Whenever I talk to Tim's family...I realize I have an accent. I had no idea what a "spicket" was for the longest time. Water in Chicago comes out of faucets. A spigot is an "oldy timey" name for a faucet that is not hooked up to a pressurized water supply. And here...we pronounce the 'g'. If you pump water out of a well...it comes out of a spigot. Ain't that quaint?
Supposedly native Chicagoans speak Inland Northern American English.
I realize I say "grage" (long-a) instead of "gah-rage" for garage. I slip a "g" into the word bedroom...making it bedge-room. And I misuse the poor word "with" with great abandon. Because only Midwesterners say..."You wanna go with?" and imply "me." And to my knowledge...only Chicagoans say "What's with you?" to mean "Have you suddenly lost your bleeping mind?"
But I don't talk like a reject from the mafia.
To a native Chicagoan...the "Da Bears" accent made famous by Mike Ditka is the Bridgeport or "South Side" Chicago accent. It's associated with the old Irish and Italian-American neighborhoods down by old Comiskey Park. Even WE THINK IT'S FUNNY.
When I was still in College...my linguistics teacher told me that I spoke SCWE. "Standard Chicago White English." He was on the seventh year of his study on Chicago neighborhood dialects...and had just published a paper on "Chicago Standard Mexican English."
I stopped him before my brain started to foam.
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