Until Bridget VanDenHaute started college, no one had ever told her she sounded funny when she talked. Growing up near Medina in Hinckley Township, she’d rarely been around anyone who spoke any differently than she did. But in 2011, she moved to Athens to attend Ohio University and noticed the accents immediately. She heard the subtle Southern lilt of Cincinnati, the brusqueness of southeastern Ohio Appalachia, and the head-scratching yinz from OU’s Pittsburgh contingent.
Only she was the one who got teased.
“It started right away, and at least at first, it was constant,” VanDenHaute, now 24, says today. “Before college, I guess I was a bit of a homebody and never really went that far away. No one had ever brought up how I sounded before.”
It was the worst in the dorms. For the first couple of years, a week would rarely pass when someone didn’t point out her hard, nasally a’s or her short o’s, which sounded as though they were coming from all the way in the back of her throat and, somehow, sounded more like an a.
“I heard it all the time,” she remembers. “‘Say mom!’ or, ‘Say lasagna!’ and I’d do it and they’d laugh. “A lot of the time it was from my friends who were from Columbus or Cincinnati — who I thought sounded funny. But I’d get it from people who weren’t from Ohio too. Those were the ones who really pissed me off. You want to say, ‘You’re the ones who sound different, not me!'”
Then, one day, she did.
One night while out at the bars, after being asked about her accent for what felt like the millionth time, she took to Twitter and fired off what may as well be a rallying cry for Northeast Ohioans who feel just like her: “Im sick of being told i have an accent,” she wrote. “Bitch, im from cleveland, you have the accent.”
Talk to people from all over the Greater Cleveland area and you’ll hear two things: A distinct Cleveland accent (sorry, folks), and a chorus of denials that such an accent exists. So let’s first dispense with the fiction that Clevelanders don’t speak in a way that is noticeable to anyone who grew up elsewhere, including other regions of Ohio. We do. And it is. How it got here, how it developed, and how it has spread over time has fascinated linguists for years. And as it turns out, Cleveland is one of a dozen or so cities along the Great Lakes that have, over the past half century, been part of the largest transformation of spoken English in more than a thousand years.
In the late 1960s, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania named William Labov began noticing a series of changes in vowel pronunciations among speakers in the Midwest. He would eventually call these changes the Northern City Vowel Shift, later abbreviated to the Northern Cities Shift, known in linguistic circles as simply NCS. The pocket of the country that is home to this shift — called the Inland North Region — stretches from Syracuse, New York, in the east to Milwaukee in the west, and includes some areas from Green Bay in the north to St. Louis in the south. Other major cities in the NCS region include Chicago, Madison, Toledo, Detroit, and, you guessed it, Cleveland. In all, it’s a territory of more than 88,000 square miles containing more than 34 million English speakers who, today, likely sound drastically different than their great-grandparents did.
The Northern Cities Vowel Shift is an example of what linguists call a “chain shift,” and in this case, it all starts with the short ‘a’ sound. As Labov wrote in The Politics of Language Change: Dialect Divergence in America, “The initiating event appears to be the shift of short-a in bat to … sound very much like the vowel of yeah. It is not just this one word, bat … but all words spelled with short-a: cad, bad, that, cat, attitude, cap, happen, happening, etc.”
What this means is that speakers in Cleveland, and elsewhere in the NCS region, are almost adding an extra syllable when we say those words and others like them. To use Labov’s example, if you insert the word “yeah” into the middle of the word “cat,” you come up with something that sounds like “c-yeah-t” (or kee-yat).
***
While this dialect shift wasn’t detected until the 1960s, linguists believe it has roots that go back as far as the construction of the Erie Canal, which, in the mid-19th century, brought tens of thousands of immigrants from the East — especially the Northeast — to various points along what we now know as the Rust Belt.
By the beginning of the 20th century, cities like Cleveland, largely populated by Yankees who had moved from New York and New England to settle the Western Reserve, had become home to tens of thousands of Irish, Italian, German, and Eastern European immigrants. Each brought their own language and a modest understanding of English to a region already populated by settlers who spoke a Northeastern version of American English. Something had to give.
“Language is going to change pretty quickly when you get all these non-native speakers together,” says Dennis Preston, who teaches sociolinguistics and perceptual linguistics at Oklahoma State University.
These new, non-native speakers from the East especially struggled with what is called the “low front vowel,” or the short ‘a’ sound heard in words like bag, cat and hat.
“That vowel didn’t exist in any of their native languages, so they did what any of us would do — they went for what sounded closest,” Preston says.
So among the growing immigrant population, hat became something closer to hot, cat became cot, and so on. Not surprisingly, the native speakers who were already there mocked them.
“They’d open their mouths and get laughed at and called dagos and polacks,” Preston says. “So that first generation wanted to rid themselves of this accent, but then the second generation came along and started to overcorrect. Instead of replacing ‘hat’ with ‘hot,’ they started saying ‘h-yeah-t.’ This triggered the whole rotation.”
Once the short a sound began to change, the other vowels fell like dominoes. The shift in the ‘a’ sound created something of a phonetic vacancy in our mouths. So to fill that void, the vowel sound in the word “cot,” for instance, slid forward, and eventually we were saying cat to mean that extra bed a hotel offers when you have three or more people in your room. Pretty soon, our c-yeah-ts were sleeping on our cats.
