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| amazighstarrynights (profile) wrote, on 2-1-2005 at 11:49am | |
| We are talking about dialects and languages in class - for all of you that make fun of me for talking like a Canadian - check this out!!! Yooper way of life may be pert-near gone By Francis X. Donnelly / The Detroit News Sonny Longtine provides some phrases and pronunciations you might hear north of the bridge. "Ya know, it's cold up here so, if you come to visit, don't forget your chook and your choppers." "For dinner, we're going to have some lutefisk and cudighi." "Kids in Yooperland speak both Yoopanese and regular English, ya know." "Holy whah! Heikki Lunta came last night." "We go Marquette, you betcha, and then we go shop-ko." "Them there trolls don't think we have baths in our houses. If we don't, we have the outhouse in the backyard." - sound familiar Danielle and Laurence - you thought I made up the phrase about trolls!! "Youse guys pronounce it SAW-na, but the right way to say it is sauna." Yooper glossary Bush -- woods Choppers -- long-cuffed mittens Holy wah! -- exclamation Making wood -- splitting wood Pank -- pack down snow with flat side of shovel In the Upper Peninsula, youse hear less and less about the wearing of nips, chooks and choppers. Residents still don the clothes, you bet, but they're more likely to be called by their common names: socks, knitted hats and long-cuffed mittens. That's because the U.P. dialect -- a quirky brew of expressions, pronunciations and grammar -- is slowly dying. Holy man! What may seem quaint to the rest of Michigan is a source of concern up north, where denizens worry that a withering language might foretell a withering culture. The economy of the isolated region never recovered from the decline of the mining and logging industries. Older residents are dying while younger ones move away. "It's part of who we are," said Sonny Longtine, 64, a retired high school teacher who has lived his entire life on the peninsula. "It's what the U.P. is all about and always has been." State representatives from the area were concerned enough about the issue that they vainly proposed making Yoopanese the official state dialect. "It's small town all over," said Hoolie DeCaire, 59, another U.P. lifer who runs a tourist shop in Ishpeming. "It's still a slower pace. The wilderness is just a short distance away." A way of life The U.P. dialect is one of the strongest signs of the local culture. It's a culture that comprises more than snow, beer and guns, ya know. Yoopers, a name derived from U.P.-ers, love their splendid isolation. They often hunt and fish in the heavy forests of pine and the ubiquitous lakes, great and small. Bigger than Maryland, the U.P. is a land of public saunas, ice fishing and Cornish meat-and-vegetable pies called pasties. "Instead of grumbling about what you don't have, be thankful for what you do have," said Glenn Bjork, 80, of Negaunee. Bjork, one of four generations of miners, then recounted the things he has: a home, food, clothes, fishing, hunting and a cabin in the woods. The distinctive way of life has pretty near, or pert-near, produced its own vocabulary. In Bjork's parlance, the woods are "bush" and cabins are "camps." "Making wood" means splitting it. A person sitting down to laker, cudighi and pannaukakku is about to eat lake trout, spicy Italian sausage and a baked Finnish pancake. If he then needs an antacid, he could buy it at the shop-ko or co-op. Mining drew immigrants Long before anyone ever heard the term "melting pot," the U.P. was home to immigrants from dozens of nations. One of the things that resulted from all those groups trying to master English was the U.P. style of speech. Among those influencing the dialect : American Indians, French Canadians, Irish, Germans and Russians. But the real Tower of Babel began in the 1840s, with the heyday of copper and iron mining. The mines in the western U.P. attracted workers from all over Europe, including Finland, Italy and Poland. In the tiny mining town of Calumet, 32 languages could be heard on the street in 1880, said Michael Loukinen, a sociologist at Northern Michigan University in Marquette. "It's what makes the U.P. unique," he said. "It was a conscious link that immediately evoked those traditional cultures." One of the biggest contributions to the local dialect from the French Canadians is "eh," which seems to end sentences as often as periods. The Swedes or Germans donated "yah," which is how they pronounce "yeah." Combine the two and you have a favorite Yooper exclamation, "Yah, eh," which means "you have got to be kidding me." The Finnish influence Parts of this linguistic gumbo combine Brooklynese and a Boston accent. The Boston habit of widening the "a" in words comes from the same Canadians who brought it to the U.P. The Brooklyn idiom of "dem" and "dose" comes from the fact that the "th" sound is missing from most languages. Of all the groups shaping the U.P. language, none has had more influence than the Finns. One of the smallest U.S. minorities , the Finnish are the biggest one in the U.P., accounting for 16 percent of the population. Like the Italians in Brooklyn, they also had trouble pronouncing the "th" sound. "Up dere, my kit brother doesn't talk dat way hardly at all," said Ken Myllyla, 72, an Escanaba retiree whose grandfather emigrated from Finland. "If you don't speak a foreign language and dat, it doesn't stay wit you as much. Dat's the way my dad useta sound." In 2001, when Chelsea, Mich.-based actor/playwright Jeff Daniels made a movie about life in the U.P., "Escanaba in da Moonlight," the cast learned to speak Yoopanese by listening to Myllyla. The Finns, besides contributing words and sounds to the U.P. dialect, also influenced its grammar. The Finnish language doesn't use "to" when describing locations. They go Marquette or, instead of visiting their hunting cabins, they go camp. Locals stayed put As U.P. speech fades from the rustic landscape, the reasons can be found among the usual suspects. The U.P. population stagnated in the early 20th century after mines began to close. Since 1910, the number of Yoopers dropped from 326,000 to 318,000, while the state's overall population more than tripled. The older population is dying off. Younger residents are self-conscious about the way they sound. The schools are teaching so-called proper English. Also, the area has been influenced by outside forces, from homogenous mass media to newcomers from other parts of Michigan with their funny accents. Rather than wonder why the dialect is disappearing, the more interesting question might be: How did it hang around for so darn tootin' long? The answer lies in the most rural pockets of the western U.P., said Zacharias Thundy, a retired English professor at Northern Michigan University. Outsiders seldom moved into the area and locals never left. "I'm surprised in a sense that the media, TV and radio, hasn't totally obliterated the (linguistic) difference," Thundy said. Kathryn Remlinger, associate professor of linguistics at Grand Valley State University, doesn't believe the dialect is dying, but is just evolving. That's the nature of language, she said. It's always changing. Remlinger, who has studied the local idiom, was heartened to find it spoken by residents who hadn't grown up in the U.P. They had picked it up after moving there. One word the newcomers might hear is "sisu," which is Finnish and describes one's ability to accomplish something against overwhelming odds. It's something that local residents pride themselves on. Their latest Herculean feat might be to ensure that words like that continue to live on in their rural homeland. Does the U.P. still have sisu? You betcha. You can reach Francis X. Donnelly at (313) 223-4186 or fdonnelly@ detnews.com. Source: U.P. linguists and residents Source: U.P. linguists and residents |
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guajiragoddess | 02-03-05 12:53pm TROLLS!
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