How to Speak Midwestern

“A long-overdue study of the middle-American vernacular, and how that vernacular informs our identity . . . A regionally specific Urban Dictionary.” —Inside Hook

The Pittsburgh toilet. Squeaky cheese. City chicken. Shampoo Banana. Chevy in the Hole. These are all phrases that are familiar to Midwesterners, but foreign to anyone living outside the region. Find out what they mean in How to Speak Midwestern. Edward McClelland will not only explain what Midwesterners say, but how and why they say it. He examines the causes of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, one of the most significant changes in English pronunciation in a thousand years; explains why the accents in Fargo miss the nasality that’s a hallmark of Minnesota speech; and reveals why Chicagoans talk more like people from Buffalo than their next-door neighbors in Wisconsin. For outsiders, McClelland will include helpful information such as “How to Talk Through Your Nose,” “How to Mispronounce Foreign Place Names,” and “‘Well, That’s Different’: How to Passive-Aggressively Criticize People, Places and Things.”

If you’re from the Midwest, you’ll have a better understanding of why you talk the way you do. If you’re not, well, you’ll know exactly what to say the next time someone ends a sentence with “eh?”

“How to Speak Midwestern is a fascinating read, whether you hail from WOWOland, the UP, Cereal City, or Baja Minnesota.” —Chicagoist

“A dictionary wrapped in some serious dialectology inside a gift book trailing a serious whiff of Relevance.” —The New York Times