Pronunciation's in the bag: Linguist explores WI accent

UWM linguistics instructor Dr. Kelsie Pattillo has a question: Do you want a bag of bagels?

She’s less interested in your answer than she is in how you pronounce the word “bag.”

Pattillo recently published a paper on a well-known Wisconsin linguistic quirk – the population’s tendency to pronounce words like ‘bag,’ ‘flag,’ or ‘agriculture’ with a long ‘a’ sound. Her work details the results of her students’ research, who spent their classes surveying friends and strangers about their pronunciation preferences.

Pattillo sat down to talk about her research.

So, this started out as a student project?

They were supposed to interview people on campus. Students were supposed to get somebody to say, ‘I bought a bag of bagels,’ and then ask them where they were from and their zip code. And they were supposed to guess how old the speaker was (under or over 50).

We used Google Sheets and had a big spreadsheet where everybody could upload their information from the interviews to the same place at the same time. Then they looked for trends and discussed what they’d found.

I wanted to do something where students would practice what I talk about in class, but I wanted them to actually go out and do it. I wanted it to replace an assignment that they already did with more modern dialectology methods and something digital. I wanted them to produce something that would be useful for future classes. It worked out pretty well.

Your results showed that about 48 percent of people in Wisconsin say “bayg” instead of “bag.” Is there a correlation between a person’s zip code or age and their pronunciation?

No! It’s everywhere. With the research we did, I was able to see that this is really a Wisconsin thing; you get both pronunciations here. It’s common in Minnesota and North Dakota and even where I’m from in Seattle.

As I read more about this after doing this as assignment with students, we know that this pronunciation has been in Wisconsin for at least 70 years. I don’t know if it started in Wisconsin, but this is where there’s the highest concentration of people using it.

I was surprised that there was such a sharp line between Wisconsin and Illinois. People outside of the Midwest tend to group everybody from the Midwest as one accent, but it’s very, very diverse.

Kelsie Pattillo

Do you have any guesses why the “bayg” pronunciation is so common in Wisconsin?

No. When we have an ‘ng’ at the end of a word after an ‘a,’ like in ‘hang,’ we use this vowel of ‘ay’ instead of an ‘a’ sound where we’d use the ‘ack’ – for example, the word ‘back’ versus ‘bang’. It seems like when this vowel comes before a ‘g’ sound, that it’s becoming more like this ‘ng’ sound, which is made in the exact same place in the mouth as the ‘g’ sound. Because of the similarities, it seems to be working, but why for people in Wisconsin and not other places? I don’t know. That’s how sound change works: Sometimes it happens in one place and not others.

How did you get interested in this type of research?

I’m a linguist and so we talk about language variations in many different ways. Usually, if you talk about variation, people are familiar with different words or different pronunciations. I’m not from Wisconsin, for example, so moving here and hearing someone ask about a bubbler, or the first time my husband said that he had to go to a Tyme Machine, I laughed hysterically.

As a linguistics student, these are things that were interesting to me. When I first came to UWM, I was aware of a linguist who used to be here named Bert Vaux. He is now at the University of Cambridge in England. He did a lot of work on the Harvard Dialect Survey, and UWM actually houses his results from that. The New York Times a few years ago had a language quiz that you could take. My students still use it to see what words they use and whether it can predict where they’re from.

They were using Vaux’s data from these dialect maps. I’ve used the maps in classes that I’ve taught and learned about them as a student, but nobody here has done anything like that since he left. As I started teaching, I realized that I could do that work just as well as he can.

So, tell us – who’s right? Is it “bag” or “bayg?”

What I teach in this class is there’s not really a correct pronunciation; it’s just variation and we can find patterns to these variations that line up with social things. I say, ‘they’re both right!’ and people don’t like that. People have a really strong opinion about this particular word. I think that most of the time if you go out of the area, or you go inside and that’s not your pronunciation, people tease each other.

What’s next for you and your students?

In the future, going towards more digital work, I plan on creating Google Surveys with students and we’re going to look at variations in place name pronunciation. There are a couple of examples from here on campus – one is Lapham Hall, which is named after a person. Do you say Lap-ham or Laf-ham when you first come to campus? Is it Klo-chee or Klotch-key? If you don’t have that local knowledge or haven’t heard it spoken, you might pronounce it different ways.

Students really enjoy this. One of my goals was that students would go out and talk to people about what they were learning in the class and hope that they have to talk about linguistics outside of class. Language is great that you can observe it any time you talk to somebody or read something. As much as I can do to get students to do that sort of work, the better. I want to keep that going, and there’s a lot that hasn’t been explored.

By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science