
Preservationists, please save a dying language before it’s too late: Chicagoese - ryan_j_naughton
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-met-chicago-language-kass-20180803-story.html?msource=9J68Z&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT0RJek5ERXhNRGhrTURaaSIsInQiOiIrOVV6MHZVdHRuVWl1aGhnazdMSjFraXY1RzlYXC93SG1lZ1pNaVFycDZNV25Wa0RjSDZuM1lzSGtqNlBBcXoyUmhubXBNWjcxR3l6MTd3bXVTUDBjTzJhOHo5WWJRSXVubFdGRHJ2UlwvVmdWRkdiZzhzdzU1OEFsaDAxb0dDaVFpIn0%3D
======
lgessler
William 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))

~~~
bilbo0s
"...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.)

~~~
jdmichal
I think you're interpretation is pretty accurate. There's an old joke that a
language is a dialect with an army and a navy.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy)

The basic premise is that there is no clear distinction between the term
"dialect" and "language". Especially when you hit interesting cases like
dialect continuum, which is a bit like a game of telephone. Any two
neighboring dialects can generally understand each other, but the further away
you get the less that is true. So if you look at the two ends, is that two
different languages? Even though you could walk from one to the other and
everyone will understand each other?

An accent, on the other hand, is something more intrinsic to how an individual
renders sounds. That is, I can speak my native language English with my
accent, and I can also speak Spanish with that same accent. For instance, I
could use English "r" sound (/ɹ/) instead of the Spanish rolled or tapped "r"
sounds (/r/ and /ɾ/). Or I could use English vowel "e" (/ɛ/ or maybe /eɪ/)
instead of Spanish vowel "e" (/e/). And so on. "Losing your accent" is
basically learning how to render those sounds in a fashion that matches
expectations.

------
peterwwillis
The 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
In 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
I'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
If it didn't have a name it's probably because, much like the Italian Beef,
nobody outside Chicagoland was aware of it or cared to be aware of it.

Also, though so-called Chicagoese has its own distinctive features, it's part
of a larger regional dialect. (See
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inland_Northern_American_Engli...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inland_Northern_American_English)).
But that dialect is disappearing and Chicago, being the largest representative
city, may become the location by which people remember it (e.g. in parody) in
the future.

That's the heart of it: the dialects are now quickly disappearing (after a
brief period where researchers were sure some of them were growing!) making
them increasingly prominent as part of a larger social discourse.

------
chapium
Is 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
Yep, 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
agreed, 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".

------
ksdale
My 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
> 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.

------
hugh4life
"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
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
That's ludicrous. French accents don't sound fancy to Americans purely because
we think of France as fancy.

~~~
lgessler
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)

------
WhompingWindows
New 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.

------
mannykannot
The 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
There is no clear distinction between a dialect and a language.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy)

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_mer...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German#A_language_or_a_mere_dialect)?

~~~
mannykannot
Nevertheless, 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
The 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?

~~~
mannykannot
I am not concerned with doing so in the general case, and even less in corner
cases that are not relevant here. My point is that preserving 'Chicagoese'
will be difficult because it is essentially English in an English-speaking
part of the world.

~~~
jdmichal
You said, "Nevertheless, 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."

That is what I was responding to. There is a difference, but it's social and
not linguistic. Which means when you say things like, "Chicagoese is clearly
English", that you are making a _social_ judgement that they are the same
language, whatever that means to you.

Clearly, for at least a few people quoted in the article, it has social
meaning that they both speak "Chicagoese" and not "just English". So they
might have a quite different opinion on the matter. And clearly the author of
the article does.

~~~
mannykannot
Ah, I see - though I don't think the distinction being social as opposed to
linguistic makes a difference here. The question "what would you recommend
doing about it?" would seem to apply both to how to classify Chicagoese, and
how to stem its decline.

------
asymmetric
Not available in EU. Mirrors:

* [https://archive.fo/bqEVs](https://archive.fo/bqEVs)

* [https://web.archive.org/web/20180808164502/http://www.chicag...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180808164502/http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-met-chicago-language-kass-20180803-story.html)

------
samcheng
If 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.)

------
joshlittle
Typical 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.

------
Animats
Not 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-02...](http://www.chicagotribune.com/ct-per-flash-
simplespelling-0229-20120129-story.html#)

~~~
eric_the_read
Reading early '60s Marvel comics, I'm struck (and irritated) by their house
style of using 'thru' everywhere, instead of 'through'.

------
interfixus
> _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_

~~~
jessaustin
Do you imagine that this is the right place to complain about this phenomenon,
which is by now well-known to people on HN?

~~~
interfixus
I report a fact. The complaint is entirely your own imputation.

~~~
jessaustin
The 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
We need to say it to remind our fellow EU citizens that are in favor.

