Linguist revels in and respects UP dialect
By John Gagnon

Vicky Bergvall MTU News Related stories Glossary What's in a word? Says who? Additional Work Beth Simon of Indiana University-Purdue University has researched the historical aspects of language use in the area--that is, how speakers of other languages learned English, and how they learned reading and writing. For more information, e-mail: vbergval@mtu.edu remlingk@gvsu.edu simon@ipfw.edu   B&W photos courtesy of Michigan Tech Archives/ Copper Country Historical Collection

Writing in 1944, the UP’s own Robert Traver said of north country Finns: “Their brogue is inherently the funniest I have ever heard.” He then gives an example, a no-hunting sign posted by a Finn landowner. It read: NOTIS YOU WHOS TO GIVE IT YOU PROMISS FOR  HUNT IT MY LAN? BETTER YOU LOOK OUT ELSE I SOOT IT YOU WIIT DA 2 PIPE SOT GUN. AND DATS TO BE NO PULLSIT. Traver continues: “But it would be a distortion for me to present a picture of the Finns in the false role of mere New World comedians, unwitting or otherwise. They are so much more than that, a fine people, a deep people....” Traver wrote several books set in the UP, including Anatomy of a Murder. His writing is peppered with the linguistic patterns of UP immigrants. Some of his message about the Finnish brogue and the Finnish people concerns Vicky Bergvall, associate professor of linguistics, who has lived in the UP for twelve years. As a scholar, Bergvall sees the regional language as distinctive and the people speaking the language as resilient. But she is especially attuned to Traver’s warnings about dialect as humor. “To have somebody denigrate you because of the way you talk is really unfortunate,” she says. “I try to train people not to laugh at the way others speak.” Bergvall has been interested in variations in dialect for years and has regularly incorporated the topic in her teaching. Language death—the decline of dialect and language variation—impels her work. She views language as a story of a people, “a story we would be the poorer for losing,” Bergvall says. Bergvall, who considers herself “an outlander,” has an ear for language, but she doesn’t like what she’s hearing these days: uniformity. She says language and dialect, like the Finnish brogue, are disappearing, which, to a linguist, is like a mathematician without numbers. Worldwide, Bergvall says, even major languages are giving way to English exclusively, which troubles her. “Imagine if we stopped speaking English,” she says. “What would happen to Shakespeare?” Similarly with dialect, she says. “One of the joys we see in the world is linguistic variation.” Linguists like Bergvall worry about dialect and the possibility of a gradual “wearing down of distinctiveness.” Linguistic variations can be lost—“mashed by the steamroller of standardized English,” she says. The result could be “terribly, terribly bland.” Bergvall is from high plains of central Montana, what she calls “the dusty part” of the state. She has been teaching at Michigan Tech since 1989. Always interested in “what marks our voices as being different,” she has both a master’s and doctorate in linguistics from Harvard University. “I am incompetent in eight languages,” she jests. “I don’t even speak English well.” Language endemic to Upper Michigan, she says, results from a score of languages spoken by immigrants who arrived during the area’s mining boom. The diversity forged the dialect. Words are telltale, as are other UP regionalisms: intonation (“the musicality of your voice”) accent, or the pronunciation of vowels and consonants (“Accents make richness”) substituting d or t for the th sound (da for the, dis for this, tink for think, tree for three). This characteristic is common to UP Finns, but Bergvall says a lot of languages don’t have what in English is the th sound. She has heard the exact same story depicting this feature of the language (tirdy-tree and a tird) for Finns in the UP, Italians in Brooklyn, and Cajuns in Louisiana. grammatical structure, such as ending sentences with eh unique expressions The strong Finnish influence in Upper Michigan is partly an outgrowth of what Bergvall calls a “dense network”—by which she means cohesiveness—whereby some Finns purposely set themselves apart from the wider culture. She sees that inclination as a good thing for the dialect. “It helps keep the UP local,” she says. She approaches the subject from the standpoint of both a detached observer and a unabashed champion of linguistic diversity. Variety in language remains a wonderment to her. She calls it a “playground,” and she values it because she believes it is an expression of human variation and is thus worth preserving. “When I go to Louisiana,” she says, “I like to have Louisiana food and hear a Louisiana accent—and not just because it’s picturesque and quaint and touristy. I think there are things that express the heritage and history of people, and language is one of them. I like the variations. I don’t want all this to turn out to be vanilla.” There is that flip side to dialect, however. Use of Nonstandard English often gives rise to stereotyping. “People who don’t speak what's assumed to be standard English,” she says “are assumed to be stupid or generally less capable.” Other people poke fun. “Language prejudice is rampant,” she says. And deplorable. A better attitude, she avows, is a respect for diversity that “acknowledges the richness and variety of the locale, its language, and its people.“ “You’ve got to love the UP,” she says.