Passing judgment on pronunciation

“Oh my gahd!” said the Clevelander to the Columbusite. “My mahm is so funny, can you believe it?”

“I hear you,” the Columbusite replied. “That last joke your mohm told had me rolling on the floor. I think we cought her on a good day.”

“You’re darn right we caht her on a good day. I never knew she was such a comedienne?”

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Oh, that Cleveland “a.” To Clevelanders, it’s much ado about nothing. To themselves, they sound perfectly fine. Ask a central Ohioan about how Clevelanders speak and, well, they’re just weird. Through her research on regional language differences, Ohio state assistant professor Kathryn Campbell-Kibler found about a third of Cleveland denizens think Columbusites are the ones with a strange accent and their own speech is normal. When Columbusites were asked the same, there was total consensus: All Clevelanders talk funny.

Campbell-Kibler’s favorite line she heard during her research: “I’m sick of being told I have an accent. B****, I’m from Cleveland. You have the accent.”

It’s no surprise that people are protective of their speech, Campbell-Kibler said, as language is at the root of a person’s perceived power. When hearing someone speak, people create instantaneous judgments about his or her intelligence, background, social status and education. When coupled with other factors such as how good looking or how wealthy a person is, speech can be an instant trigger for whether someone is accepted or rejected and whether career and other opportunities are presented or withheld.

“Linguistically speaking, there is no such thing as an accent,” Campbell-Kibler said, noting she uses the term only to talk about people’s perceptions and ideas.

“When we hear people, we care a lot about power,” she said. “Sounding regional at all is problematic because it comes with being tied to a place or deliberately or non-consensually opting out of a global economy of prestige. We think of accents as things layered on top of normal speech. People actually think some people have accents and some people don’t, which linguistically makes no sense.”

England, Germany and other locales are to blame for our regional dialects. When people from those countries began to immigrate to the New World, they had thousands of years of being in the same place to develop variety in their dialect. As the folks left for what would become America, they often settled in places with others who spoke like them — people they already knew. While some dialect mixing certainly occurred, there was enough homogenous settling to create the regional differences.

Such homogenous movement held true during westward migration as well. For instance, 11 families from the Farmington River Valley in Connecticut and Massachusetts moved together to found Worthington, Ohio.

“This happens now when people immigrate to the U.S.,” Catherine-Kibler said. “For example, Somali immigrants will seek out flourishing Somali communities, so you still see that pattern.”

Speaking like a Clevelander merely means training your tongue to move to a different part of your mouth on certain vowels. University of Missouri associate professor Matthew Gordon, writing for PBS.org’s “Do You Speak American?” feature, noted a Northern Cities Shift, which includes Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland and Buffalo. In this region, vowels “merge,” where the “a” in cat invades the space occupied by the “i” in bit, creating an “ea” sound that develops pronunciations like kee-yat. It works the same when the Cleveland “a” overtakes the “o” vowel sounds.

“People who are not linguists would consider it nasally,” Campbell-Kibler said. “A nasal vowel in linguistic terms is one in which there is airflow through the nose.”

This way of speaking is spreading in the region, though in Columbus the pattern is shifting the other way.

That got Campbell-Kibler wondering: What happens to Clevelanders’ pronunciation after spending four years in Columbus at Ohio State? Would that Cleveland “a” soften or disappear altogether?

For the past three years Campbell-Kibler has spearheaded a program called Ohio Speaks. She created modules tailored for different courses to use as part of their curriculum, such as psychology, linguistics, English composition, Spanish and Russian. Students record themselves, fill out a questionnaire and participate in a project relevant for each class using their own raw phonetic data as the source material.

If the students decide to opt-in, Campbell-Kibler can use their data for her research. The Ohio Speaks website (ling.ohio-state.edu/ohiospeaks) also is a collection point and allows students to record their voices and complete some interactive projects outside of the classroom.

Currently Campbell-Kibler has analyzed more than 700 voices, and she found one’s roots are stronger than she expected. Clevelanders aren’t being stigmatized because there are a sizeable number of students from northern Ohio attending the university. And while she found the Cleveland “a” did soften slightly between a student’s first and second year, there was no movement after that.

“The change in location is just not a factor for how they speak in college,” Campbell-Kibler said. “They might not be in Cleveland now, but they’re from there and this is how they talk.

I was a little surprised by it. I’ll be happier when I understand the whole pattern more. But I find it plausible that things aren’t changing. How one speaks is socially meaningful to people, so I suppose that makes it less surprising that they aren’t changing.”

I’m thirsty, pass me a dope

If you don’t know what a whiffletree is, you’re not alone. Phrases quite common to our ancestors are vanishing from our lexicon, and they aren’t likely to come back.

No longer do you hear people say they are going to run to the store to pick up some clabber cheese (cottage cheese). And with the prevalence of modern technology in farming and transportation, very few of us would need to find our whiffletree — the crossbar of a harness used to connect a draft animal to a cart.

These were common words in Ohio as settlers departed from the eastern seaboard and moved west into the Buckeye state. But Ohio State associate professor Kathryn Campbell-Kibler said trying to halt alterations to language is akin to trying to control the weather.

Here are some other words in Ohio that you might not hear too often or might not mean what you think they do, from the Dictionary of American Regional English (daredictionary.com/page/mapsintro):

    • dope — soft drink

            • blue john — milk that is just starting to turn sour

            • dropped egg — a poached egg

            • hamper — a container for fruits and vegetables

            • toadstabber — a large, folding pocket knife

            • thunder mug — a chamber pot

            • puff — a covering for a bed

            • plunder room — an attic or storage room

            • buzzard roost or peanut heaven — the upper balcony of a theater

            • lickskillet — nickname for a part of town, especially a poor neighborhood

            • toad strangler — a heavy rain

            • gee-haw — to get along with someone

            • catawampus — askew, also an imaginary creature or animal

            • brier hopper or stump-jumper — a rustic or countrified person

            • joggling board — a seesaw

            • coffin nail — a cigarette