My Madtown (and Birthplace) Dialect

 

Today I took the New York Times dialect quiz (which you can find here), and it said I was either from Madison, WI (nailed it!!), Aurora, IL (kind of random, but not that far away), or... Rochester, NY?? That last one really got me, because in fact I did spend the first two years of my life in Rochester, NY, but I spent the next sixteen in Rochester, MN, and that wasn't showing up in my dialect at all. Yet somehow I absorbed enough of the local dialect as a toddler to have some upstate New York in my speech? That's crazy! My results said that because I call athletic shoes "sneakers," that means I am most likely from Rochester. I guess I also call them "tennis shoes," but usually sneakers, or just sneaks. Like, "I have to get a new pair of sneaks soon because these are getting holes in them." (Based on a true story.) Apparently Aurora is because the words "cot" and "caught" don't rhyme for me, but an informal poll of the Night Prayer folks indicated that the whole Madtown crowd feels that way. And I cannot for the life of me remember what gave away the fact that I have spent my entire adult life in this crazy capital city on an isthmus. The one Minnesota thing I remember people mocking in my speech when I first arrived was how I made every sentence sound like a question because I ended on an up note. So, for example, they would ask where I was from, and I would say something that sounded to them like, "Rochester, Minnesota?" and they would laugh and say, "Aren't you sure?" I have it on good authority (a Swedish person) that this is from Norwegian; while Swedish has a very sing-song melody to it, Norwegian just goes right up the scale. So how did we indicate actual questions in Minnesota? I can't even remember, and I must not do it anymore, because nobody has commented on it in decades. I'm all Madison (and upstate New York) now!

Famous Hat