Illinois Accents (Chicago, Champaign, Urbana: eat, dinner, county)

[TabulaRasa]

Originally Posted by Drover

For a classic example of the Northern Cities shift, Dennis Farina (per above) is where it's at.

Agreed. My SO is a Buffalo, NY-bred Italian, and he and everyone in his family and hometown neighborhood sound pretty much exactly like Dennis Farina. I lived in Chicago, and if I hadn't known where he was from when I met him, I'd have pegged him for a Chicagoan based on accent alone. Those Great Lakes cities have barely distinguishable nuances.

[GolfLover2]

We live south of the city of Chicago down hear Joliet. Our son went to school out in Virginia ... in Lexington, VA to be exact. The kids out there thought he had an accent .. a "Chicago" accent. I guess everyone has a regional sound to their voice and speaking. Makes it interesting, doesn't it?
Best of luck at school ...

[Drover]

Originally Posted by GolfLover2

We live south of the city of Chicago down hear Joliet. Our son went to school out in Virginia ... in Lexington, VA to be exact. The kids out there thought he had an accent .. a "Chicago" accent. I guess everyone has a regional sound to their voice and speaking. Makes it interesting, doesn't it?
Best of luck at school ...

It never occurred to me that I have an accent until I lived in Pittsburgh and people there kept asking me where I was from.

[linicx]

I spent one winter in Florida and returned to Illinois. My mother said I had a suntan and a southern drawl.

[jackhitts]

To add my two cents: I was born in Joliet, grew up in Michigan and now live in Effingham. I'd say about half of the people I work with (at a newspaper, so we're all college-educated) have normal-sounding Midwestern accents— that is, no drawl, no nasally Chicago thing, no nothing. The other half have either a drawl or a nasally Chicago thing (I have a semi-nasally Detroit thing, but I'm not counting myself).

Let me note that the "drawl" of which I speak is nowhere near a Southern drawl like you'd find in Tennessee or Alabama or Kentucky. It's just slightly drawn-out vowels. Kind of a rural thing, not really a Southern thing, just that "Praire drawl" that someone mentioned (I love that explanation).

Anyway, I find this breakdown somewhat fascinating though. One co-worker, who grew up right around Cairo — which might as well be Kentucky— as no trace of an accent whatsoever, while another coworker sounds like she's from Chicago, but I found out just the other day that, no, she grew up in a rural area around here. Another male co-worker from the Peoria area sounds just normal, but a guy from Urbana has the Prairie drawl. (Conversley, one of my best friends from college, a female also from Urbana, has no accent whatsoever.)

Maybe the further south you go the more "Southern" it gets but let's be honest... people most people from Illinois are more culturally influenced by Midwestern cities and watch their TV channels and listen to their radio stations, so they're going to sound more like them than they will sound like they're from the South. (Ie, they're going to listen to Cardinals and Blues and Rams games on KMOX or Cubs games on WGN or Colts games on whatever the hell the famous Indy station is.)

Also, this is a completely different topic, but something Chicagoans might want to take note of: Everyone who lives south of Joliet hates it when you use the generic term "downstate" to describe their region. It's a bit insulting to them, I guess, that you don't know your own state's geography. For instance, I read a Chicago Tribune article that called Effingham "a Southern Illinois city" and people I work with flipped a s**t (well, it was mostly in jest, but still). Which, you have to admit, is understandable, considering a good third of the state lies south of Effingham.

[Drover]

Well, if a good third of the state lies south of Effingham, then a good 2/3rds lies north of it. Close enough to "Southern Illinois" for me.

[jackhitts]

Originally Posted by Drover

Well, if a good third of the state lies south of Effingham, then a good 2/3rds lies north of it. Close enough to "Southern Illinois" for me.

Like I said, I don't actually care since I am not from here, but for some reason people around here do. Maybe they think that being from "Southern Illinois" makes them sound more like hicks? Most around here would say they're from "East Central Illinois." Also, they are still in the 217 area code, which is the Central Illinois area code (618 is Southern).

In any case, I always kind of thought anything South of I-64 was more "Southern Illinois". Mostly because between I-64 and 70 is Metro East St. Louis, which I don't really consider "Southern" Illinois at all.

[leevank]

I just happened to see this old thread when doing a Google search on regional accents, and noticed that it mentioned the accent around Champaign-Urbana. I was born in Champaign-Urbana in 1949, and lived there continuously until graduating from high school in 1966. I then went to college at Illinois State, and aside from spending 6 months in North Carolina, have lived in Maryland since that time, although business travel has taken me pretty much all over the United States.

I had an English professor at Illinois State who, by asking you to pronounce about a dozen words, and supply what you called a few common things, could predict with astounding accuracy which county you came from (including adjacent counties) if you'd lived your entire life there. He thought I was from Matoon, but then my mother's parents were from Jasper County (a little south of Matoon), and I definitely sound more like my relatives from her side of the family than those on my father's side of the family. For about 15 other people in my English class, he either predicted the county or an adjacent county.

I wouldn't call the south-central Illinois accent so much a "Prairie drawl" as a "rural twang," but while I never thought I had an "accent" during my early life, when I listen to my recorded voice, it's definitely not entirely the standard TV newscaster's accent. My former boss (who is from St. Louis) refers to it as a "country accent."

I agree with an eariier poster on one thing: When I'm in the upper South (North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky), I find it very easy (and indeed pretty much automatic) to develop more of a twang and slip into something that sounds more Southern than I normally do. But I never slip into anything remotely resembling the local accent when I'm in either the Deep South, or in places like Boston or Minneapolis. And despite having spent many more years in the Baltimore area than I ever did in central Illinois, people can still immediately tell that I'm from somewhere in the lower Midwest.

By the way, what do any of the rest of you from Illinois call the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street? In Champaign-Urbana, at least when I was growing up, it was universally called "the parking." But in other areas of Illinois, it was called other things, or simply "the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street." That was one of the questions the English professor used to identify where you were from, and I had never previously known that anybody called it anything other than "the parking."

I've changed some of my pronunciations since leaving Illinois, but the one thing I simply CAN'T do is to refer to a parent's sister as an "ahnt" rather than an "ant." My wife (who grew up all over the country as a Navy kid, but whose mother is from Virginia) thinks "ant" sounds hopelessly hayseed, but I think "ahnt" sounds ridiculously snobbish.

[Avengerfire]

Originally Posted by leevank

...By the way, what do any of the rest of you from Illinois call the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street?...

City owned property. Or my fave (which I use as well) "Da grass by the curb." Or "Da grass between da sidewalk and da street."

[j33]

Leevank - I've always called it a 'parkway' but I have no idea where I got that term.