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"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 l

"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 ago
The 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 ago
  That's ludicrous. French accents don't sound fancy to Americans purely because we think of France as fancy.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - lgessler 8y ago
    If 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

lgessler 8y ago

The 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 ago
That's ludicrous. French accents don't sound fancy to Americans purely because we think of France as fancy.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- lgessler 8y ago
  If 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