Welcome to Cleveland.
You’ll rarely find a native of New York, or Boston, or Texas who is unaware of how the rest of the country hears his speech. Clevelanders, on the other hand, tend to be more like VanDenHaute. Most people in Northeast Ohio seem either oblivious to their native and natural dialect, vigorously defensive of what they believe is their “normal speech,” or some combination of both.
I was talking recently with an acquaintance of mine at the eastside pub where he works as a bartender. He conceded that there is certainly a Cleveland accent, but is adamant that he doesn’t have one (he does). This bartender, who asked that I not use his name, grew up in Mayfield, but went to college in the South and lived there for several years after. His accent is subtler than most Clevelanders’, and, perhaps not surprisingly, it now works in concert with the slight drawl he picked up in his years below the Mason-Dixon line, but it’s there. Because of course it is.
As we conversed over drinks, a couple of men at the other end of the bar started listening.
“We don’t have an accent,” one interjected eventually. He said he used to live out West and when people would tell him that he “talked funny” he’d tell them they were crazy. “The Midwest is where there is no accent.”
His friend jumped in: “No, I think there’s a Midwest accent, but we don’t have it here in Cleveland. There’s no such thing as a ‘Cleveland accent.’ People say that all the time, but it’s a Midwest accent. Go to Chicago or Detroit. It’s there.”
“You don’t hear it here too?” I asked.
“I hear how we talk,” the first man said. “And we talk how we talk. But it’s not an accent.”
Very well, then.
Those late-night barflies aren’t alone. I recently mentioned to my mother, who was born in southern Indiana but raised mostly in northwest Ohio, that I was working on an article about the “Cleveland accent.” She replied: “But people from Ohio don’t have an accent.”
Linguists and voice scholars who have studied Midwest speech have all come across this phenomenon, which they say is more or less unique to Clevelanders and our Rust Belt brethren.
“People here honestly don’t hear it,” says Shannah McGee, a voice production specialist at Case Western Reserve University. “Everyone says, ‘Well, I don’t have an accent.’ I say, ‘Of course you do!’ There’s this myth that the Midwest is where there is no discernable accent, but that’s just not true.”
McGee, who also teaches acting and works as a dialect coach, grew up in Indiana but has lived in Cleveland for more than 30 years. She immediately pointed out my accent when we met at a coffee shop in Cleveland Heights one recent afternoon (I apparently give myself away when saying my own first name). In the early 2000s she worked with actors on the film Welcome to Collinwood, which starred George Clooney and Sam Rockwell and was set in the Cleveland neighborhood. She was tapped by directors Joe and Anthony Russo — Cleveland natives and former Case students — to help the cast the perfect “Cleveland sound.”
Not being a native Clevelander, she sought out friends who she knew had the accent and recorded their conversations. She also went to the West Side Market in Ohio City, recorded what she heard, and took notes. “I’d hear them say, ‘I want to buy some candy’ and, of course, it would come out ‘kee-yan-dee,'” she says. “Then I’d figure out what they were doing to make that sound, which is, they’re lifting the tongue in the back of the mouth and pulling it back. That nasalizes the sound.”
McGee says actors still learn what is known as “standard American” English — which features crisply pronounced consonants and includes vowel pronunciations that are usually only heard on the East Coast (think Frasier Crane). But she and most linguists agree that there is no such thing as a “standard” version of English.
“You learn it in acting school so you don’t sound like you’re from anywhere,” she says. “But no one on the real planet actually speaks it.”
Or, as Preston puts it: “People always want to associate dialect with non-standard speech. If there’s a place that doesn’t have a dialect, that’s a place where people don’t have a human language.”
So why, in our minds, are we the special ones?
“It was something my parents always told me,” says Gabby Hollowell, a student at Ohio University and native of Chardon. I tracked her down after noticing several instances in which she had tweeted about people’s reaction to her accent. “My stepdad says, ‘We don’t have an accent. People from England have an accent.’ Everyone speaks the same [in Northeast Ohio] but a lot of people just don’t realize it’s just as much of an accent as anyplace else.”
Hollowell has a point: The idea of Midwestern exceptionalism when it comes to speech is something that is often stressed by parents — and even teachers — from the time we’re small. I recall being told by a middle school English teacher how “lucky” I and my classmates were to come from a part of the country that spoke “standard English.”
“When we talk about ‘accents,’ that means we’re assuming that there’s a ‘normal’ way of speaking and then there’s all these other ways of speaking that are different from that,” says Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, a linguistics professor at the Ohio State University. “But from a linguistic point of view, this doesn’t make any sense. There’s no place on earth where we can say, ‘You get to be normal.'”
Edward McClelland, who has written extensively about language and the Midwest, recently completed a book called How to Speak Midwestern. He believes the notion that this part of the country speaks some unicorn version of English that is devoid of any distinct sound goes back to a time when the Cleveland area was, in fact, considered the broadcast industry standard.
