# Midwestern 'accent' **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 16, 2002, 7:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/midwestern-accent/132553 "2002-10-16T19:12:29Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Sternvogel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/bc79bd/32.png) [@Sternvogel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sternvogel)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2002, 3:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/midwestern-accent/132553/41 "2002-10-20T15:06:59Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Skogcat \* > \*\*you’re all wrong of course. > > I agree Exit should be eks-it. > > Do you pronounce “x”, “eggs”? It is “eks” right? Hence “eksit” for exit.\*\* Yeah, no other words in which “x” is pronounced like “gz” exist. At least I can’t think of a single example. 🙂 (Of course, if you do say “ek-sist” and “ek-sample”, you won’t exactly get the joke.) ---
**Author:** ![Doctordec](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/cdc98d/32.png) [@Doctordec](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doctordec)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2002, 4:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/midwestern-accent/132553/42 "2002-10-20T16:50:46Z")
I live in northern Ohio and I’ve travelled a lot within the state. There are three dialects in Ohio. The Youngstown area shares their speech pattern with Pittsburgh. “Goin’ dawn the Stillers game !” South of Columbus you’d swear you were in Kentucky. Somewhat southern with a few “y’alls” thrown in. A lot of people in the Akron area have a southern speech due to the great influx of West Virginians during the middle 1900’s. In the northern part of the state we share dialect with mainland Michigan and Northern Indiana. Midwestern. The natives say ant and if you say ont you are considered snooty. We say pop instead of soda, too. ---
**Author:** ![robcaro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/df705f/32.png) [@robcaro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robcaro)\ **Post date:** [October 20, 2002, 5:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/midwestern-accent/132553/43 "2002-10-20T17:00:43Z")
Really… What difference does it make. We are not going to change our vernacular just because someone from a different part of the country pronounces the word differently. We speak the way we were taught and that most usually stays with us throughout our lives. ---
**Author:** ![Houlihan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/f9ae1b/32.png) [@Houlihan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Houlihan)\ **Post date:** [October 21, 2002, 1:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/midwestern-accent/132553/44 "2002-10-21T01:38:53Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by l43452 \* > \*\*Where are you from Houlihan? \*\* Akron. And I say ant, not awnt. Saying awnt is for east coast muckity-mucks. ---
**Author:** ![TheLoadedDog](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/35a633/32.png) [@TheLoadedDog](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TheLoadedDog)\ **Post date:** [October 21, 2002, 2:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/midwestern-accent/132553/45 "2002-10-21T02:00:31Z")
As an Australian, I tend, rightly or wrongly, to think of the mid-western accent as a kind of _default_ American one, with accents such as the NYC “oily boid gets the woim” and the Southern drawl being examples of the many distinct variations. The “aunt” thing fascinates me though. I’ve always assumed that Americans pronouce it “ant”, and Aussies and Brits pronounce it “ahnt” ( a bit like “aren’t” without a strong ‘r’ sound). The references in this thread to rhyming it with “haunt” is a new one on me. “ornt”? ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [October 21, 2002, 3:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/midwestern-accent/132553/46 "2002-10-21T03:02:03Z")
[hijack] i’m a bit annoyed at dictionaries and phonetic spellers who use “round”, “long” etc. and having no idea what they mean. Well, not annoyed at THEM, per se, but at the fact that we dont really have one accepted way to communicate sounds. Why cant we use the system I learned in Linguistics in college? It looks a lot like the systems the dictionaries use, except more standarized. IIRC, the vowels are as such: ae: act,ant. (its that funny ae scrunched together, actually.) a: fa,la,da. e: pay, say, gay. E: rectify, men (actually, its an epsilon) i: five, lie. I: icky, fin, bin. etc. It also had some funky characters such as Theta for an unvoiced (or is it voiced?) th, whereas dictionaries just make it up as they go along. By the end of the semester I could read paragraphs written in this. ay wud fuli s’port haeving Evredaey InglIsh rIDIn thIs wey, Its ey lat mor prEsIs. ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [October 21, 2002, 3:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/midwestern-accent/132553/47 "2002-10-21T03:03:45Z")
