Talking the talk of the Copper Country
A regional variety of American English
If you've spent any time in the Copper Country, you might notice a distinct way of speaking by local residents. Although commonly mistaken for Canadian English because of some of the shared sounds and the use of eh, the Copper Country dialect has been influenced mainly by Finnish, but also by other languages such as Canadian French, German, Cornish English, Italian and Croatian—the languages of the area's immigrants during the copper boom of the mid-1800s and early 1900s. The sounds, words and phrases of the dialect are a result of these various languages coming into contact as people migrated to the area, mixing and mingling with each other, and the sounds, words and phrases of their languages melding with those of the local variety of English to create a regional dialect. It is important to note that this is not the only dialect of the Copper Country; it is the one most associated with the area and typically spoken by the majority of lifelong residents. Dialects vary in the Keweenaw, and everywhere, as a result of certain characteristics of the speaker: age, ethnicity, education and social class.

What makes a dialect a dialect?
Language contact is one of the most common factors affecting differences in U.S. regional dialects. As speakers of different languages have interacted, the sounds, words and grammar of their languages have influenced the English spoken in different regions. Cultural differences also have an effect: speakers need words for various items, ideas and inventions that are new or unique to a region. A third factor is geographical boundaries: mountain ranges and rivers that both separate and isolate regions. For example, the Hudson River separates r-pronouncing speakers who say park your car from r-less speakers who say pak ya cah. Through language and culture contact, and geographical boundaries, dialect differences develop. These differences are based on three main linguistic features: sound (phonological) features, vocabulary (lexical) features and syntax (the grammar or word order of a language).

Sound (phonological) variation: Typically we notice the sounds (phonology) of a dialect most, and these sounds tend to be vowels. For example, we hear the influence of early Modern English from Southeast England in the vowels throughout the South. For example, right may be pronounced like rat. In some areas, such as cities around the Great Lakes, there is distinction between the pronunciation of caught and cot; in other places, such as some Midwestern cities and areas west of the Mississippi, there is a merging of these sounds where there is no distinction and both sound more like cot. Linguists call this similarity a vowel merger.
Although consonant variation is not as common as differences in vowel sounds, it does happen. For example, we can hear the r-lessness of British English brought over by settlers to the East coast and South. In these areas, some speakers drop their rs when they occur after vowels (like in the example of park your car). Similarly, other languages also influence the sounds of the variety of regional American English that we speak. We can hear the influence of Norwegian and Swedish in Minnesota, German in parts of Wisconsin, Dutch in parts of Pennsylvania, Spanish in the Southwest, French in southern Louisiana and Scots-Irish English in Appalachia.
Vocabulary (lexical) variation: Differences in vocabulary (lexicon) also make dialect a dialect: We have skunks in Michigan and pole cats in Kentucky; pop in the Midwest and soda in the East; water fountains or drinking fountains throughout most of the United States, but bubblers in parts of Wisconsin; people use rubber bands in Indianapolis and gumbands in Pittsburgh; they drink milkshakes in Illinois and cabinets in Rhode Island; people might lug or carry a bag with them in Minnesota, yet schlep it in New York City; this bag might be called a poke in Eastern Appalachia and a sack in other parts of the country.
Grammatical (syntactic) variation: In addition to sounds and vocabulary, dialects also are distinct because of their different grammars: how words are ordered and put together. For example, in Appalachia you can indicate the probability of something happening by using multiple helping verbs: I might ought to go to the store. There, speakers also might use an a- prefix with verbs ending in -ing: She was a-reading and a-writing; in different parts of the Midwest people might say Their car needs washed or that Their car needs to be washed; some speakers in the rural south may omit be as in The coffee cold; and, speakers in various parts of the United States may say There's six people in my family or There are six people in my family.
What's important to note is that dialect differences occur among these three features: sound, vocabulary and grammar, and more importantly, these variations are regular and rule-bound. For example, the use of the a-•prefix found in Appalachian English only occurs with verbs ending in -ing. Speakers in the East and South who drop their rs only do this after vowels. If we pay close attention, we can discover not only what makes a dialect a dialect, but we also can discover the rules governing the variation.

Why do differences still exist?
But why do these distinct varieties still exist with all the moving around that people do, and the influence of the media, especially TV, movies and radio? Aren't regional dialects dying out? No, regional variation is alive and well. In part, distinctions exist because of isolation and remoteness of areas. The U.P. is a good example of this; isolation and remoteness have limited the amount of contact speakers have with others, conserving the local dialect. Similar examples are the islands of the Outer Banks off North Carolina, the Ohio River (which separates Northern and Southern dialects), mountain ranges and the Great Lakes. In addition to geographical boundaries, cultural differences affect dialect. It is well known (if not quite accurate) that speakers living in snowy regions have more words for snow than speakers in tropical climates. A more compelling reason for the maintenance of dialect differences is identity: our language is one of the most obvious ways that we mark who we are, where we're from and where we've been—this may include not only our home town, but our economic class, gender, age, ethnicity and education.