“For a period of time in the middle part of the 20th century, what was considered a neutral accent was based in the Cleveland area,” McClelland says. “This is ironic because now the [vowel] shift has made Cleveland speech more distinct from the rest of the nation.”
Indeed, in a 2005 PBS documentary called Do You Speak American, Labov, the linguist who first reported the Northern Cities Shift, pointed out that the region from Rochester to Chicago was the closest thing to television news network standard pronunciation that existed in the U.S.
“It was what the NBC standard was based on,” he said.
And it was a standard that, perhaps not surprisingly, had strong ties to the Cleveland area. The man who is credited with creating it, a linguist named John Kenyon, was a professor at Hiram University, just southeast of here. In 1924, Kenyon published the first version of a guide called American Pronunciation, later was a consulting pronunciation editor of the second edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary and, in 1944, co-authored A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English.
One constant across all of Kenyon’s works was that he was an unabashed proponent of the version of English spoken in the CLE.
“[T]he author has based his observations on the cultivated pronunciation of his own locality — the Western Reserve of Ohio,” he wrote in American Pronunciation, referring to himself. “It is his belief, however, that this is fairly representative of what will here be called the speech of the North.” He would later simply call this, “General American.”
But, as McClelland says, it seems the idea of “General American” has somehow managed to outlast its phonetic reality.
***
Campbell-Kibler has studied a concept known as enregisterment, or how and why distinct speech varieties come to be recognized and accepted both within and outside of the community in which they’re spoken. She has looked at this idea among Ohio residents and concluded in a 2012 paper that Clevelanders may have slowly begun to accept that we have a way of speaking that is unique to us, even if not everyone is able to articulate just what it sounds like. In fact, Campbell-Kibler says people in Columbus — who speak in what is known as the “Midland” dialect — are even more in denial about how their speech is perceived.
“If you Google the words ‘Chicago accent,’ you’ll find several sites talking about ‘da Bears’ and how to make yourself sound like you’re from there,” she says. “If you Google ‘Cleveland accent,’ you find a number of people debating whether one actually exists or what it sounds like. If you Google ‘Columbus accent,’ there’s nothing language-related at all on the first page.”
For many, conceding to having an accent is like admitting that you’re an uneducated member of the lower class. And since accents are typically the strongest among blue-collar, working-class communities, there’s become a greater fear of stigmatization, which linguists believe accounts for much of the denial in former industrial strongholds like Cleveland.
“Nothing has been linked to this ‘northern cities accent’ other than that it seems to sound ugly to people,” says Barbara Johnstone, a linguist at the University of Pittsburgh who has studied the social stigmatization of accents. “An accent can get linked with your identity in a positive way, but it can also have negative links, too.”
For much of the 20th century, it was common, even expected, for high school seniors to graduate, get a job at the local steel mill or manufacturing plant, stay there for 30 years, then retire. In these cases, there was little occasion to speak to anyone who didn’t sound exactly like they did. But as those jobs started disappearing, people started going to college and working in more white-collar or customer-facing environments, and, for the first time, they’d start to hear from strangers that they sounded “different.”
“All of a sudden there was a choice,” Oklahoma State’s Preston says. “‘Do I try to sound like I’m not where I’m from?’ And I don’t see why anyone in the working class would try to do that. So when they’re presented with a linguistic signal that doesn’t match with what they think they sound like, they reject it. ‘I don’t have an accent. You have the accent.'”
Which brings us back to Bridget VanDenHaute. Now getting a master’s degree in speech pathology at Cleveland State, she’s a self-proclaimed “reformed denier.” Not long after announcing to the world that bitch, she was from Cleveland, VanDenHaute enrolled in a linguistics class. One day, while her professor was presiding over another installment of the years-old “remote” vs. “clicker” debate, VanDenHaute was called on to speak. The professor asked her where she was from.
“I thought, ‘God dammit, here we go again — and from a professor this time!” she says. “He asked if I was from Cleveland and I said yes, then the whole class started having me say words like ‘mom’ and ‘lasagna.’ That’s when I finally started to hear it in myself.”
As for the tweet, VanDenHaute’s “you have the accent” comment didn’t spark much of a conversation at the time. But not long after, Ohio State’s Campbell-Kibler spotted it while doing research on Twitter and decided the sentiment perfectly summarized the entire accent denial debate in Northeast Ohio. It’s now the basis of a new paper she’s writing called Bitch, I’m from Cleveland, You Have the Accent: Constructing and resisting place-based accents on Twitter. The new study compares the attitudes of Twitter users across the state about whether their city is, or should be, associated with a specific way of speaking.
VanDenHaute now says she’s “100-percent aware” that she has an accent, and adds that she does remember the night she fired off the Twitter missive. “I just snapped,” she says before pausing to laugh and adding, “I must’ve been drunk. I probably wouldn’t say that today.”
This article appears in Aug 17-23, 2016.
Excellent article, but the claim that the Northern Cities Sound Shift represents “the largest transformation of spoken English in more than a thousand years” is pretty obviously absurd. How about the Great Vowel Shift or the cumulative phonological processes that led us from Old > Middle > Early Modern > Modern English?
