For Yinz and Yous: On Edward McClelland’s “How to Speak Midwestern”
How to Speak Midwestern | Edward McClelland | Belt Publishing | 2016 | 149 Pages
The day I receive Edward McClelland’s How to Speak Midwestern in the mail, I know exactly what to do with it.
Alright Gram. If we’re in Michigan and somebody refers to “the Soo,” what are they talking about?”
A smile spreads across her face.
Oh, that’s easy. The Sault St. Marie.
Let’s do another one, Gram. This one’s a bit harder. If I say, “But will it play in Peoria?” what do I mean?
She gets that one too, and faster than the first.
My 93-year-old grandmother is a Midwesterner through and through. She was born in Davenport, Iowa, grew up in Cherry Valley, Illinois, raised a family in Southwest Michigan, suburban Chicago, and Madison, Wisconsin, and because of this Midwestern mobility, speaks with a complex blend of accents and vocabularies. She also struggles with dementia. Guided by my own knowledge of the twists and turns of her life, and McClelland’s glossary, the word game I play with her brings my family an hour of brightness in what are otherwise dark days.
On this evening with my family, How to Speak Midwestern serves as the centerpiece of a Midwestern call and response, but that is not the only utility of this deceptively slim volume. Overall, McClelland’s publications belie any notion of Midwest-as-flyover. He has written extensively on the people, themes, and histories undergirding the physical and social infrastructures of this place, from Barack Obama to General Motors to a medley of “third coast” actors in The Third Coast: Sailors, Strippers, Fishermen, Folksingers, Long-Haired Ojibway Painters and God-Save-the-Queen Monarchists of the Great Lakes, which won the 2008 Great Lakes Book Award in General Nonfiction.
How to Speak Midwestern provides McClelland’s readership with yet another lens through which to encounter our eclectic region. The book is broken into three regionally focused, braided essay-style chapters—Inland North, Midland, and North Central—with an introduction and sizable glossary of terms. The glossary further segments the larger regions covered in the first half of the book: Michigan, Pittsburgh, Wisconsin, and so on. Unlike most glossaries, which would be a slog to read from beginning to end, McClelland’s glossary accommodates linear reading, especially if you’re a word nerd like myself and delight in learning about why you grew up calling your mom “Maa,” but your friends from Oregon (the state, not the little town in north central Illinois) did not. For this reason, How to Speak Midwestern makes a great party book, road trip book, coffee table book, bathroom book, waiting room book, or gift. The English major in your life will enjoy it, as will your father, two notoriously difficult populations to shop for. It jogs the memory, instructs, and teaches. Reading it makes you feel smarter, in that you can now explain your friends’ speech patterns (if they are amenable to a lesson), and those of Fred Rogers (Midland–Latrobe, PA) and John Goodman (Midland–St. Louis).
My first revelation about my own speech came on page 56 (McClelland is quoting Iron Range native Sara Schmelzer Loss):
A lot of ‘voiced’ sounds (ones pronounced with your vocal cord vibrating) are produced without the vocal cords vibrating so they sound voiceless … Therefore, it’s not just ‘j’ that can sound like ‘ch’— but also ‘z’ that can sound like ‘s’ and ‘g’ that can sound like ‘k.’ Devoicing obstruents at the ends of words is a process we see in a lot of languages—German, Russian, Serbo-Croatian.
I snap a picture of the page for my girlfriend, a native of the Pacific Northwest, alongside the message “It me.” She and I mostly (mostly she) have puzzled over why some of my ‘g’ endings—hiking, looking—come out hikink, lookink. I feel understood. Seen! Many more revelations follow.
McClelland begins the book with a kind of origin story—one many Midwesterners have—of the moment we discover our accent:
I first found out I had an accent when I was a sophomore at the University of Michigan. I was taking a class in linguistics, and I asked a student from New Jersey whether she’s noticed anything distinctive about the way I and other Michiganders talk.
‘You say ‘cayen’ for ‘can,’ she told me without delay.’
In his story, I recognize myself as a graduate student at the University of Kentucky. “Say hot dog,” my classmates would croon, like the parents of a toddler learning their first words, poking fun at the dramatic, painfully Chicago ah sounds. To this day, I’m reluctant to say “Hancock,” which gives me about as much trouble as any word in the English language. My A’s and O’s are unfortunate inheritors of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift when “New Englanders, New Yorkers, and immigrants arrived in upstate New York to dig the Erie Canal,” according to McClelland. The new dialect, which folded in accents from Mainers and Rhode Islanders and Bostonians, emerged and spread westward. For this reason, Chicagoans have more in common with speakers from Maine than even those in central Illinois. As somebody who has lived in Illinois both north and south of I-80, I can attest to the truth of this.
The main takeaway from the book is something linguists know, but the average yinz amongst us might not: regional vocabularies, accents, and dialects provide solidarity against prejudice and nativism that comes with being an immigrant in this country. How we speak is the product of historical events, movements, power, and geography. Cleveland’s proximity to steel mills and auto plants drew European immigrants; the Great Depression made the Transatlantic “wough” and “greatah” fall out of favor; John S. Kenyon, a Cleveland philologist who preferred the ‘r’ sound whenever it appeared in words, published the landmark and widely consulted at the time A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English in 1944.
My ears perked when McClelland discussed the connections between accents and broadcasting. While living in Lexington, Kentucky, my friends and colleagues from Cincinnati, Ohio (83 miles north of Lexington) claimed that Cincy was where newscasters would go to “lose their accents.” There was even a school there where your local weather person had probably spent six weeks converting their Grand Rapids “ruff” to “roof,” and their Central Illinois “warsh” to “wash.” McClelland neither confirms nor denies the existence of this fabled school, but there is something to this trend of broadcasters, from Dan Rather and Bob Schieffer (both native Texans), getting “rhotic”—that is, finding their r’s and never looking back.
This is only the tip of the iceberg of speech knowledge McClelland drops in How to Speak Midwestern. The book could easily have been titled Why We Speak Midwestern, with its histories of “pop,” “youse,” and “da Bears.” And with social media exposing us to unfamiliar ways of speaking every day, the book is even more timely. Now I know what the heck the former Lt. Gov. and now U.S. Senator of Pennsylvania John Fetterman meant when, after suffering a stroke on the campaign trail, tweeted: “Thank yinz for the well-wishes—it means the world to me.” With all the earnestness this Midwesterner can muster, I ask, does How to Speak Midwestern play in Peoria? Yah, you betcha.