The media are wiping out dialects? Not!
But what about TV, radio and other media—aren't they wiping out regional dialects? Most linguists would say no; although we may learn new words and expressions from various media, they do not affect dialect beyond temporarily adding to our vocabulary. An example of how the media build our vocabulary is the word not when it is used as a sarcastic negative. This seemingly new use of not was popularized in the early 1990s by the movie Wayne's World. Interestingly, not has been used periodically since the time of William Shakespeare. The media's influence on our use of language is limited because our interaction with the media is limited—it's a one-way communication street. Television, radio and other forms of media aren't interactive, and humans must interact with language in order to affect language use and change. Despite limited effects of the media, but because of identity, cultural differences, geographical borders and isolation, regional dialects remain. In fact, some studies have shown that dialects are getting stronger in some areas and for some speakers. Language use in the Copper Country is a particularly good example of how these factors work together to create a regional dialect.

Language variation in the Keweenaw
The Copper Country's relatively remote location, along with language contact between English and the languages of the immigrants who settled there, have shaped the local dialect and helped it remain fairly distinct from other varieties. This distinctness and why it survives, as well as whether it is changing, have been the heart of a study I began during the summer of 2000. The research project is based on seventy interviews with residents of the Copper Country, ages twelve to ninety-two, representing a varied sample of education, socioeconomic class and religious and ethnic backgrounds. The majority of participants are lifelong residents, but some are part-time or have returned after living away from the area. In addition to the interview data, I also use a variety of other sources that discuss language, language use and what it means to be local. These sources include newspaper articles and letters to the editor, Web sites, movies, song lyrics, popular literature, jokes, student essays and notes from my observations.

