Kathleen Lavey

Lansing State Journal

It seems like you can tell a New York accent from miles away. They're "yuge!" And there's the southern drawl, California surfer talk, the clipped tones of the Boston-born.

But Michiganders don't have an accent, do we?

We sure do, says Edward McClelland, who dives into the topic in his book, "How to Speak Midwestern."

Michiganders -- and folks who live in Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota and western New York state -- do have our own particular speech patterns, and our own vocabularies. Think "Yooper," "party store" and "Up North" for starters.

McClelland, 49, graduated from Sexton High School in 1985. Back then he was known as Ted Kleine. He lives in Chicago now and has made a point of focusing on the Great Lakes region in is work. His books include "Young Mr. Obama" and "Nothin' But Blue Skies."

New York Times reviewer Jennifer Schuessler called "How to Speak Midwestern" a "dictionary wrapped in some serious dialectology inside a gift book trailing a serious whiff of Relevance." McClelland says the book was planned "as a stocking stuffer." It came out Dec. 1 and is already in a second printing.

"I wrote these serious books about Barack Obama and the Rust Belt, and they kind of had meh sales, and then I wrote the goofy little guide to Midwestern slang. And here it is," McClelland said. "I did an interview with the BBC this morning, so the whole world now wants to speak Midwestern."

We asked McClelland to expand on the concept of "speaking Midwestern." Here's our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and continuity.

Where did the idea for this book come from?

I wrote an article for Belt magazine, which is a magazine that covers the Rust Belt, about the Northern Cities Vowel Shift. That’s a linguistic change that has been happening in the upper Midwest for maybe the past 50 to 70 years, and it’s supposed to be the biggest change in English vowel pronunciation in a thousand years.

If you’re looking for examples, it’s when you say ‘cayen’ for can and 'bahhx' for ‘box.’ “One I hear probably here more than anywhere else is short E short U confusion. I was at the post office where the clerk said, ‘that’ll be $37.70. Will it be DeBUT or cre-DUT?’ You might not notice it a lot if you’re from Lansing, but I notice it.

But we don’t have an accent, do we?

Midwesterners, especially Michiganders, are convinced they don’t have an accent.

The Midwest is the accent-less region from which all the rest of the country deviates, but I wanted to show that, yes, we do have an accent in the Midwest. We’re not just the bland middle, linguistically or otherwise. We have a variety of fascinating speech patterns and sayings that make us distinct from the rest of the country.

The accent we have in this part of the country is called “Inland North.” It can be traced back to western New England because this part of the Midwest was settled by New Englanders. …

I have a whole sub-chapter on the Yooper accent. That’s completely different. That can be traced back to Scandinavian and German immigration, particularly the Finns. The western U.P. has the only counties in the United States where Finns are the predominant ethnic group. The thing about Finnish is that Finnish is completely unrelated to English. They were in a very isolated place, they didn’t have much contact with other English speakers and they held onto their language for a lot longer.

What are some of the Michigan terms that made it into the book?

Some of the Michigan terms I have are “Coney Island” (referring to several variations of the chili dog) “Devil’s Night” (Oct. 30, a night of mayhem that precedes Halloween) “Ford’s,”(to refer to the automaker). That explains why people put an S on the end of everything here: Meijer’s Kmart’s Kroger’s. You didn’t work FOR Ford, you worked AT Mr. Ford’s.

There are ‘fudgies,” (tourists who visits resort towns Up North, where fudge is sold). A lesser-known one: A year-round resident of the northern Lower Peninsula is a permafudge.”

There’s the ‘Michigan left,’ that’s exclusive to us, where you make a right turn then make a U turn to make a left turn.

Party store. Nobody else says it, it’s only in Michigan. I quoted a line from an Eminem song, “tired of taking pop bottles back to the party store.” It’s the most-Michigan line in music history. Works in the fact that Michiganders call carbonated beverages pop, the 10-cent deposit law and it identifies the party store as the place to redeem the empties. Calling an auto plant ‘the shop’ I don’t hear that anywhere else. And calling an autoworker a ‘shop rat.’ And then there’s the Walmart Wolverine (a supporter of University of Michigan sports who never attended the school).

Why do you think people are so interested in this particular topic?

I hate to think that Donald Trump had something to do with this, but it is possible. Ever since the whole Rust Belt voted for Trump, there has been this anthropological effort to understand the mind of the Midwesterner, and I think that’s contributing to the interest in the book. I was convinced that the white working class was going to be the Time person of the year.

The person from the BBC was asking me, ‘Why is there this big swath of red along the Midwest?’ And I said, ‘You’ve got to remember that these states voted Democratic six times in a row before, this and Trump won them all by less than 1 percent. We’re going to find out if this is a one-off or a permanent change.

What’s your favorite thing you learned while researching this book?

Probably that in Pittsburgh, when your fly’s unzipped, people say “Kennywood’s open.” There is this local amusement park called Kennywood. That was my favorite slang word.

Probably the most interesting thing is that accents are always changing. Every generation has its own sound, just like every generation has its own slang.

What comes next for you after this?

I don’t know. Maybe I’ll do this for the whole country.

Contact Kathleen Lavey at (517) 377-1251 or klavey@lsj.com. Follow her on Twitter @kathleenlavey.

Find the book

"How to Speak Midwestern" by Edward McClelland is $16.95 from Belt Publishing, beltmag.com.