by the way, that “having no idea what they mean” refers to ME having no idea, not the dictionaries, speakers themselves ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [October 21, 2002, 3:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/midwestern-accent/132553/48 "2002-10-21T03:28:21Z")
Anyone who claims to hear a “u” in any pronunciation of “aunt” is blowing smoke. The New England pronunciation has essentially the standard pronunciation of the “a” in French and most of the rest of the US uses one of the other “a” sounds. And there are at least two others that are used, the lax and the tense version of the sound of “can”. Let me see, if I use “au” for the NE sound, A for the lax and a for the tense version, then when my daughter went to college, her Massachusetts roommate and an Aunt ann and my daughter had (or would have had she had one) an Ant Ann. It was funny. As to where these differences arise, well most of them arose in England and were transported here. And the arose in England in the same way that all differences in English arose–a combination of changes introduced by one person that spread (think if the absurd–in terms of the spelling-- pronunciation “nucular”) and, in the case of England, whether the speakers originally spoke German, Danish, or a Celtic language. BTW, if the “u” in aunt were really pronounced, it would come out something like “ount” (“out” with an “n”), which it isn’t in any dialect I am aware of, although I have heard midland (England) accents that sounded something like that. ---
**Author:** ![tomndebb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/b9e5f3/32.png) [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)\ **Post date:** [October 21, 2002, 4:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/midwestern-accent/132553/49 "2002-10-21T04:41:54Z")
> [@](#): > > (its that funny ae scrunched together, actually.) You can get an ash (that is its name) by typing Alt + 0230 in lower case: æ, or Alt + 0198 in upper case: Æ. To get an epsilon, enter {symbol}e{/symbol} or {symbol}E{/symbol}, substituting square brackets, , for the braces, { }, I used: [symbol]e[/symbol] or [symbol]E[/symbol]. It is not exactly the character found in the IPA, but the lower case version is close. ---
**Author:** ![Zoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/a4c791/32.png) [@Zoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zoe)\ **Post date:** [October 21, 2002, 5:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/midwestern-accent/132553/50 "2002-10-21T05:38:03Z")
> [@](#): > > Originally posted by Zoe > Quote: > > Originally posted by David Simmons > > "Yes and only a New Yorker like Cole Porter would rhyme “idea” and “here” and “near…” > > ## Gottcha! Cole Porter was from Indiana. > > Yes, Porter was born in Peru, IN but I don’t think he was “from” there. I was born in Webster, WI but I’m not from there because I grew up in Iowa and have lived the greater part of my life in California. > > Porter spent most of his life in high class schools in the East, in Europe and in New York. Dialects, although they may be changed later, are naturally formed as one begins to talk. He didn’t leave Indiana until he was fourteen. And he didn’t go to New York to live until his mid-twenties. From his Yale Senior bio sketch (prepared by Porter himself) he says, “Porter expects to enter the Harvard Law School, after which he will go into either mining, lumbering or farming. His permanent address is Westleigh Farms, Peru, Indiana.” Source: Brendan Gill, author, art preservationist, dramatic critic and one of Porter’s biographers. Yes, even Indiana can produce the sophistication of a Cole Porter. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Zoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/a4c791/32.png) [@Zoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zoe)\ **Post date:** [October 21, 2002, 5:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/midwestern-accent/132553/51 "2002-10-21T05:52:10Z")
> [@](#): > > Originally posted by TheLoadedDog: > > As an Australian, I tend, rightly or wrongly, to think of the mid-western accent as a kind of default American one, with accents such as the NYC “oily boid gets the woim” and the Southern drawl being examples of the many distinct variations. The Mid-Western dialects are considered standard in broadcasting because that’s where the broadcasting schools were at first. I like the way you refer to it as “a kind of default American one.” I guess you are right in a way… Other than that, I don’t believe that any one dialect is considered “standard.” [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/midwestern-accent/132553.md?page=2)