Pronunciation’s in
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UWM linguistics instructor Dr. Kelsie Pattillo has a question: Do you want a bag of bagels?
History prof explains fighting fake news Linguist studies Wisconsin’s accent Communication alum shines with Bucks Students push frontiers with research Biology alum keeps WI livestock healthy
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She’s less interested in your answer than she is in how you pronounce the word “bag.”
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Pattillo sat down to talk about her research.
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So, this started out as a student project?
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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.
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.
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2 • IN FOCUS • March, 2020
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.
