White Eng lish

Milwaukee-ese is not the dialect spoken by everybody in Milwaukee.

“When we talk about Milwaukee English,” says Steve Hartman Keiser, a linguist at Marquette University, “it tends to be seen as only white English.”

In a racially segregated place such as Milwaukee, African-American English can be quite distinct from white dialect and can be spoken also by whites and Latinos who grow up in largely black neighborhoods, according to Thomas Purnell, a UW-Madison linguist and author of

Wisconsin Talk’s chapter on black English. He points out that African-American speech has its own rules and sounds and “constitutes a linguistically legitimate variety of American English and not a bastardization or ‘dumbing down’ of English.”

The south-tonorth migration patterns of African-Americans since the middle of the last century have created dialect maps with patterns that run primarily north-south, as opposed to the largely east-west patterns of white speech. “So Milwaukee, Chicago, Memphis and Mississippi tend to share features that are different from New

York, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia,” says Hartman Keiser.

Still, Milwaukee’s variety of African-American English is distinct from that in the South – for example, speakers here are more likely than those in the South to pronounce their “r”s, and the common “ah” pronunciation of the pronoun I is less common here. And, says Wisconsin

Talk editor

Joe Salmons, “African-American populations often selectively pick up pieces of local white vernacular.

As far as I can tell, black people raised in Milwaukee say

bubbler, just like everybody else.”

Shannon Kilsdonk, principal of Milwaukee Public Schools’ Hartford University School, can confirm the bit about bubbler.

The mostly African-American kids in her East Side school use it. Same at bilingual schools such as Hayes Bilingual School in Milwaukee – at least in English, says Tania Delgado, a secretary at the school. In Spanish it’s fuente de agua, or water fountain.