‘Speaking American,’ ‘How to Speak Midwestern’ capture how we talk

“Speaking American: How Y’all, Youse, and You Guys Talk” by Josh Katz; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (224 pages, $25)

“How to Speak Midwestern” by Edward McClelland; Belt Publishing (120 pages, $16.95)

Hailing from the Galapagos of American speech, i.e., Pittsburgh, where cultural and geographic isolation allowed such mutations as “yins” and “redd up” to flourish, I enjoy hearing variety in the way people talk.

Even in the relative homogeneity of a Midwestern newsroom, subtle differences in accents emanate from the Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota natives who work here – not to mention the novelty delivered by a few East Coast outliers.

“An important element of Midwestern identity is believing you don’t have an accent – that you speak a neutral brand of standardized English from which all other Americans deviate,” writes Edward McClelland in “How to Speak Midwestern,” one of two complementary new books about how Americans talk.

Of course that isn’t true.

Josh Katz’s visually appealing “Speaking American: How Y’all, Youse, and You Guys Talk” turns more than 350,000 responses to an online dialect quiz into a beautiful book of informative maps. For example, the carbonated beverage I drank as a boy was called pop in Pittsburgh but is soda in Milwaukee and might be called coke in Alabama, even if it wasn’t a cola.

While most of America calls the thing we drink from at school either a water fountain or a drinking fountain, Katz’s map highlights eastern Wisconsin (and, inexplicably, Rhode Island) as home to people who call it a bubbler. Although here I must demur a bit. It has been a long time since I heard someone here refer to a bubbler in an unself-conscious way, without humorous or locally ironic intent. Language, as both books point out, is always changing, just like the world around us. The first thing I notice on any college campus I visit is the prevalence of stations for filling personal water bottles where simple bubblers once stood.

Katz mines his data to create tip sheets for different regions, including “How to Pretend You’re From Wisconsin,” a disappointing little essay in an otherwise wonderful book. The largest two of its four paragraphs are devoted to a discussion of cheesehead, a former insult repurposed as marketing icon.

Regional accents, McClelland argues, are strongest today among “whites who have never left their hometowns or graduated from college, and who hold jobs that require little contact with people outside the region: police officers, firefighters, tradespeople, retail clerks, truck drivers, assembly-line workers, hairstylists. (The TV show ‘Cops’ is great for accents.)”

As already evidenced, McClelland leavens his writing with pop-culture references (including Fred Rogers as the archetypal speaker of Midland dialect) and touches of humor. He’s also not above moments of disapproval, such as his disdain for the increasing popularity of “you guys” as a form of second-person plural for people of any and all genders. (Yes, I plead guilty of having addressed mixed-gender, even all-female groups of people as “you guys.”) He’d like to see youse, y’all and, I suspect, even Pittsburgh’s yins reclaim some of the ground they have lost to the awkward “you guys.”

McClelland devotes half of his book to glossaries of words peculiar to individual states and cities in the Midwest.

This story was originally published January 4, 2017 at 8:06 PM with the headline "‘Speaking American,’ ‘How to Speak Midwestern’ capture how we talk."