I have lived in Northeast Ohio my entire life. I don’t know anyone who pronounced cat or candy that way. I have traveled extensively and people have actually asked me to repeat particular phrases for them because they say that have never heard anyone speak so properly and without an accent of any sort. When I tell them where I am from they say, “Oh – that’s why!”
If there is such a deep accent here, it would have been helpful to hear of more than two examples …
Having lived here my whole life, I didn’t really notice the NEO or upper-rust belt accent until I moved away. I assure you, friends, after hearing the difference… if your husband’s name is Todd, you’re calling him Tahd, not Todd. Naht that there’s anything wrong with that, but we definitely sound weird anywhere else we go. Think how somebody from Wisconsin sounds to you; that’s how we sound to everyone outside of this area.
I’ve lived in Cleveland my entire life and NEVER have I said ‘kee-yan-dee’ for ‘candy’ or ‘cot’ for ‘cat’. That’s how people from the Pittsburgh area say it, not people from the Cleveland area. I’m confused…..
Nope, born and raised in NEO and I’ve never spoken like this or noticed anyone I know who speaks like this.
The denial is strong in here. Cleveland does have an accent. Listen to the Triv Show, that’s it.
I work in sales and have grown up in the Cleveland area my whole life. I can assure you we have an accent that I wasn’t even aware of it until a few years ago. When my company has national sales meetings and sales reps from all over the country come together they all make fun of the way I talk. It’s very subtle to use but I can assure you it’s there. Literally it’s the running joke at sales meetings. Hi I’m Aaa-shley I’m from Cleee-vel-aaand. I find it humorous and unique so I don’t mind. Good article!
I moved to columbus as a teen and was constantly asked to say Mom and Pop because the kids there thought it was funny. they all sounded like stoopid southerners to me! After returning to CLE 10 years later, our accent is very clear in my ears. Not everyone here has it, but it’s real, folks.
After 24 years here, people can still tell that I’m from Sha-CAW-go, Ill-ANNOY. I KNOW we said kee-an-dee and dee-add-ee …we are what we are. When I was in sixth grade I took a dramatics class at a little theater and our diction coach used to yell at us about our Chicago accents. I always thought it was just a Jewish thing, until I moved to other states as an adult.
But Clevelanders (my wife is fifth generations) most definitely do NOT sound like Chicagoans. They don’t sound like anything or anybody else. To me they sound “normal”…almost like radio and TV folks…unless they have ancestors and relatives from Southern Ahia. That’s a whole different ballgame.
Gotta go get da kee-yat outta da ay-ell-ee…or my dee-add-ee ain’t gonna gimme enny kee-an-dee. See ya in twunny minnits. Hey, jeet jet? No…jew?
Chuckles the Clown
Clevelanders talk normal proper English everyone else has the accent…….
I’ve heard it, I’ve said it, but I definitely think it’s more urban than suburban or rural. And it’s definitely something that is reinforced with folks who are ESL (English as a second language) or multi-generational. Let’s embrace it. In addition to the CAVS, Michael Symon, and all of our great CLE history, it’s who we are.
Kee-yan-dee? Are you serious? I am a Clevelander, born and raised, and never in my fifty-two years have I heard anyone pronounce anything the way the author of this article insists we are pronouncing words. The only time I’ll hear a “yeah” in anything is when someone actually says “yeah”. We have some pretty hard, short vowels and pronounce our “r’s” pretty hard, that much I’ve noticed. But the whole stick a “y” sound in where it doesn’t belong? I think not.
Thanks for a great article! I think that only people who have traveled a lot and lived in other places for long periods get it. I lost my accent for a bit (thankfully!) but hear it slip back into my speech every so often. Makes me cringe. 😉
All these folks in denial cryack me up. We all have a definite eyaccent, just eyask anyone from outside NEO and they’ll confirm. Eyaccents aren’t byad, thyat’s just how we sound.
There is a Sout Lur ane accent among steelworkers. I thought of it as Brooklynese. Heard it from Eat Tweah-nee Ate(E28th) to Eat Turdee Turd (E33rd) in South Lorain (a region unto itself)
I’m from the Alliance, Ohio, area, an interesting meeting point of the “Lake Erie accent” as I call it (or Cleveland Accent), Ohio Appalachian accent, and Midland accent or “flat English.” When I moved to Columbus, I could hear the differences among the three accents as I’ve defined above. I also know of people who moved closer to Cleveland, picked up the accent, and then left the area and lost it. Great article!
I grew up relatively closer to Cleveland than the Youngstown area, but since moving to Y-town I have definitely noticed an Eastern Ohio/Western PA dialect. The pronunciation nuances are subtle with influences of Appalachia and Southern Ohio, things like “steel” become “still” as in the Pittsburgh Stillers, and instead of “cool” it becomes “coal” or possibly “cole.” The differences in word choice are more noticeable. Things like “buggy” instead of “shopping cart,” “sweeper” instead of vacuum cleaner,” or “day turn/night turn” rather than “day shift/night shift.” I feel like my accent and word choice has been more based on what I heard on television, both local and national, where the phrasing and accents are more standardized, but maybe I’m suffering from some accent denial too. = )
I moved to Cleveland a year ago after growing up in Boise, ID. Supposedly, there is very little accent in Boise, which is the reason there are so many call centers there (sorry for the spam calls with 208 areas codes…Not my fault). There was a huge call center right around the corner from my old house. I’m sure that everyone sounds like they have an accent when they travel. I haven’t noticed the specific sounds described in this article, like “yeah” for a. But I can say that I’m constantly asking people to repeat themselves because I don’t hear them clearly. There is at least some difference in the way people talk here compared to Idaho. I wonder how weird I sound to people here.
