What happened to 'Milwaukee-ese'? It hasn't gone anywhere, but it has changed.

Did you buy some bakery this morning? What about your car — did you park it at the ramp?

If you live in Milwaukee, you’ve likely developed an ear for the city’s unique lexicon, known as "Milwaukee-ese." People say "c'mere once," refer to haircuts as "falling downstairs" and add "ainna" to the end of most questions. Thirsty people, of course, ask where they can find a "bubbler."

Or do they?

Readers have previously written to What the Wisconsin? — a feature in which we answer questions about our city and state — about how we speak in Wisconsin and what we say.

Most recently, someone inquired: What happened to Milwaukee-ese?

Milwaukee natives have a vested interest in the “Milwaukee” way of speaking, and there is a common misconception that the city is losing its dialect.

And Joe Salmons, a linguist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says this is not just a Milwaukee concern — it's a national and an international perception that dialects are disappearing.

Here's the history of Milwaukee-ese, and what might be next for our local way of talking.

How did the Milwaukee-ese dialect emerge?

As with any origin story, the broader historical context of the English language in Milwaukee and in Wisconsin needs to be considered.

When German, Polish, and Norwegian settlers came to the area, they brought their customs, cuisine, and — of course — languages. In many cases, immigrants continued to speak other languages at home for a couple of generations before English became more prominent within the community.

Children who grew up in Milwaukee at the turn of the 20th century spoke languages besides English at home and likely learned English as adults, Salmons said. This early exposure to different types of speech meant that children learned to recognize certain features — how words were pronounced and how they're put together — and decide which features were kept and which were dropped. Eventually, they started to develop their own dialect, which was then spoken outside the home.

Kids adapt their language to that of their peer group, adjusting to a broader way of speaking compared to how they typically speak inside the home. Or, as Salmons put it: "Kids want to sound different from their mothers."

This transformation from the home community to the school community facilitates even more editing and adaptation until certain features start to stick around. It can take years — decades even — of community engagement and language exposure for certain features to become salient and recognizable as one converged dialect.

Knowledge of Wisconsin English — the stereotypical "Wisconsin" way of speaking — first appeared in published writing in a 1938 newspaper article in Green Bay. The first appearance of "Milwaukee-ese" wasn't until 10 years later when the Milwaukee Sentinel published an article poking fun at someone who used the word "ainna."

In the scheme of things, it's a relatively new dialect.

Milwaukee-ese is a rich Wisconsin dialect formed by rich communities

"Milwaukee-ese" is a subset of the Wisconsin dialect: A pattern of sounds — including accents — and words that is specific to the people in this city.

People naturally recognize and adopt a regional or social dialect; it's a function of language that the brain is pre-wired to identify. Language learners subconsciously distinguish certain sounds and phrases that belong to a specific social group.

The dialects people use depend on who they're surrounded by in the community, Salmons said. In other words, community members tend to sound similar.

Milwaukee is a particularly interesting case for studying dialects, according to Salmons, because of the diverse and dynamic community. "Milwaukee is this super rich area of people speaking all kinds of English," he said.

Greater language variation in a community provides more opportunity for a unique dialect to develop, he said.

Simply put: The richer the community, the richer the dialect.

Language evolves over time — this isn't your grandmother's version of Milwaukee-ese

Even though the Milwaukee-ese heard today is still relatively new, the dialect is under near constant revision. It hasn't disappeared — it's just evolved.

This is due to the malleability and shape-shifting nature of language. Though people often expect there to be stasis — "some sort of stability over time," Salmons said — how people speak and what they say is adaptive. A language evolves to better capture the regional and social identities of the people who speak it.

Milwaukee-ese today, he said, "is not what it was in 1950. It's not what it was in 1900. It's not what it was in 1850."

A few quintessential markers of Milwaukee-ese have gradually disappeared from the lexicon — many of which have Germanic roots and were spoken by immigrants learning English as a second language. Two standouts are the aforementioned “ainna” and the iconic “once” — another tag typically added to the end of a request, as a way to soften the demand.

Some of the stereotypes that historically categorized Milwaukee-ese were “always kind of shaky,” Salmons said. This is because stand-out phrases like “falling down the stairs” — how a speaker might refer to getting a haircut — were likely never uttered by people who learned English as a first language. As new speakers learn and develop the dialogue, those “shaky” phrases start to disappear, he said.

So what type of Milwaukee-ese can we expect to hear in the next 50 years? We don't know yet, but it's not going to be what it is today. And this is incredibly exciting to researchers like Salmons.

"We have barely scratched the surface here," he said. With demographics changing — including a recent influx of Spanish, Hmong and Somali speakers — there's more exciting research to be done.

The key is: Wherever a community exists, a dialect will emerge. And however the community changes, so will the dialect.

While our city’s dialect may take different forms from what was considered Milwaukee-ese 10 or 20 years ago, it’s still alive and well, and it is still uniquely ours.

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: What happened to Milwaukee-ese? Dialect is evolving, not gone.