[QUOTE=pulykamell;19447529 I’m from Chicago, but we have quite a distinct accent from the rest of the state. I can’t think of a particular word that would be a specific Illinois pronunciation and not regionalizing me to the Chicago area. Maybe “KAY-roh” for the city of “Cairo, Illinois”? [/QUOTE]
I’m also from the Chicago area. I used to work with a man who said he spoke English as a second language – his native language was Southside Chicago.
I was thinking maybe “Dessplanes” for the suburb Des Plaines. I know that on an episode of Law & Order Criminal Intent, one character very carefully pronounced it “Dess Planes” but that gap between the syllables cleverly underlined that she wasn’t familiar with the town.
The only people I’ve heard pronounce “wash” as “warsh” are Hoosiers, but I suspect that may not be so state-specific.
Since the OP is asking for pronunciations of words that pinpoint where people are from, rather than actual words themselves (like bubbler or jimmies (which we also use in the Midwest). I’ll nominate “sorry” pronounced as “sorey” in Wisconsin. But I’ve heard Canadians pronounce it that way, too. Someone who says “ONbelievable” or “ONreal” is probably from Minnesota.
For Illinois, I’ll pick the name of the state itself. Native Illinoisans say Ellannoy. People from outside of Illinois say Illannoy.
I think it’s more regional than that. It’s “ill” not “ell” from the Chicago-area speakers, as far as I’ve heard it. I’d be somewhat surprised if linguistic boundaries are neat enough to coincide with geographical boundaries on the state level. I’d expect them to be somewhat more localized than that.
This link seems to corroborate: says ‘bubbler’ comes from RI, and is common in two enclaves, southeast New England including part of NH, and another comprising most of WI. I’m not sure if the attribution to Rhode Island is definitive, but more than one source specifies those two zones for ‘bubbler’.
I agree NJ is difficult to nail down by accent. It isn’t just physical proximity it’s class and ethnicity. The accent often described as New York in commonly known form (like on TV shows) is really a working class Italian American NY area accent. James Gandolfini and company were not speaking in a ‘New York City’ accent but several of those actors in their own actual NY area working class Italian American accent, which the others were imitating (more or less accurately). I grew up in Queens, middle/working class background and don’t speak that way. We’re Irish. People outside the NY area very rarely recognize me as native NY’er by speech, though it is there, a diluted version of how my Brooklyn born parents spoke, but it’s not Tony Soprano, more subtle and in some ways different, as compared to generic non-local/non-Southern US accent. And in parts of NY area elements of the NY Jewish accent have tended to prevail, among Jews and Gentiles alike (eg. on Lawn G’island).
Then mix in all the new people (Queens is almost 60% foreign born now), and it’s not really clear how NY’ers speak, let alone any defined area in NJ where people speak just like in NY. I live in Hudson Cty NJ now where a lot of native born people (only 40% foreign born here) are of Italian descent and speak in some form of the TV style ‘NY accent’. But a lot people don’t.
I agree in NJ by region though, it would be a coincidence if a specific quirk in my speech is heard in that of people from southern NJ, two pretty unrelated areas. You’d probably find my exact accent in some people in southern NJ, if they moved from the NY area, in FL too.
One thing I noticed after I married a Missouri girl (I myself am from Illinois) is that, at least around here (about 100 miles southwest of Saint Louis), people don’t say “Highway 49” or “Highway Y.” It’s “Y Highway” or “49 Highway.”
North Carolina’s state lines are arbitrary compared to culture–as I’m sure is true of a lot of states. 'Round here in the mountains, there’s “holler” as a description of a location. My wife, from Charlotte, will get her accent going on when she’s around family; the word that shows the accent most is “oil,” pronounced something like “ohhl”.
Most of Ontario: “the cottage”
North/ Northwestern Ontario, some parts of very Eastern Manitoba “Camp”. You can have 200k of quads and boats and a house with 6 bedrooms and 5 baths but if it’d on a lake and you go there on summer weekends it’s your camp. Or it could be a bit of rented land with permanently parked RV that makes Walter and Jesse ’ s look like the Four Seasons Hotel; this is also your camp.
I’ve lived in south-central Wisconsin for 30+ years and I’ve never heard anyone say “bubbler” except when discussing that people in Wisconisn say it. I’ve always thought of it as more of a Milwaukee area thing.
I’m from central-central Wisconsin (Marquette County) and we had bubblers. We also put jimmies on our ice cream and cupcakes. We had pannycakes for breakfast sometimes, too. We’d watch TV sitting on the davenport, probably while drinking a pop.
And we pronounced the state as “Wis GHAN sin”.
We also pronounced THAT state to the south as “Ellannoy”, like the natives, but that could be linguistic corruption from all the damn FIBbers that come up that don’t know how not to shoot cows during gun season.
In a reverse-related thing, I got a kick out of the SNL sketch with Shatner as TJ Hooker, where he got on the hood of a car and couldn’t get off until he was in Beloit, WI, which he pronounced as “Buh loy”. You’re not from around here, are ya, Bill?
Despite the extensive French influence in WI town names, that city is pronounced with a “T”. “Buh loit”.