A lot of you remind me of the story of the two young fish swimming to fish-school one morning.
They pass an older fish who tips his fish-cap at them. “Morning, boys!” he says. “Water’s nice today, huh?”
The two young fish watch the older fish swim away. Then one turns to the other and asks, “What the fuck is water?”
I keep saying the words “cot” and “candy” over and over, and I’m still not hearing any “yeah.” I will admit our O’s and A’s can become nasal, leading to “caaaht” and “caaaandy,” but I’m not sure where this alleged Y business is coming from. I can’t even figure out how cot is supposed to sound like cat, no matter how I wrinkle my nose. The only time I hear “yeah” vowels in the Cleveland area is when we’re making fun of New Yorkers.
Another comment mentioned the name Todd. How else would you pronounce it, besides “tahd”? Is it just a matter of how wide your mouth is when you say it?
Now, in more rural areas you’ll hear EE vowels become I, as in creek = crick, or AY vowels become E, as in Dale = Dell, but I don’t usually hear that among people raised in the cities.
It’s absolutely real! Clevelanders pronounce their A’s very differently. My cousin in Brecksville is named Patrick, but everyone up there calls him “Pyeahtrick.”
And yes, I’m sure you in denial just read that out and thought, “nobody says it like that!” But it’s tough to give an accurate, phonetic spelling of an accent. I was just in Cleveland in June, and trust me, it runs rampant. When I meet a someone from the midwest, I’m able to tell within the first 20 words out of their mouth.
It’s not just Cleveland though! As the article mentions, all Midwestern cities have this. Even all the way as far as Philly has its own, unique accent. Michigan has probably the most extreme accent in the region. But all the Midwest accents are about 90% the same, with a few slight differences.
Trust me, if you live in NE Ohio, and you don’t think people pronounce their A’s differently, I guarantee you have an accent 🙂
MALKINTENT – your comment is amazing lol.
NE OHIO RURAL GIRL
Oh it’s there. This article was great! I grew up about 50 miles west of Cleveland and now I live in Toledo. I’m constantly told my A’s and O’s are short, and people are always confusing my name with another one because of the way I say my A! When I was in college and made new friends with southern Ohioans, I drank pop(pahp), and they drank soda…stuff like that. Let’s embrace it! 😀😀
I grew up in a small PA town right next to the OH border, halfway between Cleveland and Pittsburgh. I used to describe my accent as “Cleveburgh.” Now that I live in Cleveland, I find myself sounding more “Cleve” than “Burgh,” which I think is pretty cool. I like the NEO accent more than the western PA one.
Wonderful article…OK I am now listening💕 I do say Cyanton!!!
Born and raised in Northern Ohio, and I never met anyone who spoke this way. I had teachers for parents, and learned to speak English the phonetically correct way. Kee-yan-dee? Never heard it, ever.
Where ever I speak, across the world, people comment about how clear my accent is. I tell them that this was once the Ohio/Indiana broadcast accent, a standard which has some similarity to California and is known for its clear and crisp accent. In the United Kingdom, the Queens English was popular but that has changed significantly because of the negative impact of class distinction.
But language and accents change. TV is a huge influencer. As just one example, the American Southern accent, which has many variations, has softened over the decades. The Cleveland accent has picked up some new influences which is natural.
A label for everything and everything has to have a label. I get the academic need to label the “Great Lakes Accent”— which is the one national broadcasters strive for their anchors to use. There is a discernible difference as one travels — and linguistically it makes sense to assure someone labels it, even if it is the “norm” or “standard” for “American English”. Even so, Ohio itself is home to many accents — Cincinnatians still use “Please” instead of “Excuse Me” as a holdover from their german roots of “Bitte” etc. S.E. Ohioans often pronounce an ‘r’ in Washington and words like that: “Warshington”, similar to their S.W. Pennsylvanian neighbors. The further south in Ohio into river country, and as expected, Kentucky drawls become more prevalent. But in the band of Ohio along Lake Erie, our great lake, it is the dominant ‘Great Lakes Accent’ that prevails. I hear the ‘eah’ sound often times here in Cleveland, but it is a subtle sound you hear, not as pronounced as the ‘eah’ sound that prevails in some accents back between Bahston and Bal’mer (Baltimore). Even so, what is ‘water’ anyway? — we have lakes, rivers, creeks and rain.
My wife, who was raised largely out in Madison, closer to Ashtabula, definitely has the nasal “a” / added “y”, but as someone who grew up in the eastern burbs of Cleveland, I don’t have any of that in my own voice, even though I recognize it in others’. Maybe it’s because I have always been involved in theater and audio, and therefore have spoken with the ‘neutral pronunciation’ by nature. Beats me. The ‘Cleveland accent’ definitely exists, but it’s not as ubiquitous as this article makes it seem.
