Discovering Chicago's Dialects 



A Field Museum Experiment in Adult Education 



by Michael I. Miller 



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Friting in 1904, an eminent University of Chicago 

 linguist, Professor Carl Darling Buck, described Chicago 

 as "an unparalleled babel," whose linguistic diversity sur- 

 passed other American immigrant centers such as New 

 York and transcended even the Byzantine variety of 

 ancient and great cultural crossroads — like Constan- 

 tinople itself. 



The fact that forty languages were spoken in Chi- 

 cago did not make it unique in America, but that four- 

 teen of those languages were spoken by more than 

 10,000 persons each was unprecedented in the history of 

 human civilization. The Chicago of 1904 supported dai- 

 ly and weekly newspapers in at least ten languages and 

 regularly provided church services in at least twenty. 

 Though multilingualism and multidialectism are com- 

 monplace facts of urbanism — no doubt constants of 

 urban life since the earliest cities appeared in Mesopota- 

 mia — no other civilized place had harbored such a broad 

 variety of tongues on such a large scale. 



If this were not enough to make Chicago's speech 

 interesting to linguists, we confront the parallel and 

 apparently contradictory fact that English as spoken 

 here has become a kind of de facto American national 

 standard, partly because it forms the basis for the "net- 

 work standard" heard on radio and TV. Since this may 

 be horrifyingly true to graduates of Oxbridge and to gen- 

 teel Londoners, it seems worthwhile to ask about the 

 effects on our language of over a century of constant 

 immigration. 



What changes have been brought by urbanization, 

 technological change, and marketing to the traditional 

 folk dialects we would expect to find transported here 

 from New England (and ultimately from England itself) ? 

 What Chicago localisms — Chicagoanisms — have de- 

 veloped over the last 150 years of European settlement 

 at the southwestern end of Lake Michigan? To what ex- 

 tent have loanwords, loanshifts (words whose meaning 

 has changed under the influence of another language) 

 and loanblends (word hybrids) taken root in Chicago's 



urban culture? What has been the influence of Southern 

 and South Midland immigrants, particularly Southern 

 blacks and Appalachian whites? What have been the 

 effects of mass education — itself an unprecedented so- 

 cial experiment from a European point of view? What 

 are the continuing effects of social stratification and of 

 other forms of social organization, such as national 

 parishes or red-lined housing areas? Most importantly, 

 what dynamic changes continue to develop in Chicago's 

 speech? 



The Checklist Technique 



"Discovering Chicago's Dialects," a creative experiment 

 in adult education sponsored by the Field Museum, en- 

 gaged fifteen Chicagoans in attempts at answering these 

 and similar questions. We did not find all the answers we 

 sought; but most of us felt that the search itself was worth 

 our time and effort. 



The course began with a brief overview of Chi- 

 cago's settlement history and a thumbnail sketch of the 

 materials and methods of dialectology as an academic 

 discipline, beginning with the very first scientific at- 

 tempts at dialect collection along the Rhine River in 

 western Germany in 1876. This part of the course was 

 considerably enriched by the contributions of Virginia 

 McDavid, a former fieldworker for the Linguistic Atlas 

 of the United States and Canada. Then we set to work 

 on a concentrated study of Chicago's vocabulary and 

 pronunciation, using a checklist technique pioneered by 

 Alva M. Davis, formerly of the Illinois Institute of Tech- 

 nology, and following out several lines of investigation 

 suggested by the brilliant work of Lee Pederson, con- 

 ducted here between 1964 and 1966. 



Though course participants drew heavily on previ- 



Dr. Miller is assistant professor, Department of English and Speech, 

 Chicago State University, and has been an instructor for Field 

 Museum's Adult Education Program. 



