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

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?

RE: Missouri - I'd say anything north of St. Louis feels like the mid-west and anything south feels like the south.

Jeff City is south of St Louis and feels Midwestern

I live in NYC and my in-laws are Midwestern ... hot combo

hot combo

another word for cassarole

lol

Well Que, the poster is a joke, because the little girl in the poster is wearing overalls and chewing on a piece of hay or something, so it pretty much reinforces uh some stereotypes all by itself.

i still like it

I live in NYC and my in-laws are Midwestern

Haha, my dad is from Brooklyn, and my mom was born in West Va. but grew up in NE Ohio. Definitely a hot combo.

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

Of course there's "fade zones" in geography! Maybe not so much when dealing with discreet variables like States, but certainly with continuous data like % of landuse devoted to farming corn, for example. After all, the first law of geography is that everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things. I don't think he's saying it makes Missouri southern, only that it makes Springfield more southern than, say, St. Louis. The use of states as the political jurisdiction for this survey is arbitrary anyway - we could use counties to be more accurate if we cared to.

xxxxxxpost

Isn't Jefferson City just west of St. Louis? I don't think it's much further south, if at all.

If travel down to the "boot heel" it feels WAY southern.

The same can be said about southern Illinois, tbh.

Also, I always thought states had to be west of the Mississippi to be considered "mid-west".

the midwest is wherever a shoneys is

f course there's "fade zones" in geography! Maybe not so much when dealing with discreet variables like States,

well, yeah, okay, when we start talking about landuse and stuff, sure. . .but this thread is about States

nm I just looked at a shoneys map wtvr

our state boundaries were drawn by slavers and plutocrats and paid for in blood anyway, fwiw

― cialis morissette (goole), Thursday, October 22, 2009 11:01 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

ok and I can't even load the cracker barrel site to see if that's viable

I think there might be cracker barrel's in arizona tho so that'll rule that out

per this map, kentucky is definitely part of the south and MO probably is too.
http://www.verysmallarray.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/070605_uswafflehouse.gif

that waffle house map is almost exactly like the shoneys map

^^^^from the files of noted Emeritus Geographer, Dr. W. House

was gonna say Bill Knapps restaurant but there used to one in FLA

yeah let's rely on a fucking waffle to teach us about geography

makes sense, if any non-Dixie state is to be inducted into the Waffle Confederacy, it might as well be the one that doesn't recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Day

http://www.superpoop.com/040209/how-far-away-is-ohio.jpg

lol iiiijjjj u r a gis stan

that map's treatment of Michigan as contiguous creates a weird error

I guess NY, too. Part of NY is really, really close to Ohio

more slave than stan, but yeah

I srsly think of western PA as being midwest.

― quincie, Thursday, October 22, 2009 2:00 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

madness

you could maybe make a case for erie, i guess. but yeah, pittsburgh is v. hilly and its accent is not midwestern

maybe it's different in upper st. clair tho

OH SHITTTTTTTTTTTTTTT

mookie throwing down. also, check it out guys, #2 gis result, the zinesters agree with me

http://api.ning.com/files/IlN0UevPKmaGg*x8ULBu6VC4IyGWkDu3gW8Zyklx5rFXRZO47GrVVLykuG2kmKKq9FsOiFv5*78qiz2TKyZwPFgRbtQavwfX/midwest_map.jpg

ks, mo, ky and wv are border states

southern IL has more in common with Kentucky than it does the rest of IL, most def
do not know wtf nabisco is talking about w/r/t Iowa not being the center in any way. When I think of the Midwest I think of flat, nearly-featureless endless prairie, farms/dairy farms/cornfields, fat white people, conservative culture-wise, bland food, esteeming small town life over city life. That just screams "Iowa" to me.

the funny thing about putting the Dakotas in or out is ... well, no one much lives there, and those that do are all over on the east side toward the core midwest, so whether or not the states as a whole count is really just like asking whether the midwest's property line includes those little bumpy bits out back or not

xpost - haha I am telling you, if you wanna continue the house analogy Iowa is like the guest room nobody goes into; it makes such a poor heart