A brief history of the Copper Country
Before describing the dialect and how it has developed over the past 150 years, I will give some background on the history and development of the community to understand not only their influences on the dialect, but also the strong sense of local pride and the effects of this pride on maintaining the dialect, even when it and its speakers may be ridiculed and stigmatized, especially by speakers of more mainstream varieties of English. My hope is to create awareness about the dialect by describing its history and structure in order to foster acceptance of local ways of speaking here and elsewhere.
The rural and remote areas of the Copper Country contrast with the more cosmopolitan air of Houghton and Hancock. This contrast is kept alive through the strong sense of pride that permeates the community, in particular pride in ethnic heritage. Many local residents are third or fourth generation Finnish, Cornish, French Canadian, Swedish, Croatian, Slovenian or Italian. Pride also comes from survival in a place that some would see as less than idyllic—with an average of 250 inches of snow per year and a fifth season, Bug Season. Pride in local culture is evident in the grocery stores that sell specialties such as pasties, thimbleberry jam, sauna makkara (ring bologna), juustoa (a kind of cheese) and smoked fish. The pride and perseverance that characterize many residents are reflected in the Finnish expression sisu, defined by Terttu Leney as "fortitudinous staying power and tenacity in the face of adversity, against insurmountable odds," in other words, having guts.
Some might say that the Keweenaw itself has sisu because of its ability to adapt to environmental, industrial and developmental changes. What appears as wilderness was within the last 150 years a clear-cut series of hillsides and fields, dotted with smokestacks, mining company buildings and houses. From the 1840s through the early 1900s the Keweenaw was a booming copper mining region, boasting a population of 100,000 in 1890. This population contrasts with the 2000 census of 54,881 for the four-county area (Baraga, Ontonagon, Houghton and Keweenaw). The majority of the male ancestors of the current residents who settled the area came to work in copper mines and lumbering. Those who ran the mines, the mine captains and officers, generally were wealthy men from Boston and Chicago. These men and their families had wealth, education, nicer housing and a command of the English language, and they also had the ability to leave the area when copper profits fell.
The tension that has existed historically between locals and outsiders over labor and land also is reflected in derogatory ethnic and linguistic stereotypes. The term Yooper, associated with the negative stereotype of the dumb, backwoods, poor slob, who doesn't speak correct or proper English, typifies this tension. In response to the derogatory stereotype, some residents have reclaimed Yooper and use it as a positive label and identify themselves with a sense of place. Contention between insiders and outsiders also is reflected in the label troll, given by residents of the U.P. to people who live downstate, or beneath the (Mackinac) bridge.
The stereotype of the dumb Yooper who sounds ignorant has deep historical roots, growing out of class, ethnic and language differences in the area. Immigrants from English-speaking Cornwall were some of the first to arrive as miners. Because of their experience with hard-rock mining, they were given some of the better jobs in the mine. Later immigrants—mostly Finnish, but also Croatian, Slovenian and Italian—typically were given unskilled jobs in the mine because automated mining was in use by the time of their arrival. Because of their lack of hard-rock mining skills and because they didn't speak English, these men often were thought of as stupid. Ethnocentric attitudes often were encouraged as well as maintained by the mining companies through hiring practices and organization of housing settlements. For example, worker housing typically was clustered in ethnic and language groups, so we have Swedetown outside of Calumet and Frenchtown north of Hancock. The divisions that fostered ethnic and linguistic differences continue today, in stereotypes perpetuated by the media, such as in the songs of Da Yoopers and characters in the movie Escanaba in Da Moonlight. Yet interestingly enough, these parodies reflect some of the characteristic features of the local dialect.
A Finnish brogue
As many people from the area can tell you, the Copper Country dialect is strongly influenced by Finnish, and often the dialect is referred to as Finnish brogue. The influence of Finnish is in part due to the fact that a large proportion of later-arriving immigrants was Finnish. As Finnish immigrants to the area learned English, the sounds, vocabulary and grammar of Finnish merged with those elements of American English. An interesting fact is that these influences from Finnish have developed and spread over time so that speakers of the dialect who have no Finnish heritage or who have no or little knowledge or exposure to Finnish continue to use these features. It also is interesting that many other languages were spoken in the Copper Country during the mining boom—at one time there were thirty-two languages spoken in Calumet and newspapers printed in twelve different languages. Yet Finnish is the language that has had the most significant and lasting effect on the dialect. But why is this when there were so many other languages in the area, from Polish to Canadian French to Italian and German and more? The predominance of Finnish is in part due to the large Finnish immigration to the Keweenaw during the late 1800s, continuing into the early 1900s. It also is a result of the tendency of Finnish settlers to live in rural areas such as the Trap Rock Valley northeast of Calumet, Calumet Water Works Road and Lakeshore Drive southwest of Calumet, Liminga Road west of Houghton, as well as Atlantic Mine and Superior Location.
In addition to living in rural areas, which were more isolated and had more homogeneous populations than the towns, Finnish immigrants tended to have kept in contact with other Finnish speakers—here and in Finland, and to have continued to speak, read and write Finnish for usually two generations, sometimes more. For example, the majority of the people in my study over the age of sixty-five and of Finnish descent spoke Finnish before they spoke English, some continuing to speak Finnish throughout their lives, others losing it after learning English and attending school. Thus isolation, literacy and contact with Finnish language helped keep the language alive in the area, which increased its contact and influence on English.
In addition to these influences is how English was learned, not only by Finnish speakers, but also by those of other immigrant languages of the area. Because immigrants tended to live in segregated housing, had little contact with native English speakers and tended to marry those who spoke their own language, they typically spoke their native language at home. However, immigrants, especially adults working outside the home, and school-aged children needed to learn English as a common language. But, because there was little contact with native-English speakers, English was learned from other immigrants whose own language textured spoken English. Many participants in my study over the age of sixty-five learned English from older siblings or neighbor kids whose first languages were Finnish, French, Italian or German. Their parents, in particular their fathers, learned English from other immigrants while working. So, the English that developed over time was an accented English, accented particularly by Finnish.

Borrowed words from immigrant languages
As Finnish speakers maintained their language, and as Finnish came into repeated contact with English, it affected the sounds, vocabulary and phrases of the local variety of English. In contrast, other immigrants to the Copper Country tended to live in towns where they had more opportunity to interact with a wider variety of speakers of other languages (including English) and often lost their first language after one generation. The characteristics of these other languages leveled or were ironed out, and the languages themselves had little effect on the variety of spoken English. Nonetheless, some influences from other languages remain, although these influences tend to be few and tend to be limited to words. This kind of borrowing is typical of English in general; more than two-thirds of English words are borrowed from other languages.
Common words in the Keweenaw have been borrowed from Canadian French, including chuke or chook from touque, meaning a knitted winter cap; and eh and heh as in Have a nice day, eh, and That's a pretty dress, heh, probably derived from the French tag question, hien. Speakers (and cooks) from Cornwall brought the traditional U.P. pasty. Most likely these English speakers also gave the area the words bush, meaning forest or woods, and bloody, a sometimes pejorative exclamation. Ojibwe gives the dialect place names such as Keweenaw (a portage), Ahmeek (beaver) and Assinins (little rocks).

