seem "normal." Perhaps the most commonly cited Chi- 

 cagoanisms are prairie "vacant lot," gangway "passageway 

 between buildings," chut "political influence or power," 

 and snorkel "firefighting equipment." Others that might 

 be added to the list are parkway "grass strip between 

 street and sidewalk," gaper's block or gaper's delay "traffic 

 obstruction," and American fries "sliced, fried potatoes." 

 Many of these words, like clout and American fries, have 

 spread beyond their origins in Chicago, but others re- 

 main local and still others ought to be considered as 

 characteristic of Chicago use, even though they may 

 have originated elsewhere and are commonly used in 

 other restricted areas. 



For example, German-speaking people have influ- 

 enced the vocabulary and pronunciation of American 

 English in several places where they have settled in large 

 numbers, including Pennsylvania, Texas, the "Dutch 

 Fork" of South Carolina, Wisconsin, and several large 

 cities, such as Louisville, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and 

 Chicago. Some characteristic Germanisms that occur in 

 Chicago (and in other German settlement areas) 

 include achja "oh yes" (also a children's game), ainna as a 

 question tag, probably a loan translation, or caique, of 

 German nicht wahr "isn't it so?," all "consumed, used up, 

 gone, dead," already "yet" (cf. German schon), apple- 

 kuchen "apple cake," apple-snitzen "apple slices," and aus- 

 gespielt "tired out." These examples all come from the 

 letter A in the recently published Dictionary of American 

 Regional English. They supplement common German 

 words in American English (like flak), and they are all 

 cited from Chicago sources, dare also indicates that 

 another German-based language, Yiddish, has influ- 

 enced Chicago speech, citing for example Abie Kabibble 

 "person of Jewish ancestry," and alter kocker "old fogy," 

 with an acronym built on alter kocker, AK. 



It seems obvious, however, that Yiddish has not in- 

 fluenced Chicago's speech as much as New York's, and 

 German has perhaps had less influence here than in Mil- 

 waukee or Cincinnati. The dominant contact language 

 today in Chicago is of course Spanish, but even the in- 

 fluence of Spanish on Chicago English is open to ques- 

 tion. For example, though knowing Spanish is a political 

 requisite in at least four of Chicago's fifty wards, Chica- 

 goans in general have not adopted anything equivalent 

 to the common southern California word pachuco "a 

 young tough." For another example, signs for cervezafria 

 "cold beer" appear commonly in mixed Polish-Puerto 

 Rican neighborhoods, but one wonders how many 

 Chicagoans of Polish descent would know how to order a 

 cold beer in Spanish. Can we really consider cervezafria 

 10 a Chicagoanism within American English? 



Multilingualism 



As questions such as these imply, the word lists that we 

 can derive from sources like dare do not give us a com- 

 pletely accurate picture of the impact of multilingualism 

 in Chicago. We need detailed studies of contact and of 

 use frequency. And here, as with so many other aspects 

 of the study of Chicago speech, Lee Pederson has pro- 

 vided us with a clear outline and a useful model. 



Pederson distinguished at least three levels of 

 acculturation in the migration of words from other Ian- 



From a linguistic point of 

 view, the motto for political 

 success in Chicago seems to 

 be, "If you can't switch (from 

 one language or dialect to 

 another), you can't fight!" 



guages to Chicago English. For example, he classified 

 Weissbrot "white bread" as a poorly acculturated term 

 because even though he had recorded it in the speech of 

 native Chicagoans, it occurred only in the use of Ger- 

 man bilinguals and apparently had not spread to mono- 

 lingual or to people from other, non-German linguistic 

 backgrounds. On the other hand, Pederson classified 

 words like Czech kolacky "breakfast pastry" as well 

 assimilated because they occurred in the speech not only 

 of Czech bilinguals but also of monolinguals and others. 

 However, there are degrees of acculturation, and it 

 would be useful to know more about exactly how wide- 

 spread these terms are and what have been their exact 

 avenues of transmission. In any case, Pederson's third 

 class includes words like shivaree "wedding celebration," 

 classified as fully acculturated because even though the 

 word seems to be dying out of use, few are aware of its 

 French origins and its users consider it a strange but thor- 

 oughly English word. 



Black Speech 



Among the newer native English influences, black 

 speech in Chicago is not uniform and also differs from 

 the types of black speech heard in the South. Neverthe- 



