"Wisconsin is at the epicenter of a linguistic collision"

Something that the NYT seems to have missed but that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has picked up on is how English is changing. In an article entitled "That Wisconsin accent…or is it an eccent?", readers are forewarned of an impending change in English perhaps akin to the Great Vowel Shift.

Thomas Purnell, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, ran to the office of colleague Joseph Salmons.

Excited and out of breath, Purnell managed to say, "You won't believe what I just heard."

Purnell had been walking down a hallway behind a couple of female undergrads who were discussing a party that one had been to but the other had not.

"One of them says to the other, 'Eck-tually, it was ax-cellent,' " Purnell explained.

That snippet of overheard conversation - trivial to the untrained ear - demonstrated the forces of linguistic change bearing down on Wisconsin. The unusual vowel sounds are hallmarks of a change coming at us from the Southeast, the so-called Northern Cities Shift in which "aa" and "eh" sounds are being reversed.

This change, however, is moving head-on toward another vowel change coming from the West, the so-called Low-Back Merger. In this second change, words such as caught are being pronounced increasingly like the word cot.

In other words, Wisconsin is at the epicenter of a linguistic collision.

Prof. Purnell and others are exploring Skonnie English and are holding public forums on the matter. The Milwaukee forum was yesterday while the one in Eau Claire is on the 27th. Folks here in Madtown get the chance to give their input on Saturday, April 1st from 10 a.m.–noon at Union South (227 N. Randall Avenue).

Having grown up in Chicago but also having spent some time up nort, I think my dialect is an odd mish-mash. Although I heard the term "uff-da" as a child, I didn't start using it until my 20s. I sometimes end sentences with "hey" and that is definitely something I picked up here in the Land of Cheese. Still, the word "creek", for me, should be pronounced as it's spelled - no "crick"! And bridges are a certain number of feet across, not "acrosst".

Anyway, while you're waiting for your chance to give the lowdown on Wisconsin English, check out the Wisconsin Englishes podcast.