Lars, you’re right to identify those other vowel shifts, but the NC shift is at least as momentous and arguably more so because of the sheer number of people involved, and geographical area, from New York state to Chicago, at least!
The theory behind how “the accent” formed is fascinating. As I was reading this I was sounding out the individual words and while I didn’t hear this “yeah” in “kee-yeah-ndee” I did feel the weird tongue placement he described. We do for sure pronounce our As and Os and Rs different, nasally and harsh. But whatever.
I’d rather sound like we do than some southern hick. Pittsburgh has one of the more bizarre accents…how do you put an R in wash anyways? I’ve been living in Philly for the last year, the accent here is just plain dumb…”wooder” rather than “water” and “dohg” rather than “dog.” I can’t even begin to imagine what they do to get words like “stay” and “day” to come out like they do.
I had the nerve of a coworker from Boston heckle me about my “accent.”
Again, whatever. We know we don’t have an accent. This article is just scientific proof of what we all know…Clevelanders are a more highly-evolved human being 🤓
No, we do not have accent, nice try. I had a sociology prof at John Carroll U whose husband was a linguistic sociologist. According to him and his studies, clevelanders had no accent. He actually said Cleveland was the center of language in America and actually pinpointed it to a neighborhood near Cedar Hill (close to Coventry). The standard (high) dialect of any country is usually reflected in a country’s national news. Of course American news occasionally has a marble mouth like Brokaw or a Texan like Rather, but generally you think that national news people do not have an accent (think Matt Lower or David Muir). And generally those national broadcasters talk like we do in Cleveland (not like New Yorker, Bostonian, or even a person from Pittsburgh, etc). Not a total surprise to me that students at a university would say someone from Cleveland has an “accent” because they sound different than they do. But honestly I went to JCU that had a lot of out of state students, Georgetown that was totally diverse, and have lived in the DC area for 18 years which is a super transplant city – and never once has any one ever told me I have an accent. Even when I lived in Australia for two years,of course people there said I sounded like an American, but no one ever told me I had a particular accent from America.
That foxy weather chick on Fox-8 (Melissa M.) says “Kee-YAN-ton” and “Ee-yak-ron” every night she’s on TV. I was sure she was from Sha-CAW-go.
Nope…it’s Youngstown. Go figure, huh? And she told us to go look at the “full mew-n” tonight.
I think it’s sorta kee-yute.
Chuckles the Clown
I was born and raised in NE Ohio but moved to Nevada almost 20 years and I’m always asked where I’m from because of my accent! My children tease me because I say py-ants (pants) and ask me to say it over and over! I just went back to NE Ohio for a 5 week visit and definitely noticed the accents and now that I’m back home, everyone is telling me that my accent is stronger than ever! Great article and to those that in denial, get over it and embrace your Cleveland accent, it’s something to be proud of!!!
I was born and raised in Cleveland Heights, and some years later, lived in Lakewood, but I never ran into anyone who spoke in the way this article indicates. It wasn’t until I moved to Cincinnati three years ago and made friends with a woman at church that I got my first taste of the infamous “yeah”; her accent was extremely pronounced and at first, I thought she had to be joking. I have no idea if she was originally from Cleveland, but I plan to ask her the next time we see one another.
I’m old enough to have grown up when Cleveland was the broadcast standard, and I’m sure my youthful television watching habits contributed to my speech patterns. I’m pretty sure that no matter what my accent is, it’s not the one described here.
I lived from 2nd grade till 9th grade in Mayfield Hts, eventually moving back to Chicago, where I was born. For the last 30+ years I’ve lived either on the East Coast or West Coast. To a great extent, because so many people in places like LA and DC (where I’ve lived since ’97) are from other places, at some point their kids (regardless of ethnicity or even race) grow up speaking “broadcast English”. But as I do a lot of public speaking and presentations in my job, listening to stuff I did decades ago (even as a college DJ) and what I do now, there is definitely the existence of a “northern accent”. Sometimes it’s derided as an “adenoidal twang” (as someone actually said to me when critiquing me on the high school speech team in suburban Chicago). I had to exorcise it (subconsciously or otherwise) when I worked overseas so I can be readily understood, especially since Middle East, Asian and African folks are much more accustomed to the Queen’s English .
I was never aware of the Cleveland accent until I moved to Columbus (I’m from Mayfield Heights) to attend Ohio State, and many people asked me where I was from….and I asked why. Then I was made aware of my Cleveland accent, which apparently I still have. A year ago a cousin of mine was in town from LA and noticed my accent right away….and I consciously try to speak without it! Guess I’m not too successful….
I’m surprised that no one has mentioned the great “A” versus “E” aspect of the Cleveland dialect. I grew up here, and I also remember being taught at a young age that we had no accent. But as I travelled more and more, I came up realize that it most certainly exists.
Yet I don’t notice that “cat” and “cot” mixup as much as the article suggests. Rather I think the most discernible thing about our accent is that we often turn short e’s into long a’s. And this is most noticeable in how many of us say the man’s name Aaron versus how we say the woman’s name Erin, which is to say that we pronounce them virtually identically. Much of the rest of the country pronounces each name the way it’s spelled, with Erin sounding almost like “Ehrin” and Aaron sounding “Aaron” or “Airon.” Yet Clevelanders typically pronounce both names as the male “Aaron” and think nothing of it.
