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Preservationists, please save a dying language before it’s too late: Chicagoese
- chapium 8y agoIs it already dead? I rarely encounter this accent in Chicago proper. It has migrated to the suburbs. Come to think of it, I only hear it in the city because it is used for pedestrian signals and pre-recorded CTA announcements.
- kevinmchugh 8y agoYep, it white-flighted out to the suburbs. My dad's two siblings kept their accent but my dad suppressed his, either when he was at Loyola or at U of C, because he didn't want to sound like a low-class south sider. You'll still find it in certain neighborhoods, Beverly comes to mind.
- brootstrap 8y agoagreed, probably due to amount of youth in the city. growing up in the burbs of chicago i heard my family talk like this, mainly the men. Dad, uncles, you would hear a lot of 'trow some sausage on der' type phrases. Also instead of Jewel (grocery store) you hear "the Jewels".
- interfixus 8y ago> Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism
- azinman2 8y agoYou’re not missing much.
- jessaustin 8y agoDo you imagine that this is the right place to complain about this phenomenon, which is by now well-known to people on HN?
- interfixus 8y agoI report a fact. The complaint is entirely your own imputation.
- jessaustin 8y agoThe fact is less interesting than the complaint. Yes we know that your regulators have broadcast ambiguous threats of ambiguous penalties around the world. It is a fact that does not require daily reminders.
- TomMarius 8y agoWe need to say it to remind our fellow EU citizens that are in favor.
- gammateam 8y agoregional news sites that skipped GDPR have pretty much nothing to report just VPN in though, if you really want to see torguard has a nice interface to switch servers pretty easily, but note that it changes the traffic from your whole computer and not just a browser
- notfromhere 8y agoregional news don't have the time or resources to deal with GDPR
- asymmetric 8y agoNot available in EU. Mirrors: * https://archive.fo/bqEVs https://archive.fo/bqEVs * https://web.archive.org/web/20180808164502/http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-met-chicago-language-kass-20180803-story.html https://web.archive.org/web/20180808164502/http://www.chicag...
- hugh4life 8y ago"Recently, idiotic stories attacking Chicagoese were in the news. These were based on a blasphemous survey from YouGov that found our Chicago accent to be the least attractive in America. Garbage. Lies. All lies." I went to a school where at least half the people in my dorm had a Chicago accent and I found it extremely grating. "Chicagoese is our lyrical native tongue. But we’re losing it, bit-by-bit in the great American leveling that is destroying distinctive speech across our nation. .... “Some people still speak that way, but it is no longer as widespread or as distinct as it was 70 years ago. Radio, TV, and the great mobility of modern Americans are gradually leveling all the various, colorful, local varieties of English in favor of a dull, neutral, standard American.” " I may be imagining things, but when I was growing up people in my area(don't want to give it away but it's a rural area where a local university would have lots of Chicago students) spoke more dull and neutral than they do now... now there's more of a southern/redneck tinge taken from country music.
- lgessler 8y agoThe cure for the confused talk of accents being "dull", "grating", "neutral", "jarring", "ugly", "guttural", etc. is to observe that dialects have these associations merely because of the social statuses of the people who speak them. In other words, the linguistic qualities of the dialect itself do not play any role in determining how the dialect will be viewed by others. It's a bundle of *isms wearing a linguistic fedora.
- TulliusCicero 8y agoThat's ludicrous. French accents don't sound fancy to Americans purely because we think of France as fancy.
