Are You From Chicago?
Circa 1989, an acting teacher informed my high school classmates and me that we had a distinctive accent. I was in disbelief. An accent? But we’re from the midwest. The North! The North Shore of Chicago, more specifically. What could she be talking about? She was from Los Angeles, I think, clearly not understanding that WE midwesterners are the normal speakers in America. In LA, they don’t have accents either, and as far as I was concerned, I sound just like her. How dare she accuse us of sounding different. We had NO accent. This is probably around the time that I learned the word ethnocentrism and I should have connected the two concepts. But alas, 17.
Turns out that girls growing up on the North Shore, in particular in the late 80s, had a mix of Chicago and Valley Girl wrapped into one that was unknowable to us. Interestingly, and here I will get specific, the Inland North accent was the basis for the term ‘General American’. Ha! I was right. We are simply representative of Americans - normal speaking within this country. We represent the baseline. That is until, upon further study as an adult, I learned that the regional accent bent towards a Northern Cities Vowel Shift characterized by extra nasal resonance and a “bright” vowel quality often found in Chicagoland. Short “a”, anyone? Indeed, lots of us. Now this is familiar. And how did the Valley Girl get mixed in? Not sure but that was indeed emblematic of the North Shore at the time. Linguists refer to that as “media dialect”. Perhaps we were borrowing our speech from MTV!
Something peculiar is happening though, perhaps expected given the melting pot that is America and how connected we now are online and in person across geography. A shift is occurring over recent decades whereby the Chicago accent is weakening over time. Research has found that generational accents change and we have differing language, slang, accents from our parents. We take our accents with us wherever we go. I left the midwest in 1995 Colorado and California. I actually tried to shake it at some point given the strange ridicule but it followed me like a shadow reminder of my roots. At some point, I don’t exactly know when, I decided to embrace it. It is a piece of me now that I refuse to give up. When meeting new people, I often get a quizzical look followed by, “Are you from Chicago? I hear it.” Indeed! I wear it or rather say it with pride now. I lean into it. So while the accent may be diminishing in Chicago, it is alive and well in me in Colorado.
Author’s note…
In researching this essay, I came across Rick Aschmann, a professional linguist, who created a map of North American English Dialects, Based on Pronunciation Patterns. This is his hobby. You should check it out. What a gift.
