Linguistic/cultural stereotyping in the Upper Midwest: Lutran Air

This was passed along by a contributor, who got it from a colleague.

WE ARE PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE LUTHERAN AIRLINES IS NOW OPERATING IN MINNYSOTA! ALSO SERVING VISCONSIN, NORDERN MITCHIGEN, NORT & SOUT DAKOTA

If you are travelin soon, consider Lutran Air, the no-frills airline.

You're all in da same boat on Lutran Air, here flyin is a upliftin experience.

Dair is no first class on any Lutran Air flight.

Meals are potluck. Rows 1 tru 6, bring rolls; 7 tru 15, bring a salad; 16 tru 21, a hot dish, and 22-30, a dessert.

Basses and tenors please sit in da rear of da aircraft.

Everyone is responsible for his or her own baggage.

All fares are by free will offering, and da plane will not land til da budget is met.

Now, Pay attention to your flight attendant, who vill acquaint you wit da safety system aboard dis Lutran Air.

Okay den, listen up; I'm only gonna say dis vonce:
In da event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, I am frankly gonna be real surprised and so vill Captain Olson, because ve fly right around two tousand feet, so loss of cabin pressure would probably mean da Second Coming or someting of dat nature, and I wouldn't bodder with doze liddle masks on da rubber tubes--you're gonna have bigger tings to worry about den dat. Just stuff doze back up in dair liddle holes.
Probably da masks fell out because of turbulence which, to be honest wit you, we're gonna have quite a bit of at two tousand feet, sorta like driving across a plowed field, but after a while you get used to it.

In da event of a water landing, I'd say forget it. Start saying da Lord's Prayer and just hope you get to da part about forgive us our sins as we forgive dose who sin against us, which some people say 'trespass against us,' which isn't right, but what can you do?

Da use of cell phones on da plane is strictly forbidden, not because day may confuse da plane's navigation system, which is by da pants all da way. No, it's because cell phones are a pain in da wazoo, and if God had meant you to use a cell phone, He wudda put your mout on da side of your head.

We start lunch right about noon and it's buffet style wit da coffeepot up front.

Den we'll have da hymn sing; hymnals are in da seat pockets in front of you. Don't take yours wit you when you go or I am gonna be real upset and I am not kiddin!

Right now I'll say Grace:

Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest
and let deze gifts to us be blessed.
Fader, Son, and Holy Ghost,
May we land in Dulut or pretty close.

Garrison Keillor made these kinds of stereotypes famous nationally for the Upper Midwest, Norwegians, Lutherans, and Fargo certainly promoted some pieces of the picture.

But note what social association the particular linguistic features have here. The key feature is the 'stopping' or use of d or t for interdental fricatives (the 'th sounds' in words like this or thing.) Depending on where you are in the Upper Midwest, this feature is taken to be a clear sign of German ethnicity (Mary Rose's Stanford dissertation treats such a case in Wisconsin), a sign of Polish identity (you can hear that view in Milwaukee, or find it performed on Saturday Night Live in the da Bears skits that our Wisconsin Englishes folks like so much.) Here, it's religion, with immigrant identity obviously lurking in the background.

By the way, the v for w thing would be characteristic of various immigrant communities, but seems to have passed out of even folk stereotype for most of Wisconsin, as far as I know.

Fargo (the film) dialect

Me and the missus, after a long day and a fine dinner (all from the grill), kicked back in front of the TV. No cage death match stuff and none of those chick shows she's so wild about on the Oxygen Network, so we went surfing. What do we find: Fargo. OK, it's not the definitive movie of our region, but it's the Coen Brothers and I frankly worship the ground they film on. And just so you know, the city of Fargo plays a pretty small role in the movie — it's basically set in Minnesota, mostly in Brainerd.

Entertainment value aside (Is it funnier to see Steve Buscemi shot in the jaw and walking around with bloody paper stuck to his face or to see his white-socked foot sticking up out of the wood chipper? I can never decide.), the film gets a lot of attention for the regional English used. The Coen Brothers are Minnesotans and they are hamming it up big-time. For some people, it's all they know about Upper Midwestern English; for many here, it's Gomer Pyle or Hee Haw imposed on their region.

