What states do you consider to be part of the Midwest?

i've heard buffalo lumped in as a midwestern city which is totally ??? except for the accent.

― harbl, Wednesday, October 21, 2009 9:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this seems right to me + i grew up in buffalo and live here now. it's the rust belt imo.

% of people in Chicago with "Chicago" accent=% of people in NYC with "New York" accent. I've come across thousands of people born and raised in the area and only a handful have had that thick "hey dere my friend whaddaya say we get some brats and watch da bears" accent. Wish it was more prevalent tbh, cause it's pretty hilarious.

It is totally hilarious.

lol

I listen the Steve Dahl Show podcasts, right, and he plays voicemails from listeners. I'd say 1 out of 20 have a Chicago accent. Which he of course then usually mocks, awesomely.

I'm probably don't pick up on the more subtle versions of the accent, though.

Hello there, my friend. What do you say we purchase some bratwursts, and then watch the Chicago Bears football game?

Or, if you prefer, the Chicago Bulls basketball match. I believe they are competing against the Spurs of San Antonio this evening.

yew tak funny, meh friend, but yea i could gofer sem saaaasages.

- The midwest is a feeling.

- Arguments about Missouri and the south are somewhat compelling to me, actually, because there is a difference -- there are certainly places west of it that have way more in common with the core midwest than it does. Places like Lincoln or Omaha or Lawrence KS are way more, umm, spiritually contiguous with the idea of the "midwest" than a lot of Missouri. Haha Missouri is the gateway, the crossroads.

- I don't count the Dakotas; apart from a few far-eastern spots like Fargo or Sioux Falls or whatever they're just different, much more part of that whole northern-Rockies group.

- I can go either way on how far people want to extend the idea out onto the plains. You sorta just pick it up from context, really, whether someone's "midwest" is more Great-Lakesy or more Great-Plainsy. The only thing that bugs me is east-coasters whose idea of "midwest" is totally undifferentiated and encompasses most of the country. Or -- and I'm sorry if this is anyone here -- people who toss out Iowa as this quintessential midwestern flat grain-filled flyover spot, because if you've spent any time whatsoever near the midwest you know very well that Iowa is not the "center" of anything. Like any notion of a cultural or geographic category that thinks Iowa is right in the middle of it is just flat wrong.

Yeah, what most people consider the "Chicago accent" is largely a white working-class thing.

I move that it be renamed the Berwyn accent.

so can we agree that the Idea of the Midwest needs to be first broken up into cultural, physical, etc. separate contingencies and then depicted with individual raster map overlays that can show the degree of Midwesternness at any particular coordinate, as opposed to vector maps with a hard-and-fast line-in-the-sand boundary that says "this is the Midwest, this is not?"

Modern Geography was invented at the University of Chicago in the sixties by the way. I learned that in a History of Geography class.

we are all midwesterners now

except me, coz i'm from pittsburgh

I srsly think of western PA as being midwest.

it's definitely in the graying-out zone

i thought california was part of the midwest till i lived in LA, now i think the midwest is everything that isnt los angeles, new york, new jersey, or philadelphia

nabisco no it is not, wtf

no ocean coastline? no mountains? wasn't in the confederacy? yup, that's midwest.

is it boring? that's a better yardstick maybe

Like any notion of a cultural or geographic category that thinks Iowa is right in the middle of it is just flat wrong.

http://www.umesc.usgs.gov/terrestrial/amphibians/armi/images/armi_midwest_420-360.gif

Sure looks like Iowa is near the center of that area.

yeah um, i was gonna say. i can't think of a more central Midwestern geographic category than Iowa. Alton IL? Maybe? Central Illinois?

has anyone said NORTHERN CITIES VOWEL SHIFT yet?

northern cities vowel shift
look it up
labov
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UoJ1-ZGb1w

Oooh, what is that from? I would watch that whole show. (PBS, I'm guessing, if that's Robert MacNeil.)

i thought california was part of the midwest till i lived in LA, now i think the midwest is everything that isnt los angeles, new york, new jersey, or philadelphia

here is the average californian's map...new jersey and philadelphia don't make the cut

(california) -- ??????? midwest??????????? - (new york city!!!)

It's called Do You Speak American?
I use it in my classes when we do our pronunciation section to show the variety of dialects in the US.

Thanks!

Also:
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~chiang/images/newyorker1.png

labov is a God

I use it in my classes when we do our pronunciation section to show the variety of dialects in the US.

In elementary and high school is it required to speak without an accent? In my school it was strictly forbidding to speak in dialect. (Less strict in the second high school I attended, but it was still not allowed in class itself.)

I'm not sure, but I doubt it. Anyway, I teach ESL classes. Also it's impossible to speak without an accent.

(adult esl, i should clarify)

I went to school in the NW and we would get scolded for sounding "too Californian"

If you're speaking with an accent, chances are your teacher is, too.

Also it's impossible to speak without an accent.

Well, yeah, you'd need tons of speech classes, but if they overheard you speaking with a clear accent or dialect, you were reprimanded. Once two girls were allowed to come in front of the class and speak in Bruges dialect in our class. How exciting! Let's have a freakshow! (I am being sarcastic.)

Californian sounds niiiiice! I've been checking the Youtube american accents clips.The chigago dialect sounds.... very strange (to me).

xp
that may be true, but i doubt it was an institutionalized rule to scold students for sounding different. could it have been an individual teacher's bias?

This is a pretty good example of the Chicago accent:
http://web.ku.edu/~idea/northamerica/usa/illinois/illinois10.mp3

xp yeah there is (or was) an anti-California bias in the NW, similar to the anti-NY bias in the Midwest.

nabisco no it is not, wtf

gbx if you consider Ohio to be in the Midwest (and I think that's a majority opinion here) then how is western PA not kinda near the fade zone?

Haha my mother has a poster in her kitchen that says "I don't CARE how they do it in New York."

there's no fade zone when it comes to geography. a state is either Midwestern or not. just like how Shasta thinks Springfield MO makes MO southern instead of Midwestern. i mean i've been to both Western PA and Southern MO, and i can see why people would come up with both theories. i cannot, hoewever, support them.

laurel i love your mother's way of thinking

That Northern Cities vowel shift is what I consider the native Cleveland accent, with a little bit of Pittsburgh. Chicago, to my ears, has even broader vowels. "Block" doesn't just become "black," it becomes "blaaaaahk."

Chicago is a discrete dialect from the Great Lakes NCVS area, (flaps prevail over interdental fricatives, for instance) but it's related phonologically.

btw re: Iowa I am talking about on-the-ground people-and-geography stuff -- even if you count the Dakotas and say it's like spatially central, it's still Iowa. The well-populated Great-Lakesy stuff is on one side. The super-plainsy stuff is on another. You get more Rockies action to the northwest. Iowa itself doesn't really have the gravity of being central -- it's not like some center point that represents or averages out all the stuff around it. It'd be like saying the real core bit of the united Kingdom is in the water just east of the Isle of Man, because that's sorta in the center.

the presence of mountains in western pennsylvania disqualifies it from midwestern status.

also use of the word yinz

Ohio itself isn't monocultural either -- just listen to someone who grew up near the Ohio river but not in Cincinnati.

like that vowel shift clip above, i think the midwest begins in syracuse, fuiud

how about kind of between the Missouri and Ohio rivers?