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- lgessler 8y agoIf you're so sure, could you explain which linguistic features of French make it "sound fancy"? Even if you could isolate them and somehow attempt to make the case that it is their intrinsic qualities that give them their "fanciness", you would then need to be consistent and claim that whenever they occur in other languages they should also contribute to making the language "sound fancy", since the counter-claim is that there do exist linguistic qualities that have aesthetic values devoid of cultural context. But I think that kind of follow-up investigation would reveal that linguistic qualities with "objective" aesthetic values are elusive, if they exist at all. (For example, you could take two French sounds which are iconically French to English speakers[1][2]. Assuming these sounds confer fancy-points upon people with French accents, do native English speakers really grant speakers of other languages fancy-points when they use these sounds in their accented English? It's not clear to me if they would. For one thing, these same two sounds also occur in many varieties of Arabic, which Westerners generally don't regard as nearly as fancy or beautiful.) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_uvular_fricative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_uvular_fricative [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_postalveolar_fricative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_postalveolar_fricative
- ksdale 8y agoMy wife and I took about 6 months last year to explore the US. We stayed in Airbnbs generally in poorer parts of town because that was what we could afford. We passed through 40-something states and one of the things I was most disappointed in was the lack of accents. Pretty much no young people spoke with the accents I was expecting in a particular area, everyone sounded a lot like us (West Coast). We did hear more Texan accents in 2 days in Dallas than in a month in Austin, which I suppose is to be expected. New Orleans was delightful when it came to accents, as were a few other cities in the South. In most places though, we only heard very occasional local accents and they tended to be possessed by older people. I chalked it up to people just gradually moving toward a Hollywood type of accent. I also noticed that if we spent very long in one place, my accent would shift slightly toward whatever was local, so I'm wondering if the locals, upon discovering we were from the West Coast would do the same thing and let their accent drift closer to ours. In any case, I was always listening for accents and even though I'd never really thought about it, it was disappointing to realize that a lot of accents are probably disappearing.
- drivingmenuts 8y ago> We did hear more Texan accents in 2 days in Dallas than in a month in Austin, which I suppose is to be expected. That's apparently due to the large influx of Californians, though I personally run into more Easterners moving here rather than Californians. By here, I mean Austin.
- lgessler 8y agoWilliam Labov, a prominent sociolinguist and dialectologist, doesn't think regional accents in the United States are on their way out: > Contrary to the general expectation that mass culture would diminish regional differences, the dialects of Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, Birmingham, Buffalo, Philadelphia, and New York are now more different from each other than they were a hundred years ago. Equally significant is Labov's finding that AAVE [African American Vernacular English] does not map with the geography and timing of changes in other dialects. The home dialect of most African American speakers has developed a grammar that is more and more different from that of the white mainstream dialects in the major cities studied and yet highly homogeneous throughout the United States (http://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/4510 http://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/4510)
- mannykannot 8y agoFrom my limited experience, I have the impression that in Britain, the children of South Asian and West Indian immigrants have quite commonly taken on the accents of their home towns and regions.
- bilbo0s 8y ago"...The home dialect of most African American speakers has developed a grammar that is more and more different from that of the white mainstream dialects in the major cities studied and yet highly homogeneous throughout the United States..." Is there a difference between a "dialect" and an "accent"? Because having been in the military, I can definitely tell you that different black people have different accents. I think anyone who's been in the military could tell you that. So I'm wondering if this guy means that blacks speak the same language, which is AAVE, but the accent of a black person from Jackson, Mississippi could still be significantly different from the accent of a black person from Lincoln, Nebraska? (Because their accents are, in fact, significantly different.)
- detaro 8y agoYes. Accent is only about how speech sounds: pronunciation, emphasis, dynamic of speech during a sentence... Dialect includes vocabulary and grammar too, and the quote says that the grammar they use is common.
- samcheng 8y agoIf you don't know what accent (not really a "language") the Chicago Tribune is writing about, you can get a hint of it from this famous parody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBnnon_iZOM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBnnon_iZOM (This is Saturday Night Live from the early 90's, so it's a bit of a New York interpretation of Chicagoese.)
- mannykannot 8y agoThe author is writing about an accent (or, at most, a dialect), not a language, and if an accent is dying from 'natural' causes (as opposed to, for example, from policies that penalize its use), I don't think much can be done to preserve it, other than to make a record of it. A distinct language might be a little easier to preserve (but only if there is a sufficiently large number of people who want to put some effort into preserving it), as its distinctiveness helps make its preservation an overt act.
- jdmichal 8y agoThere is no clear distinction between a dialect and a language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a... For instance, having taken German in school, I could generally read Yiddish as long as it was written in Latin alphabet and not Hebrew. Even though they are considered two separate langauges. However, I could generally not understand, say, Swiss German, even though that's still considered German. EDIT: I just found this interesting blurb regarding Low German in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German#A_language_or_a_mere_dialect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German#A_language_or_a_mer...?
- mannykannot 8y agoNevertheless, they are not synonyms, and the existence of these two different words suggests that there is a useful distinction, even if it is not sharp, and even if it is not always applied consistently. In the case of 'Chicagoese', whatever it is, it is clearly the English language.
