CHICAGO — The so-called “Chicago accent” is one of the city’s greatest exports, alongside Italian beef, deep-dish pizza and the FX series “The Bear,” which returns for its highly anticipated third season 8 p.m. Wednesday on Hulu.
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But most associate a particular kind of sound to the average Chicagoan. Take “SNL’s” famous “Da Bears” sketches or Serengeti’s unofficial anthem to the City of Broad Shoulders — “Favorite actor Dennehy, favorite drink O’Doul’s.”
It’s a distinct sound: beginning “th” sounds become to “d” sounds, so that “this” or “those” becomes “dis” or “dose.” You add an exaggerated “s” to proper nouns, like the “Jewels” and “Soldiers Field.” And you have to have the flattest “a” in words like “cat” or “bag.”
But there are actually many Chicago accents with different origins, and they span far beyond the North Side climes that soak up a lot of the cultural conversation. That reflects in the media set in, or filmed in, the city — often with non-Chicago actors who must learn the many ways we speak.
“There are many Chicago accents,” said Tanera Marshall, a certified Fitzmaurice Voicework teacher who teaches voice and performance at the University of Illinois Chicago.
Marshall has served as a dialect coach on Chicago-based shows like “Fargo,” “Chicago Fire” and “The Bear,” working with non-Chicago actors to affect the specific intonations of the city’s native dialects.
Marshall’s work, and her study of the city’s ways of speaking, has given her unique insight into the varying flavors of Chicago accent, which span neighborhoods, ethnicities, socioeconomic statuses and even — especially — race.
“What determines your Chicago accent is primarily your background,” of which there are many components, Marshall said.
Heritage is a major factor: Many of the white Chicago accents culturally associated with the North Side come from Chicagoans of Irish or Italian descent, she said.
Irish-American Chicago dialects work with a much tighter jaw (“start the car” becomes “stah-rt the cah-r”), for instance. Italian American Chicagoans from Little Italy or certain communities on the Northwest Side might pronounce it “stuh-rt the cuh-r,” with a looser jaw.
Heritage is the first place Marshall goes to when determining a character’s accent, tracing their roots back to the family members who moved to the city, she said.
“While these folks are no longer alive, perhaps the sounds they made and the way they made them carried on in their community,” she said.
After race, Marshall tends to look at socioeconomic status, which can often impact how intense your Chicago accent might be. If someone has a job that requires code-switching from their original markers of identity — someone working a high-level white-collar job who came from a blue-collar background, for example — that accent may flatten into something more nonspecific.
Even if someone doesn’t have to code-switch in the present, aspirations might lead them to “lose” whatever accent they had in their community.
“We have many identities,” Marshall said.
While the white variants of the Chicago accent occupy significant space in the cultural consciousness, the Black Chicago accent is equally important and varied in the cultural makeup of the city, Marshall said.
The Black Chicago accent comes from African Americans in Chicago who are descendants of Black people from the South who moved northward during the Great Migration of the early 20th century, when millions of Black Southerners went north to escape the segregation of the Jim Crow South, Marshall said.
Marshall said makers of Southern or working-class accents made their way into Chicago accents, pronouncing “gone” like “gon’” and “was” like “wuz.”
As with all dialects, the Black Chicago accent can be identified by markers often called “accent tags:” different ways of pronouncing words that correlate to an accent or its origin. You can hear markers like these in this YouTube video from Ashlee Nichols, a former resident of the Far South Side, as she pronounces common words with the Chicago-style African American English. Again is “uh-GEEN,” Chicago is “Chi-kahh-go,” can is “kee-an,” sausage is “sah-sage,” toilet is “toah-le” — the list goes on.
These cultural differences in speaking tie not just to locality but to histories of power and oppression. As Shawn Smith, Northern Illinois University anthropology professor, noted in an article for Howard Journal of Communications, segregation practices like redlining in cities like Chicago often led to Black populations maintaining the “version of speaking” prior generations taught them.
The “presence of the Southern style of speaking is likely a function of social seclusion maintained generation after generation,” Smith wrote.
“When you live on a linguistic island, you keep your linguistic forms for longer,” said Jill Hallett, visiting lecturer of Linguistics and Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois Chicago.
Hallett wrote her dissertation on the Chicago accent — specifically, how traditional ideas of the accent, typified by white North Siders, clash with its practical acquisition by non-native speakers.
Hallett found that for many younger, non-white speakers, the typical markers of the Chicago accent differed from how they spoke, despite having lived their entire lives in the Chicago area.
Recognizing those accents as equally Chicagoan is a major part of Hallett’s work, alongside other academics like professors Sharese King and Annette D’Onofrio, who spearhead the Chicagoland Language Project at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago, respectively.
The Chicagoland Language Project “is researching the diversity of language and life in the Chicago area” through interviews with Chicagoans from all walks of life, according to the project’s website. The project is planned to cover different regions of the city every few years; currently, Chicagoans who grew up on the South Side are encouraged to participate in a one-on-one project interview, focusing on unique words, expressions and pronunciations. Theywill receive a $20 gift card for their time.
Future Of The Chicago Accent
Now that we know where Chicago’s various accents came from, where are they going?
Marshall sees a few trends cropping up. Particularly in the age of reality television and TikTok, Californian dialects like upspeak — where sentences end on an upnote, as if they’re asking a question — are becoming more widespread. Cultural movements like New York rap influence listeners to affect markers of that city’s accent, Marshall said.
“Young people are increasingly exposed to media that are not generated in Chicago,” Marshall said. The ubiquity of this media exposure has a demonstrable impact on how people speak, she said.
Even so, Marshall extolled the virtue of the “Chicago” accents in their various forms, whether taught for on-screen use or heard in all corners of the city.
“All accents are beautiful,” Marshall said. “And everyone has one.”
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