Lately I’ve been listening to the Court Junkie podcast. It’s a great podcast if you like the true crime genre.
I’m curious about the podcaster’s accent. She says she is in the Chicago area, though not whether she grew up there, and she doesn’t sound like anyone else from Chicago that I ever met. Nor does she have a typically recognizable accent, e.g. Boston, rural Midwest or Deep South.
Here are some of the things I’ve noticed:
- In words ending in “-y”, “ies”, etc., the final syllable is strongly enunciated. So babies sounds like “bay-beez” and party comes out like “par-dee”. Junkie, of course, is “junk-eee”. The final syllable is stressed almost as much as the primary accented syllable.
- The typical American pronunciation of some two digit numbers is the strongest I have ever heard, partly because of the point above. So it’s “nine-dee”, “eigh-dee”, “seven-dee” etc.
- On the other hand, the vowel in them comes out like “thum”.
Is this actually an accent, or is it just her own ideolect?
More than anything, it reminds me of when David Letterman used to poke fun at his own Indiana accent.
That sounds like a Midwestern accent, probably not from a state in the upper Midwest like Wisconsin / Minnesota which have distinctive variations. While some people have a good ear for distinguishing fairly small geographically located Midwestern accents, as a non-native to the region I cannot, to me that accent sounds like it would easily fit in throughout Illinois / Ohio / lower Michigan / Indiana, in parts of Chicago proper there are some localized accents and I don’t detect that she has any of those.
I think that the sounds you’re talking about in your post are what is called “vocal fry.” Vocal fry is actually one of the “four registers” of human vocalization. Most human speech occurs in what is called modal register and that’s sometimes called “normal speaking register.” Vocal fry is the “lowest” of the four registers, above it is modal / normal register, above that is falsetto, and above that is whistle register. Falsetto and whistle register are very infrequently heard in speech but are hear in singing and other forms of vocalization.
Speech therapy will sometimes be recommended for people who use vocal fry “excessively” in regular speech, but on the contrary occasional or slight vocal fry speech in common conversation is considered normal. There was an episode, I think of This American Life, that spoke about how vocal fry is more noticeable among women specifically doing radio and podcasts than men, and some of the reasons this is true. It isn’t universally true though, the male host of that show Ira Glass has noticeable vocal fry in his regular speech as well. For people that use vocal fry register frequently in speech, they often slip into it in certain ending syllables of certain words, which makes it quite noticeable.
It’s overenunciated, but it’s not inconsistent with a Chicago-area accent. She’s not part of the cot-caught merger, from what I can hear, so that puts that aspect of her accent consistent with this general area (among others, but cot-caught merger is mostly the western half of the US). I see she went to college in San Diego, but all her Linked In stuff from 2001 onward is in the Chicago area, so that would be consistent with being from this area. She worked for a spell in Orland Park, which is kind of a random place to work at if you’re a transplant (in my opinion.)
I do hear the vocal fry now that you mention it, but as a vocal register I don’t see it as part of her accent.
I’ve lived almost my whole life on or near the West Coast and I don’t have the cot-caught merger, and neither did my dad who moved to L.A. as a kid in 1932. Is it something observed more on younger speakers? FTR my mother grew up in Milwaukee so that could be
Here’s a dialect map of cot-caught:
Red areas pronounce them with a distinctly different vowel.
I also noticed she does something I do: here “tr” sounds are more like “chr” sounds. While that is not unusual, it is something that is present in my Chicago accent and something that is common around here. I can’t find any dialect map about it. Most speakers, in my estimation, do tend to seem to smush the sounds into “chr” (and I find it difficult to pronounce cleanly), but some accents do it more strongly than others, and while I don’t know if it’s a specific common feature of the Chicago accent, it’s certainly common and where I learned it.
It sounds like she has a generic North American English accent. It also sounds like she is over enunciating the last syllable in her words, leading to the effect that you notice.
Definitely not the stereotypical south side Chi-CAH-go accent. It just feels very over-enunciated and stilted, because she’s reading a script. I scrubbed through and didn’t notice any non-scripted conversation, which would give a better impression.
Depends on where in the South Side. Towards Bridgeport, it’s an almost exaggerated shi-CAW-go. (The Daleys had it, notably). Other parts of Chicago also do it that way – I’m not sure if it’s linked to the Irish areas of town, or not (that was a theory I had), because the CAH vs CAW middle vowel argument seems to come up a lot on Chicago Facebook groups. My high school math teacher in the Evergreen Park/Oak Lawn area insisted vehemently that it’s shi-CAW-go. I grew up saying it your way in my pocket of the Midway area, but go two neighborhoods or so west, and you’re in CAW territory – or rather, were, the dialect lines has blurred and faded for the most part.
Although certain other words/syllables are slurred or reduced. For instance the word twenty comes out like “twunney”; “thum” for them I mentioned already. Most American speakers I have heard will insert an alveolar flap in to twenty, if not an actual /t/.
I didn’t catch the part where she says “thum” for “them.” I’ll say something (Chicago accent for me) like that in the phrase “with them,” which becomes “with 'em” in my accent, or maybe “wi’ thum” (for me the break more naturally falls like that), but in that case, it’s when the previous word has a terminal “th” sound. Though, now that I think about it, I might sorta schwa the vowel in rapid speech when saying something like “give it to them.” It’s not quite a “thum,” but it does sound like some sort of reduced vowel, so maybe it is something speakers do around here. I never listened closely enough to determine.
With “twenty,” it’s a range from “twenny” to the alveolar flap version like “twendy.” It’s only if I’m being careful and enunciating that I say “twenty” with an unvoiced and clear “t.” That said, she is enuniciating in these clips, but there are parts where her accent is sneaking through.
To me it sounds pretty “standard” American, but with an amateurish over emphasis on some syllables, probably from feeling on the spot while recording.