I mentioned this to a local girl named Erin just a couple weeks ago. And when I pointed out that her name is in fact spelled Erin, and thus is pronounced “Ehrin” by much of the country, she got a bit confused and then defensive. She said “Ewww, that’s not my name. That’s gross! My name (which she pronounced Airon) is cute!” It took all of my strength not to burst into laughter.
We do the same with other similar sounding words too. So we often pronounce any type of berry such as a strawberry as “strawbarry.” It’s that “eh” sound turning almost into an “ā” sound that truly sticks out to me as the “Cleveland accent” more and more as the years go by.
the accent is changing. a guy in a gas station on Denison referred to it has “half-hillbilly, half-ebonics”
Twenty years ago I was in Phoenix and told my friend I couldn’t find my chapstick. Her cousin overheard and mocked ‘chaaapstick’. I thought ‘whatever’. Two years ago I was in Homer, Alaska with boyfriend. Guy asked me how I knew about ‘this bar’. I told him our whale watching captain told us about it. ‘Caaaptain!’ he exclaimed. ‘ I haven’t heard that accent in years!’. Year later I was in Palm Springs, about to ride the tram with my guy up 8000 feet to top of the mountain. I told him ‘I should’ve brought my pants–it’s gonna be cold up there!’ Guy in line asked where we were from, he couldn’t ‘place the accent’. Funny thing is, my guy and I are both born/raised in Lakewood, but neither time was his accent commented upon. Finally, we saw ‘The Bronze’ this year. My guy said ‘You sound just like Hope: Paaants! Caaaptain!’ I said ‘No I don’t!’ But maybe I do…just a little. Excellent article. Thanks. Angela. (Pronounced AN -jeh-luh).
Great article. When I was out west in California, they all thought I was from Canada…lol! I admit, I do hear some of the phonetic mishaps that comprise the “Cleveland Accent,” but not from everyone here. Just listen to Lebron James. Never once have I heard him c-yeahn-dee.
I worked in the hotel biz for 17 years and listened closely to people’s dialect, cadence, tempo and patterns trying to figure out where they are from and many times practice and learn their language. We all have our accents. Hell, if someone were to actually speak the King’s English, we’d say they have an accent.
The dialect comes from the practice of pressing the back of the tongue against the sides of the upper palate. I feel it when I speak! and yes, I do admit to this eeyeahccent. We Clevelander’s also say boyk, instead of bike and moyk for Mike. It’s the short A that we attach the Y to. We also add it to our long I’s, usually with a subtle O sound in words such as Mike, Bike, Tike… sounding more like Moyk, Boyk, Toyk, depending on which side of town you’re from… believe it or not the ‘Cleveland Accent’ has an East and West differenciation!!
There is definitely an accent that has crept in over the years, but not everybody has it. My mom and I do not, but my sister and father totally do. I moved away and can hear a huge difference between how my dad and sister speak versus how my mother speaks and they all grew up in Ohio.
So, I am a ne ohioan, lived in Ashtabula 40 some years, before I began nomadic life. My sister, who had moved to Denver years before I did, laughed at my “Midwest accent”. I protested, of course, as I had this grammatically correct need to enunciate my words correctly, I have grown a large vocabulary and generally try to say what I mean, and mean what I say, a distressingly rare thing these days. But, she did clarify this accent to amount to a vowel difference, ahia, indeed was how she presented this, though, I have never said Ohio any other way than with long O’s, but nasally, yes sometimes the vowels come out nasally and drawn out, something I thought was Appalachian more than Ohioan. Within our own family, Mom said maptress and chimbly…where she found the p and the b in those words, I haven’t got the foggiest idea. Daddy was the closest to the hill Williams, but he spoke like everyone else in the area…and both my parents were born and raised in Ashtabula County, not leaving until after the 80s stripped the jobs away. Now, since I have lived in all four time zones and on all four coasts…my accent is undeniably muddied and not so identifiable any more, but I worked to be less nasally, but sometimes Soda comes out pop, anyhow. Somebody makes fun of my accent, I ask them to read Conneaut….then I can laugh at them. It most definitely is not con-noot. Ashtabula seems hard for many, too, especially inflection wise. It is ash tah bula, not Ash tab oola. Lol
Having learned to speak from my mother, a native of NEO, but growing up in Northern California, then living in the South briefly as an adult, I can tell you for sure the Cleveland accent is for real. I slip into it myself if I’ve been talking with my mahm (mom) or my uncles. It’s nothing to be ashamed about, it just is. If you are ever in doubt about it, try asking for a bahx at a restaurant in Canada. Then listen to how they say box when they finally get what you’re saying
Accent? No accent? I’m in the no accent group… but I’ll tell you this. My grand dad was in WWII and back in the day, they had announcements over the ship’s speaker system… dinner at 6:30… inspection at 0800, etc. The Navy deliberately chose men from NE Ohio to be announcers because they were the one group of speakers that everyone could understand. No drawl, no yinz, no NW accent… the most common pronunciation among the crew. I was taught we don’t have an accent, and I’ve never said the word “c-yeah-t”… but we may sound different from other speakers from other places in America.
