Wes-consin? There is no East-consin

You bin shiftin' yer vowuls?
SUSAN LAMPERT SMITH

Sometime during the NCAA basketball tournament you'll hear it, and it will grate on your ears and your nerves.

Some announcer will refer to the Badgers as the team from "WES-consin."

What? Is there a team from East Consin?

Meanwhile, people new to the state will go grocery shopping at Copp's and hear this puzzling question: "Do you wanna beg for that?"

To Southern ears, our pronunciation of "bag" sounds exactly like "beg." And since they already paid for their groceries, they see no need to beg.

Why do we talk so funny? Why do they sound so weird?

The answers are rooted in linguistic phenomena known as vowel shift and vowel merger. And they're pushing American English to be more regionally diverse than less, linguistics researchers say.

"For a long time, linguists believed that mass media and education would even out the differences between regions and we would eventually all sound alike," said Joseph Salmons, a UW-Madison professor of linguistics.

"In fact, the opposite has happened."

Land of our rivals

Salmons said the reasons are tied to our sense of regional kinship. And our desire to be different from others, say those from the flat lands of Illinois.

In fact, one reason the WES-consin pronunciation is so grating is because it's part of a dialect more common in Chicago, Indiana and points south and east. In other words, the land of our hated basketball rivals.

Salmons and graduate student Dilara Tepeli are recording Wisconsin accents as part of a large National Institutes of Health study on changes in the way we pronounce vowels in America. Similar recordings are being made in central Ohio, where the vowels are not believed to be changing, and in the mountains of western North Carolina, where they're changing, but in a different direction.

While we're becoming more distinctively Wisconsin in our accents, Salmons' relatives in the mountains of western North Carolina are becoming more Southern.

Recordings of North Carolina mountain people from the early 20th Century depict them talking much more like we do in Wisconsin, Salmons said. You'll find more distinctively Southern pronunciation today, thanks to something called the Southern Shift.

Salmons illustrates the change with a joke from Southern comedian Jeff Foxworthy: "You might be a redneck if all your curse words have two syllables."

Hay-el, they sure talk funny down there.

And so do we.

More...

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This article is from Madison.com. I heard these guys on Whad'ya Know a couple of weeks ago. I thought they were pretty fascinating.

I have a northern accent. A midwest accent. The Wisconsin in me is fading. Except when I say Wisconsin. I moved to Wisconsin after five years in Missouri, but I spent the first eighteen years of my life in Iowa. After I moved to Wisconsin I noticed my mom was beginning to say "beg" instead of "bag." I had a job where I answered phones. The first time I had to spell "Oconomowoc," I froze. "A-what?" I thought. Then I learned Oconomowoc has five Os, and O is the only vowel (but is pronounced Ah-kah-na-ma-wak). A-ha. The first time I said "Wes-consin" at work, the person on the phone asked, "Where?" She wasn't the only one. I got the "East-consin" thing several times. I learned my lesson. I adapted. My accent got thick enough that people thought I was local, except for one friend who swears I have an accent but it isn't a Wisconsin accent. She's from the Milwaukee area and ends all of her sentences with "hey" (like they do), yet she can't figure out why people think she's from Canada. Uh... So I don't trust her judgment.

I can relate to this article, having moved south from the north. When I moved south I had a hard time with "a." To my ear it sounded like either an "ow" or "oh" sound. Turning one vowel into two syllables still catches me off guard. But I can only imagine how strange northerners sound to southerners.

Thing is, when I go back to Iowa, I notice more people with accents I never heard when I lived there. And when I talk to friends in Wisconsin, I am always surprised at just how thick their accents are. And when I go back up north, people tell me I am picking up a southern accent. My response: "What? Are you drunk?" And then every so often I hear a shift in how I pronounce "i" and sometimes "a." Oh, no.

On a somewhat related note, I was at the grocery store this morning where I heard a mom tell her kid to get the "buggy." For the life of me, I will never get used to people calling a grocery cart a buggy. What the...? I think that is right behind calling a knit winter hat a toboggan. So, I began to think I should start keeping a list of southern words and their northern equivalent. But right now I can't think of anything other than those two words.