Do You Speak Michigan?
How regional dialects contribute to a binary of “in-state vs. out-of-state” culture on campus
—By Alex Vena
In 2013, the New York Times published ”How Y’All, Youse and You Guys Talk,” a survey to determine where the user is from based on how they speak. With questions stemming from the 2002 Harvard Dialect Survey, the questionnaire probes about a seemingly random assortment of commodities, such as the first question pertaining to the title, “How would you address a group of two or more people?” As I sat down to take this quiz with my friends in my Ann Arbor apartment, the four of us collectively from three different states spanning the Midwest, East and West coasts of the United States, the results were shockingly accurate. The regions we were deemed to be from either matched our own hometowns, or those of our parents and relatives.
Nonetheless, these queries prompted us to argue about the “proper” response for each question, yet as the original survey emphasizes, “there are no right or wrong answers.” This also caused me to consider the role of regional dialect on the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor campus, where despite the majority of the student body are from the state of Michigan, this majority is held by a thin margin, as for the Fall 2019 semester, 46.7% of enrolled students were out-of-state. Defined by the Center for Applied Linguistics as “varieties of the language that are particular to a group of speakers,” the presence of dialects has the ability to both unite and divide a population through differences in speech that are vested in cultural history. With such regional diversity, dialect disparities are bound to emerge between students, yet how do these foster such a seemingly cultural distinction between students, while also contributing to a campus-wide culture shared by all students?
‘Speaking’ to the Cultural Role of Dialect
Language certainly holds a strong grip over one’s sense of identity through its cultural role. According to Dan Jurafsky, the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor in Humanities and chair of the Department of Linguistics in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford, “Understanding why and how languages differ tells about the range of what is human,” but also, “discovering what’s universal about languages can help us understand the core of our humanity.” These differences and similarities form a binary between themselves, which is commonly rooted in residential background. “People connect with place a lot,” asserts Hayley Heaton, a research associate at the University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching. Prior to holding this position, Heaton received her PhD at the University of Michigan in Linguistics, where she wrote her dissertation about the media’s influence on perception of regionally accented speakers. “Where you’re from, for better or worse, plays a fairly significant role in who you are.”
With this in mind, as students make the transition from their childhood home to study at a college away from home, especially for those moving across the country, an emotional attachment is recognized upon leaving. This was the case for LSA sophomore Divya Ramamoorthy, who hails from Sunnyvale, California, and had resided there her whole life up until moving to Ann Arbor in order to attend the University of Michigan. “Since I only have lived in one place for the majority of my life, I have a lot of attachment to [Sunnyvale]. All of my childhood memories were made there, so I identify as being from the Bay Area the most.” This sense of “locational identity” is held by many students, and often comes into play once stepping onto campus for the first time. At orientation, one of the first questions incoming students ask of each other is, “Where are you from?” signifying the importance of one’s hometown. This feeling of belonging and attachment transcends the personal realm and fosters a connection between those from the same region. Hearing the same hometown come out of an initial stranger’s month is oddly relieving and can lead to an instant friendship solely based on the fact that they lived in the same state as you.
“More of a Stereotype Than an Actuality”
Generally, the concept of regional dialect accompanied by the factor of locational identity brings up the presence of accents. When talking about accents, which Heaton describes as simultaneously “talking about phonetics,” a lot of stereotypes rise to the surface, as a result of what she referred to as “implicit attitudes.” “They are attitudes that are automatic that you don’t really think about, that you don’t necessarily know that you have,” which often form stereotypes, many in regard to dialect. For Ross School of Business sophomore Nathan Satterfield, who was born and raised in Chicago, he believes the “Chicagoan” regional dialect to be “more of a stereotype than an actuality.” Satterfield even attempted to imitate the stereotypical accent during the interview by emphasizing the vowels in the word “Chee-CAH-Goh”, which upon further research, stems from a hybrid of western New England and New York accents. According to Edward McClelland’s essay “The Disappearing Chicago Accent is Layered with Local History” published in Chicago Reader, this “establish[ed] a dialect region known as Inland North, stretching from Rochester to Milwaukee.” Despite lacking this accent known for its “nasal timbre,” Satterfield still believes that he speaks like he is from Chicago, but only through the fact that most residents of Chicago “only really “adopt” very specific words or phrases” in order to master the Chicago regional dialect.
A similar phenomenon occurs for College of Engineering sophomore Sydney Swider, a native of San Antonio, Texas. The stereotypical Texan and overall Southern accent, classified by wide, open vowels and a “flat nasal twang” as mentioned in PBS’s “Drawl or Nothin,’” is not a definite feature of every Texan resident. “I think that there’s different regional dialects even within Texas. I think I talk like the average person from San Antonio does, but I think that depending if you’re from the North, East, West, or South versus Central, you have different ‘twangs.’ So the usual Texas accent is very much seen in West Texas and North and South, and Central and East is more so what I’d like to think is no accent,” Swider reflects.