There is a new book: “How to Speak Like a Midwesterner”. The author believes the vowel shift was already in process in one region of England and migrated here.
The author also cites derisive names for our schools that I had never heard.
I was in complete denial when I heard someone tell me this. I had just graduated from CSU and moved to Colorado. I had a coworker ask me where I was from because she told me I had an accent! I looked at her as if she was growing a horn from her forehead. I do? She said your short “a” and short “o” sounds a bit off. Off? I began to listen to myself very carefully because I am a speech pathologist. She was right!!! I had a very nasally short “a” sound and my short “o” sounded quite nasally too compared to everyone I was working with in that area of Colorado. They sounded just like me except for those two vowels. I was born and raised in Cleveland. There are different midwestern dialects. The differences are in the vowels if you listen closely.
Hi, posting from other side of Atlantic in Cleveland UK which incidentally is twinned with Cleveland OH. Ive taken quite an interest in linguistics recently in particularly my local area and was wondering how it compared to its namesake in the states. Its interesting to hear how the Cleveland OH accent sounds and there are some similarities with Cleveland UK . For example CAR PARK sounds like
KEE-YAH PAAHK and SHIRT sounds like SHEE-YERT . Cleveland is located in the northeast of England in between 2 distinct dialect/accent regions of Durham and Yorkshire. Its linguistically closer to old English than it is to standard English in fact 80% of the Northeast region of England has been influenced by the Angles from southern Denmark and the Vikings also from Denmark with some from Norway. Words that are viking and Angle in origin are still used for example ADD or AULD meaning old and BECK for a small stream or river. So when we get similarities in pronunciation even though the two areas are separated by an entire ocean its quite bizarre.
So here we are 2 years later and this article is making the rounds on Facebook again, and I’ve still yet to hear anyone around here say “cyotton cyeeeaaannndy.” And I’m still trying to figure out how you’re supposed to pronounce the name Todd as anything but “tahd.” Or why Erin and Aaron shouldn’t both be pronounced “air-n.”
At least we can be thankful the pin-pen merger hasn’t hit Cleveland. Although I’m sure someone in the comments will claim we pronounce those the same too. (Hint: We don’t. And if someone does, they’re probably a transplant from the South.)
Everyone seems to think “Kee-yan-dee” means you pause between each syllable. It’s subtle, but the way we start our A’s is a little different. Instead of separating the syllables, try saying the word VERY slowly without pausing. Really listen to what sound you make, and how your mouth moves.
I never knew I had an accent, but listening now, I hear it.
If you want to hear another example of a accent with in Cleveland have a older person from Garfield Hts to say the name of the for mentioned town. You will hear a distinct difference in how westsiders say the name. It is unusual pronunciation in the least
Pinch your nose when you speak and you’ll find where your nasally vowels are hitting. Mom/mahm, John/jahnn, on/ahhN
I have often pondered this, but the one platform that connects all of the nation with audio is broadcast television, and we in Cleveland sound exactly like the English speaking Americans on tv shows and news. It’s rare to hear a southern accent on tv, I suspect because of the prejudice mentioned in the article, but you certainly dont hear Pittsburgh or chicago accents on main characters. They mostly speak NE Ohio. Dialect and vernacular and colloquialism, sure, we have plenty of those, mostly in line with the midwest as a whole, but I will fight anyone who insists we have an accent. We are the standard by which all other accents are determined. We are pure and infallible as virgin snow.
Born in ne ohio, lived here all my life. Warren/youngstown. Never noticed the cleveland accent til recently…yes clevelanders, you do have an accent.
Tires soundlike toyers
Fire sounds like foyer
Chicago sounding “a”— hat,box,cat,bat….
Listen to a conrads tire commercial. Listen to the news on tv8.
Having lived here for 54-years, I know no one personally that pronounces any of the words used as an example of the Cleveland accent the way you say they do. So yeah, I call BS.
I find this discussion fascinating. While I was born and raised in the Cleveland area (Cleveland Heights to be exact), quite frankly I do not personally know ANYONE who adds these extra syllables to words as we Cleveland speakers supposedly do. Yes… I have heard those who speak in such a fashion but I do not.
And pronouncing “mom” with a hard “a” sound? Seriously? No. Pen and pen are distinct words. As are root and route, aunt and ant. Perhaps I don’t speak like a “true” Cleveland ear, nor does y family or those with whom I was schooled. I do not say “toyers” for “tires” nor do I say “cat” like “cot”! Where the HELL where these people educated?!
I was born and raised in the Elyria/Lorain area (far west side of Cleveland) and yes we do most definitely have our own accent! When I went away to college in southern Ohio(Ohio U) that’s when I found out. However it really sunk in while I was living and working in other states and countries. I would choose to use different words so as to not have to repeat myself, for example, instead of mom I would say mother, this didn’t always work :). I also grew up with the same delusion that our area spoke “news caster” English. I am extremely proud of our unique accent. I notice it the most when I return home for a visit. It’s such a warm and comforting feeling to be surrounded by it.