[tapping]
[blowing]
>> Testing, one, two.
It SEEMS like an easy
question, the ki of question
everybody could agree on.
The kind of question with
simple answers.
The question, how does
Wisconsin talk?
>> I guess the Southern response
to it is, "Every which way."
All kinds of--
Essentially every kind of
language imaginable.
>> Joe Salmons, Tom Purnell and
Eric Raimey have been studying
'Sconnie speech for years now.
But their own roots are further
afield.
>> I was bred and spread in
Eerie, Pennsylvania.
>> I was born in Thailand.
>> I grew up in
King's Mountain, North Carolina.
>> All three wound up studying
language at UW in Madison.
But as they traveled the state,
they found something unexpected,
people in Wisconsin liked to
talk about how they talk.
>> You could get 50, 60, 100
people in some small town to
come out talk about language and
immigration.
You give a 45 minute talk and
people talk to you for an hour
and a half, two hours.
>> Working with students, they
spent years sifting through old
records and new recordings.
They were looking at more than
HOW Wisconsinites speak,
the team also wanted to learn
just WHAT they speak.
>> The Southeast Asian
languages, East Asian languages,
South Asian languages,
indigenous languages from
the Americas.
People today in Wisconsin
associate Norwegian with that
western area near the
Mississippi, largely.
But you look at southeastern
Dane County, there was a huge
Norwegian speaking community.
Germans, especially along the
eastern part of Wisconsin, along
Lake Michigan, but also
scattered across the state.
>> The team has also been able
to uncover stories behind some
unique uses of English words
like the word 'bubbler.'
>> Bubbler is one of these
little victory dances we do,
because we can actually trace
the historical origins to the
use of the term.
It goes back to the Kohler
water fountain company.
Back in the early 1900s they had
two versions of their water
fountains.
One of them was called the
jet version.
Then the other version was
the bubbler.
Where the bubblers were sold,
so in parts of Wisconsin,
parts of Rhode Island, parts of
Australia, people have the term
bubbler.
>> Eric, Tom and Joe also
studied the sound of Wisconsin
speech.
>> People from New York have
an accent, and southerners
have an accent.
Now, there's a legitimate
question of, like, there is a
Wisconsin accent.
This is the really cool thing
about Wisconsin English now
is that we're now on the
national map.
>> To plot that place on the
map, they've taken field
recordings of speakers across
the state, then looked at the
sound waves from those
recordings.
And they've used a single phrase
to help them out.
>> Sadly, I don't know--
>> --if you taught the
begging tot--
>> --how to etch on the edge of
the bags--
>> then maybe he'd not fight.
>> So we picked this phrase
because there's a lot of words
in there that aren't--
They have vowels in particular,
but also consonants, that
are changing our characteristic
of Wisconsin, of different
parts of Wisconsin.
>> Sadly, I don't know--
>> --if you taught the begging
tot--
>> And those are words that,
if you're from western
Wisconsin, you might merge
those vowels and they might
sound the same, like
"taht."
You can listen to people,
how they might say those words.
If they sound the same, then you
know that someone's really sort
of upper-Midwestern.
>> For all they've learned,
Joe, Eric and Tom say their
passion for language
isn't going anywhere.
>> This is certainly something
that, yeah, you'd kind of
have to keep us from doing
it at this point.
>> So, how DO people in
Wisconsin talk?
>> We now know that Wisconsin
as, you know, a community and a
language group has grown so
that we have our own identity.
So people are asking, hey,
what does Wisconsin English
sound like?
>> Or, in plain English.
>> They talk great.