Other colloquialisms
The dialect also is characterized by colloquialisms that are not explained easily nor obviously rooted in one of the immigrant languages. Some of these expressions are unique to the area, such as pank, and others are common to other dialects of the Upper Midwest such as youse and bakery. These colloquial expressions include choppers, long-armed mittens with a removable flap over the fingers; swampers, rubber-bottom boots with leather uppers; bakery for sweet baked goods (the use of which is common in areas settled by German speakers); camp (cabin or cottage); you is sometimes included in commands: Keep out you! and pank means to pack or make compact as in pank snow, pank berries in a bucket or pank powder into a blasting hole (in mine rock); make wood is to cut or split wood; youse is the plural of you, which compares with you all, y'all, and you guys; Holy whah! is an expression of astonishment and snow scoop is a metal implement for moving snow.

The fortitude of Finnish
In spite of the influence of several languages, it is Finnish that most obviously has left its mark on the local dialect, for not only have words been borrowed, but sounds and sentence structures have been adopted as well. The strongest indications of the influence of one language on another are borrowed sounds and grammatical structures. We see (and hear) this kind of influence from Finnish. For example, language contact between Finnish and English has created the use of a d sound for the hard th, as in the and them, which is exemplified in the well-known bumper sticker created by Jack Bowers of Marquette, Say yah to da U.P., eh, and Jeff Daniels' film title, Escanaba in da Moonlight. Likewise, the soft th in both and south is often pronounced as a t or what linguists call the glottal stop, which actually is an absence of sound as the air rising from the back of the throat gets stopped by the glottis (the opening between the vocal chords and the upper part of the larynx). It typically happens when a t sound occurs between two vowels, like in bottle and Houghton. These two variations of th exist in the dialect because Finnish doesn't have either th sound. In fact, th sounds are somewhat rare in languages (English is one of few languages that has them). Finnish sounds also are heard in some of the vowels: the low a (pronounced a little like ah) that often is heard in words like pasty and bath; the raised o like in boat and the aw in house typically pronounced like o. Another phonological feature of the dialect is the aspirated ps, ks and ts, especially when they occur at the end of a syllable or word, like in winter, book and stop. A final feature is syllable stress. Finnish stresses the first syllable of words where English usually stresses the second syllable of words. Finnish syllable stress has influenced the local dialect (and English throughout the U.P.) so much that non-Finnish words use this stress pattern. A good example is Baraga, which is pronounced locally as BARaga, but in its native Slovenien is pronounced with a stress on the second syllable, barAga. The pronunciations CALumet and TOIvola follow this same pattern.
Notable vocabulary (lexical) features include borrowed words from Finnish, most significant of which is sauna, for not only have speakers borrowed the word, but the pronunciation as well. We typically borrow words from other languages—for example, tortilla, rendezvous, karioke—but it is rare that we borrow the native pronunciation along with them. Sauna is a prime example of the significant influence of Finnish because of its near-native pronunciation. Other vocabulary borrowings include yah from joo, meaning yeah; nicknames: Kusti for Gus and Matti for Matt; food items include maito for milk, korpu, cinnamon and sugar toast, pannukakku for an oven-baked pancake, and juustuoa, a kind of cheese, and hyi, meaning yuck or yucky.
Similarly, other features of Finnish also reflect its contact with English. A characteristic grammatical structure is the absence of the, which is a result of the grammatical rules of Finnish, which doesn't include the use of articles—words like a, an and the. Another characteristic feature is the absence of the preposition to when it indicates location, for example: Let's go mall, I'm going casino tonight and I wasn't even going to go post office. The omission of to comes from the fact that Finnish doesn't use to as a preposition before a noun like English does. Instead, the meaning of to is included as a word ending (suffix) on the noun, called a postposition.

Differences: Variety rather than impurity
As with any variety of American English, the sounds, words, phrases and sentence structures combine in unique ways to create the distinct dialect of the Copper Country. By examining the reasons for the features of the dialect, we can come to understand that its characteristics are based on grammatical structures and are therefore rule-governed. For example, the accentuated ts, ks and ps, occur in regular, predictable places in words, and the absences of to is a direct result of Finnish grammar. The rules that make up regional dialects may vary from mainstream American English, but they are different rather than wrong. By understanding the roots of language we not only can come to appreciate its beauty, but also to understand the reasons for its structure and use.
— Kate Remlinger

Author's Note: This article would not be possible without the people who generously gave their time and insights during interviews for the study. To them I give my heartfelt gratitude. I also give special thanks to Kitty Heikkinen for planting the research seed and to Jim Kurtti, Stephanie Rowe, Rob Bell and Michelle Anderson for comments and suggestions on different versions of this article.

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