less, the Southern influence in Chicago's black commu- 

 nity remains strong and often sets this group off from the 

 Yankee-based speech of neighboring whites. The table 

 shown here indicates a few vocabulary differences we 

 found: 



Black/White Lexical Heteroglosses in Chicago 



Typical White Usage Typical Black Usage 

 frying pan skillet 



faucet spigot 



teeter-totter see-saw 



cherry pit 

 firefly 



cherry seed 

 lightning bug 



To the naive observer, the differences between 

 black and white speech seem numerous, fundamental, 

 and sometimes overwhelming. But as this table may 

 begin to suggest, most differences between black and 

 white speech are superficial, even trivial, and they sel- 

 dom interfere with communication. Furthermore, we 

 found that the differences between black and white 

 speech are statistical; that is, while more blacks than 

 whites are likely to use seesaw rather than teeter-totter or 

 to pronounce words like father without the final -r, there 

 are nevertheless many whites who use the "black" forms 

 and many blacks who use the "white" forms. We found 

 no categorical differences between black and white 

 speech. 



Code-Switching 



Each of the subjects we touched on during the course — 

 geography and settlement, urbanization, technological 

 change, marketing, localisms, contact languages, and 

 contact dialects — demands much more study than we 

 were able to give during the brief six weeks we had avail- 

 able. But course participants had little doubt of the value 

 of what they had learned. And to underscore that im- 

 portance as we watched, the 26th Ward decided its 

 runoff election largely on linguistic grounds when Man- 

 uel Torres appeared unable to debate Luis Gutierrez in 

 Spanish on a citywide TV hookup. But the key to 

 Gutierrez's success was not merely his ability to speak 

 Spanish; far more importantly, Gutierrez could switch 

 with ease and express himself with facility in both lan- 

 guages. Similarly, observers of Chicago Mayor Harold 

 Washington were struck by his ability to switch, not lan- 

 guages, but dialects, depending on the audience he 

 addresses. Linguists call this process code-switching. 



The ability to switch from one language or dialect 

 to another has always been a feature of Chicago politics, 

 as suggested by comic dialect books like the Mr. Dooley 

 series or Gemixte Pickles. More seriously, one student 



pointed out that the broadside published in 1886 which 

 spurred the famous Haymarket riot was printed in both 

 English and German. To be effective, the political lead- 

 ers of 1886 had to appeal to their followers in both lan- 

 guages at once. Today, Gutierrez's facility in English and 

 Spanish and Mayor Washington's abilities at several di- 

 alect levels provide exact contemporary parallels. From 

 a linguistic point of view, the motto for political success 

 in Chicago seems to be, "If you can't switch, you can't 

 fight!" 



While Chicago has developed a distinctive polit- 

 ical and social geography, the structure of its culture is 

 not readily apparent, and the pieces of the puzzle are 

 easily lost track of in the mass sensory bombardment that 

 characterizes contemporary urban life. However, we 

 four^d that urban dialectology, a kind of urban 

 anthropology, can provide useful clues for grasping some 

 sense of the meaning of the city. Most participants in the 

 course were not expert in phonology, but we learned the 

 truth of Lee Pederson's observation that the local vocab- 

 ulary represents "the most philologically productive 

 component of the linguistic system, the most accessible 

 approach to the study of representative monuments of 

 both the oral and literary traditions in their cultural set- 

 ting." As we continued to study Chicago's speech, we 

 hope to identify even more of the strands that make up 

 the "unparalleled babel" that Professor Buck discovered 

 and celebrated back in 1904. FM 



Further Reading 



By far the most enjoyable, comprehensive, and scholarly book 

 about American English in general is H.L. Mencken's The 

 American Language in the one-volume abridged edition by 

 Raven I. McDavid, Jr. (1963). The best book about Chicago 

 speech, but somewhat daunting to non-phonologists, is Lee 

 Pederson's The Pronunciation of English in Metropolitan Chi- 

 cago, published in 1965 by the American Dialect Society. 

 McDavid also published a shorter and very readable compari- 

 son of Chicago speech with the speech of Greenville, South 

 Carolina (his home town) in "Dialect Differences and Social 

 Differences in an Urban Society," printed in Sociolinguistics, 

 edited by William Bright ( 1966). The American Dialect Soci- 

 ety published Roger Shuy's The Northern-Midland Dialect 

 Boundary in Illinois in 1962. 



The basis for studying regional variation in American 

 English words is Hans Kurath's A Word Geography of the East- 

 ern United States (1949), but for Chicago we relied primarily 

 on Pederson's "An Approach to Urban Word Geography" and 

 "Chicago Words: The Regional Vocabulary," both published 

 in volume 46 ( 197 1 ) of the journal American Speech. For study- 

 ing language and dialect contact, the best guide is Einar 

 Haugen's Bilingualism in the Americas: A Bibliography and 

 Research Guide (1956). Buck's "A Sketch of the Linguistic 

 Conditions of Chicago" appeared in The Decennial Publications 

 of the University of Chicago, first series ( 1904). 11 