So, I listened a little, when I wasn't laughing so hard I was crying, to how they talked. A few things just screamed 'parody' — there are a couple of exchanges that consist basically of Yah? Oh, Yah. So, yah. OK, then, yah. Generally, the discourse marking and 'Minnesota nice' cliches are over the top, including good old you betcha. And they get a few salient constructions in that you might hear but that don't say much to me structurally or sociolinguistically, beyond rank stereotyping, like somebody being up from Brainerd when they're in the Twin Cities (south of Brainerd).

When it comes to real structural features, though, it seems less overplayed: There's a fair bit of 'devoicing' (or fortition, as the local phonologists call it) of final stops and especially fricatives — in fact, we get the phrase Go Bears! (for the White Lake Bears high school team) with a clear [s], like da Bears on Saturday Night Live, and a screaming Upper Midwestern long /o:/ in go. A few characters have stops for interdental fricatives a lot of the time and various folks have them occasionally (what the Wisconsin Englishes folks call dem dere dose [= them, there, those]). I don't hang out with Minnesota State Troopers, but could imagine this as a relatively slight exaggeration for Brainerd speech. And we get the distinctively Upper Midwestern use of yet, for still: "You're here yet."

But there are a few things that are real and don't seem to be on the stereotype radar screen. One such example is the frequent lack of aspiration on initial /p, t, k/. A trooper uses tags like this strikingly for example, sounding almost like dags.

When the Wisconsin Englishes guys get around to media representations of English up here, they've got some fodder here.

Maybe we can all just get along (sometimes)

Barbara Wallraff's Word Court responds this week to a query about the (now firmly established) verb to text. The issue is the connection to text message, in part, as a redundancy. The query ends with this question and her answer begins this way:

Q: Who makes the rules for a new use of words?
A: We all, collectively, make the rules about new ways to use words.

Wallraff goes on to put this verb into the context of 'retronyms' where formerly unmarked words become (at least somewhat) marked through cultural change -- acoustic guitar after the rise of the electric guitar, etc. I applaud this piece of reasonable advice. Some eggnog for the Judge and drinks all around, put'em on the Verb account.

Interestingly, the last question she takes this week involves another topic of interest here in the Upper Midwest: Someone writes in saying that they're noticing to lose being pronounced like to loose, and loosing for losing. It's not quite clear to what extent this is written versus spoken usage, but Wallraff treats it as a spelling problem, comparing the voiced sibilant to booze, clues, twos:

It's obvious what the problem is, but anyone who can spell most of these other words ought to be able to get "lose" right.

I'd love to know where the query comes from. I've noticed this lose > loose thing too, and have wondered whether it might reflect more than a mere spelling problem: As Tom Purnell of the Wisconsin Englishes Project (along with a growing team around the state) has shown, Wisconsin English speakers do a fair bit of what looks like final devoicing, and similar patterns certainly exist well beyond this one state.

The pattern is famous for the Upper Midwest mostly from Saturday Night Live's old Da Bears (that phrase with an emphatically fortis [s] at the end, not a z sound). For the phonetically inclined, Tom and his folks have reported on this in a couple of recent articles in American Speech and the Journal of English Linguistics. Another member of that project, Joe Salmons, reports that he hears this especially often in certain regionally-marked words and constructions, like in the phrases let's have some beers and I'm going to cut my hairs. (Both instances of mass noun to count noun have been suggested to come ultimately from German and other immigrant languages. The latter is pretty salient and rare here, but lots of people regard the former as normal usage, as I guess do people from some other parts of the country.) That regional pronounciations would surface especially in such stereotypes is no surprise.

But if the WEP guys are finding patterns that sound and look acoustically like this in laboratory conditions, you gotta wonder how it'll make itself felt in regional grammar beyond the low-level phonetics. Two closely related verbs (yup, it always comes back around to the verbs, doesn't it?) might be a good place for the confusion to start spreading.

This has ramifications for the study of sound change: What Tom et al. are finding looks like utterly regular sound change as far as I can tell, yet we're getting it bubbling up to public consciousness in ways that some would instantly identify as 'lexical diffusion'.

Just some ramblings during a mid-morning break ...