ous scholarly work, we did not confine ourselves to a 

 study of lifeless documents. Instead, we used five or six 

 different checklists to explore the language of our fam- 

 ilies, friends, co-workers, and anyone else we could get 

 to cooperate. As this implies, we did not attempt a rep- 

 licable sociolinguistic sampling of Chicago speech. 

 Our results nevertheless suggest some features of Chi- 

 cago's language that a more scientific sampling survey 

 might look for — and find. For readers who would like to 

 try it out on themselves, one of our checklists is repro- 

 duced on page 8. 



Chicago's Dialectical Structure 



A map created by Roger Shuy, author of The Northern- 

 Midland Dialect Boundary in Illinois (1962), indicates the 

 major dialect boundary that runs through northern Illi- 

 nois, a relatively sharp and stable Northern-North Mid- 

 land isogloss bundle. An isogloss bundle is an imaginary 

 geographical line where the dialect boundaries formed 

 by individual words, pronunciations, and grammatical 

 usages run more or less parallel, though in real life they 

 always intertwine like strands of spaghetti. 



Shuy worked from detailed field records of pro- 

 nunciation, grammar, and vocabulary of carefully se- 

 lected, long-time residents of northern Illinois. He 

 concluded that "we have a major dialect division in 

 northern Illinois which clearly marks off the Lead 

 Region [around Galena] and southern half of our area 

 as Midland and the northeast quadrant of our terri- 

 tory as Northern. . . . Our dialect boundaries in 

 northern Illinois correspond roughly to the area 

 bounded to the west by the Rock River and to the south 

 by the east-west flow of the Illinois River." Chicago sits 

 squarely in the northeast quadrant of Shuy's map. And 

 since most of Chicago's first English-speaking settlers 

 came from New England and New York, we would ex- 

 pect to find more distinctive features in common with 

 New York City than with, say, Philadelphia or Atlanta. 

 Within the city, the Chicago River presents Chi- 

 cago's most distinctive physical feature, bisecting the 

 area north of the Loop and then fanning out in northern 

 and southern branches. This shape determines Chi- 

 cago's social and cultural geography. The Irish workers 

 attracted here to dig the Illinois-Michigan canal settled 

 east of the south branch and established the basis for 

 both the speech and the political traditions of Bridge- 

 port, home turf of the Daley clan. Germans tended to 

 settle east of the north branch, where they cultivated 

 the language known as "Lincoln Avenue Dutch" 

 throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centu- 

 6 ries, and the later Poles, Italians, Bohemians, and other 



ethnic groups generally fanned out west of the two river 

 branches. Chicago's language, which began from the 

 same linguistic base as Boston's and New York's, differs 

 from the speech of the East today because of the im- 

 migration patterns begun in the 1840s and shaped by 

 the river. 



Three major population groups comprise present- 

 day Chicago: blacks, Hispanics, and the descendants of 

 the earlier European immigrants. Blacks have brought 

 various forms of Southern speech to the south and west 

 sides. Hispanics have brought Mexican Spanish to set- 

 tlements along the south branch of the river and Puerto 

 Rican Spanish to settlements along the north branch. 

 Since the nineteenth century, the European populations 

 have steadily migrated northwest and southwest, follow- 

 ing the paths of old Indian trails that later became ave- 

 nues like Lincoln, Milwaukee, Ogden, and Archer. As a 

 result of this constant population movement and neigh- 

 borhood resettlement, distinctive neighborhood di- 

 alects have not developed on a large scale. There are, 

 however, conservative, long-established neighborhoods 

 and parishes with distinctive speech forms, such as 

 Alderman Edward Vrdolyak's Tenth Ward. On the other 

 hand, the influences of Southern black and white 

 speech and of Spanish tend to break up the essential 

 unity of Chicago's speech roughly along the geographical 

 lines established by the river and creating the social and 

 ethnic organization of the city. 



New England Sources 



New England nevertheless remains the essential starting 

 point of Chicago's speech. We might think, for example, 

 that urbanization would cause traditional New England 

 farming terms to disappear, but the evidence doesn't al- 

 ways bear out this assumption. One semantic field, or 

 area of meaning, that we investigated is represented by 

 the characteristic Yankee word for a small collection of 

 hay in the field, hay cock. We found that hay cock sur- 

 vives vigorously in Chicago use, even though few of us 

 have occasion to gather, or even see, hay. However, 

 many Chicagoans replace the traditional word with an 

 ad hoc urban innovation, hay pile. Other Chicagoans use 

 the Southern term, hay shock. Still others, probably 

 because their acquaintance with farming activities is 

 slight, mistake the small collections made before baling 

 with a bale itself. Since none of these variants were sug- 

 gested by the question itself and seem unlikely to be 

 learned in school, they must survive through word-of- 

 mouth transmission, through the generations. Inter- 

 estingly, some Chicagoans use the word rick for a small 