This occurrence is not unique to Swider, but resembles Heaton’s dissertation research, whose origins are based in her Southern upbringing in North Carolina. As part of her study, Heaton brought in speakers of Northeastern, Midwestern, and Southern regional dialects. However, some were authentic, native speakers, while others were purely imitating the regional dialects. Students were tasked with picking out the imitators versus the native speakers. Heaton’s results found Michigan students to successfully determine a native speaker versus an imitator of Northeastern and Midwestern dialect speakers, but were often unable to do the same with those authentically speaking or solely imitating Southern dialect. Heaton was surprised by this, as being from the South, she thought that the imitators in her experiment were very clearly imitating the Southern dialect.
“It’s just the experience that you have, affects how much you perceive within a dialect and kind of what you see is stereotypical or not. I didn’t think of that kind of stuff [prior to conducting her research].” The Northeast and Midwest regions bring a lot of students to the University of Michigan, which likely influenced Heaton’s results, as well. Nonetheless, other studies have reached similar conclusions not just in regard to Southern dialects specifically, but across a language-wide spectrum. In an article published by professors from both the University of Washington and Ohio State University, “Regional Dialect Perception Across the Lifespan: Identification and Discrimination,” this phenomenon is explained in the following excerpt: “Imperfect dialect perception is therefore observed across languages and tasks, reflecting adult listeners’ imperfect representations of regional dialect variation in their native language.” The study also mentions how regional dialects may be misrepresented due to a lack of familiarity of the potentially numerous varieties of dialect within a given region. For example, “Midwestern American English listeners [may] perceive talkers from the New England and Mid-Atlantic regions as similar, despite observable phonetic and phonological differences between them,” which speaks to the notion that non-local listeners will perceive less “distinctions between neighboring varieties” than local listeners.”
However, even students from these regions vary from each other through the way that they speak, and may experience confusion on campus in regard to this aspect, too. LSA sophomore Samriddhi Gupta, who lived in Edison, New Jersey, for the majority of her life before attending the University of Michigan, feels that although she may not sound like a typical New Jersey resident through her accent, the words and phrases she employs may reveal her locational identity. Upon being asked if she speaks like the average resident of her hometown and if she has adopted their regional dialect, Gupta states, “People have told me I don’t have a New Jersey accent at all, so, I don’t know. But I do say some strange words that I think are mostly [used] in [the] New Jersey/New York area.” One phrase embedded in Gupta’s Northeastern vocabulary is when it is cold outside, she refers to the frigid temperature as being “brick”. These “strange words” have been met with a lot of confused sentiments from those Gupta meets. “I minimize a lot of my slang that I used to use in high school, in college because people were just like, “What the heck are you saying?’”
“Go Blue!”A Schoolwide Mantra or a Dialectical Phrase?
As the University of Michigan welcomes students from all over the world, to form a unique and proud community of Wolverines, there lies an interesting question: is it possible for a dialect to be created by university of Michigan students on campus that is unique to Ann Arbor and the student body? “I don’t know if I would say “created” as much as “built and fluctuating constantly,” Heaton states. With extremely high levels of school spirit and an alumni network that extends worldwide, a schoolwide culture and assortment of phrases such as “the Michigan difference” and the classic “Go Blue!” have defined the role of someone associated with the University of Michigan. This association ties in not just current students, but alumni, faculty, and even relatives of those attending the university. “With such a fairly fast turnover of people, it’s going to be something like older students kind of initiating younger students into it, and then it shifts in waves. So it’s kind of a very quick representation.” This may seem to eliminate the possibility of a firm “yes” to this question. On the other hand, Heaton discussed the ever-changing nature of language, and notes that “if a language is not changing, then that language is dying,” potentially supporting the notion that the University of Michigan has a unique on-campus dialect.
LSA sophomore Vaishnavi Krishnan, who resides in Grand Rapids, Michigan, when not on campus in Ann Arbor, states, “I feel like a lot of people from my area do come [to the University of Michigan], and a lot of people at Michigan are in-state, so most people that I meet have similar speaking patterns as I do.… I think also, a lot of what I say and do is based on pop culture and social media, and I feel like that’s a common thing, a trend, that connects all of us, regardless of whether we’re in-state or out-of-state. I feel like that has even more of a greater impact on the way I speak than where I’m from.” This is the case for many students, and very well supports the way in which the majority of students mingle with other students who are not from their hometown, and have different speech patterns than they do. For Ramamoorthy, Satterfield, Swider, Gupta, and Krishnan, students whose residences span from the West Coast, to the Midwest, to the South, to the Northeast, and back to Michigan, their friends come from all different states, and speak different dialects as well. “I think regional dialect has a really significant impact [on campus] because you have different perspectives, different ways of talking about the same thing, different kinds of slang… it’s just like a new perspective, or a new way of looking at something. I think it just adds more value to campus and makes it more welcoming,” Krishnan shares. This sentiment of unity coexists with the “in-state versus out-of-state” cultural binary, depicting the way language can unify us, yet divide us, too. Just remember that most regional dialectical barriers and confusions on campus can be easily paused with a friendly “Go Blue!”