- jdmichal 8y agoThe difference is social, not linguistic. I assume you're making your judgement about "clearly English" based on mutual intelligibility. That is, you expect that someone with strong skills in "English" but not "Chicagoese" would be able to understand someone speaking "Chicagoese". But what about dialect continua where any two neighbors are mutually intelligible, but the two ends are not? How do you classify which is in which language, if you are going to declare that there are in fact two languages based on the ends not understanding each other?
- Animats 8y agoNot worth saving. Born in Chicago. The Tribune, back when they mattered, used a simplified version of English spelling.[1] "Tho" for "Though" was the most noticeable change. McCormack, the publisher, was into that. It didn't catch on at all. [1] http://www.chicagotribune.com/ct-per-flash-simplespelling-0229-20120129-story.html# http://www.chicagotribune.com/ct-per-flash-simplespelling-02...
- d0lph 8y agoI do this occasionally too, not sure where I picked it up at, but half the word is silent, how stupid is that!
- eric_the_read 8y agoReading early '60s Marvel comics, I'm struck (and irritated) by their house style of using 'thru' everywhere, instead of 'through'.
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- peterwwillis 8y agoThe article doesn't explain why it should be saved. The only reason would be for historical context. But there's no reason to keep speaking it. All language changes over time. We're not all still speaking Proto-Indo-European. h₂áu̯ei̯ h₁i̯osméi̯ h₂u̯l̥h₁náh₂ né h₁ést, só h₁éḱu̯oms derḱt. só gʷr̥hₓúm u̯óǵʰom u̯eǵʰed; só méǵh₂m̥ bʰórom; só dʰǵʰémonm̥ h₂ṓḱu bʰered. h₂óu̯is h₁ékʷoi̯bʰi̯os u̯eu̯ked: “dʰǵʰémonm̥ spéḱi̯oh₂ h₁éḱu̯oms-kʷe h₂áǵeti, ḱḗr moi̯ agʰnutor”. h₁éḱu̯ōs tu u̯eu̯kond: “ḱludʰí, h₂ou̯ei̯! tód spéḱi̯omes, n̥sméi̯ agʰnutór ḱḗr: dʰǵʰémō, pótis, sē h₂áu̯i̯es h₂u̯l̥h₁náh₂ gʷʰérmom u̯éstrom u̯ept, h₂áu̯ibʰi̯os tu h₂u̯l̥h₁náh₂ né h₁esti. tód ḱeḱluu̯ṓs h₂óu̯is h₂aǵróm bʰuged.
- fake-name 8y agoIn that case, why save anything? The internet archive is obviously pointless. Everything should be just one grey homogeneous mass. People save stuff like this because it provides a interesting window into the human condition, not because of some assigned analytical "value".
- csydas 8y agoI'm pretty sure the GP is suggesting the article doesn't provide a compelling reason why the dialect/language in the article should be preserved beyond just being a note in a book somewhere. There are tons of things which we keep a copy of, but for no more reason than just to remember it. With regards to Chicagoese, maybe I was just listening to the wrong people, but I grew up in Milwaukee and went to Chicago basically whenever I wanted for most of my young adult life, and I never heard the term Chicagoese until reading this article. I actually thought the article was satire on first read, and I would agree with the GP that there isn't really a compelling argument for it, any more than I would suggest that we preserve the idiosyncrasies that my deep-woods Wisconsinite grandparents would come up with as I grew up, even if everyone in their region used the terms. I really don't get the thrust of the article's argument other than being upset that Chicago was ranked the accent as unattractive in the YouGov survey.
- wahern 8y ago
- WhompingWindows 8y agoNew England accents are certainly not dying out. While we do have a large number of non-regional speakers here in southern new england, we have MANY in certain towns who speak with heavy accents. The Family GUy Rhode Island accent, for instance, was on display at the local diner in Providence. Half the workers and customers were speaking with heavy RI accents. If you want RI accents, head out to Cranston and Warwick, to dive bars in Fox Point Providence, or down to Narragansett in the off-season where you'll get true Rhode Islanders and not tourists.
- joshlittle 8y agoTypical John Kass... slow news day at da Trib? Nevertheless after half a decade in The City, people from my hometown of Cincinnati stated I had picked up a bit of the Chicago accent. After another half decade in The (other) City, it’s disappeared. A few best friends of mine grew up in Beverly, fwiw.