Yuns got any sugar to spare? Don’t know much about N.W. Indiana but did live in Dearborn Mich. for a while and will never forget going into stores and either being laughed at or looked down on for my accent. I would have to repeat myself 2 or 3 times before the clerk could figure out what I was saying. They would have to repeat themselves to me also cause they talked so damned fast.
I worked in sales for 30 years and lost most of my accent until somebody from the mountains came in. It was like flipping a switch and I would start speaking hillbilly. I grew up across the highway from a ninety year old man and some of the words were Old English (probably Elizabethan).
that he used.
I hate that our speech has been corrupted by tv, it was one of things that made us special. Ever heard the word ‘jackkniving’, whatyacallsit, dofauit, my Dad used them cause it helped him cut down on his cussing. Wish I knew what jackkniving meant, but it is too late to ask.
Went to school with a girl from Va. and she had most beautiful Southern accent and she was a real looker. She is dead now, course you know the good die young.
My grandma and her eight or nine brothers and sisters moved north during the depression, along with hundreds of others fleeing the coal mines looking for a new life in the steel mills and auto works of Chicagoland. The old joke was that my hometown, about forty miles south of the lake on the Kankakee River, was as far as they could get on their way to Chicago on a single tank of gas.
The jobs are pretty much gone, but the people have stayed. They’re working on the fourth generation of migrants up there, and most who stayed still carry that unique patois. Yuns is a true marker separating NWI hillbillies (an affectionate term I assure you) from other Hoosiers with southern accents, but there are others - “son” used as an interjection, “I don’t reckon”, “awfulest” as a term of endearment, and so on. When I hear a phrase like “Son! I don’t reckon yuns are coming home this weekend”, it really puts a smile on my face.
Thanks for sharing.