride in Wisconsin's chief export and its agrarian tradition. But the wedges have also exposed cheeseheads to taunts that they are rubes with brains of curdled milk. . . . Chicagoans seek respite in the slower, rural rhythms of Wisconsin. Perhaps a few mistake their neighbors' style as a sign of stupidity.

In the same spirit, DARE staff report the story that "this term was developed by a White Sox (or Cubs) fan/commentator as an insult directed at the Milwaukee team originally."

One story from the DARE files suggests that the actual Packers cheesehead (go here for the original item — it's also the source of the image below) led to the term, but the chronology is presumably the other way around.


The term surely has roots in Europe, where terms like Dutch kaaskop and German Käsekopf are well-known and often negative. UrbanDictionary, in fact, has this:

Slang(can also be used offensively) for a Dutch person. "Kaaskop" means "cheesehead" in Dutch. Because the Netherlands is very well known for its cheese.

Various people report no particular national/ethnic association in German, by the way. But how do we get to Wisconsin? I'm guessing multiple sources push toward making the term a plausible nickname. The large Dutch and German populations here would have brought the term over and the constant topic of 'nationality' in popular Wisconsin culture would have kept that going. The actual cheese production in the state certainly would have encouraged the term — and note that the diary industry here is not a German import, while we're at it.

More to follow, I hope. In the meantime, eat cheese or die, I guess.

Top image from here.

Dane County Place-Names: Halunkenburg

We often sing the praises of the late great Frederic Cassidy here, the founder of the Dictionary of American Regional English. Among of his many other remarkable projects was a book called Dane County Place-Names. It was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 1968, which in turn grew from a paper from 1947 in American Speech. The book is still in print and readily available. Here's a random tidbit:

Northwestern Dane County was an area of contact, and sometimes conflict, between Anglo and other English-speaking Americans and German immigrants. Springfield Corners was apparently famous, according to Cassidy, as home to "a group of rough and spendthrift farmers who did much drinking and fighting", to the extent that the neighboring German populations came to call the place Halunkenburg, "Louts' town".

'to finch'

I was just alerted by a contributor to something from the local paper last week, from Wednesday's Wisconsin State Journal (click to enlarge, of course):

The question is the verb 'to finch'. You have to wonder if this isn't a blend of 'to pinch' in the sense of minor thefts and 'to filch'. Indeed, the Dictionary of American Regional English proposes that for the one attestation of it that they have — from California. Of course, it's possible that westward movement got a local Wisconsin term to the west coast.

WiSCO bumper stickers and t-shirts!

The Phonetics Lab crew at UW–Madison, led by Tom Purnell, has developed a software package called WiSCO – Wisconsin Speech Chain Online. It gets students plotting their vowels with minimal training, and allows them to compare their vowel system, or parts thereof, to those of others. So, you can see how raised your /æ/ in bag is compared to folks from Minnesota or Illinois, or how fronted your /a/ is. I know they're looking to go public with the program once they get a couple of details worked out.

In the meantime, this week, bumper stickers (basically like the image below) started popping up around campus.


And just this morning, I heard that you can order t-shirts from CafePress, with no markup, from here. Woohoo.

UW news: "Language matters for Wisconsin"

Well, nobody keeps me in the loop anymore … I have to read stuff in the paper! Tom Purnell and Eric Raimy of the Wisconsin Englishes project were just awarded one of the extremely competitive grants from the Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment. Their project is for working with groups in a set of communities around the state to deal with, as they've been putting it, "hot-button issues" connected to language in Wisconsin, everything from language and immigration to dialect and phonics. The issues grew out of community questions and concerns that came up during earlier talks all around the state. They're planning a short non-technical book to present key issues briefly.

The bigger point is that these serious young theoretical linguists are investing a huge amount of time and energy in doing work that directly serves the needs and interests of our state. It's another powerful counterexample to the idiocy promoted by certain aging losers that "higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world." I think this younger generation is turning out to be OK after all.

Final -z/-s in Upper Midwestern English

Twice in recent weeks, I've had discussions about regional English with people, one from Minnesota and the other from Wisconsin, who sounded like they had some of the 'final devoicing' that we've talked about before on this blog. That is, they pronounced (impressionistically, at least) the last bit in words like sees, rooms, chairs, boys with an -s sound, not a -z sound. Millions of Americans do it variably, in many contexts, but it's identified with this region.*

In both cases, these people clearly were getting most of what I was talking about very easily, but both had great trouble understanding this point. I'm well aware of the problem of orthography here — we spell such words with -s but say -z — and tried to be clear about that. In the second case, though, the speaker appeared to have real trouble hearing the difference when I said chairs twice, once each way. If so, that would be a big step beyond a variable process, a classic change in progress, etc.

So, Wisconsin Englishes specialists who read this blog, is it possible that we've got English monolingual speakers out there with real phonological devoicing?

Image from here.

*Including, yes, Sarah Palin.

"Come with" update, Eau Claire edition

The free weekly in Eau Claire, Wisconsin is called Volume One. Back in January, somebody had the brilliant (and I do mean brilliant) idea of making their reader poll about regional English.

A few weeks later (and available on the web, I think), on Feb. 14, they ran a nice piece about language and local identity, called "The Spoken Truth" in their "Thinkpiece" slot.

Big h.t. to Erica Benson.