Iggles

Some time around 2005, after having been friends with lots of people from Philadelphia for a while, I began to pick up an ear for the Philly accent. This is a distinct accent that has always sounded a little quirky to my ears, but also pretty easy to understand, at least as far as regional dialects go.

There’s really no better example of this accent than the way NFL fans from Philly will pronounce their team’s mascot. The Philadelphia Eagles are more familiarly known as the Iggles.

Before we get too far down this eagle’s nest, I don’t want to give the impression that Philly people are thin-skinned about this. In my experience, the exact opposite is true: if you hear “Go Iggles!” at a game, that’s more like a mark of pride or a signal of one’s identity than something to be ashamed of.

Now, Philly’s accent is often considered a part of the larger Mid-Atlantic dialect region, and for good reason. Listen to someone from Baltimore or South Jersey, and you’re likely to hear the same general quirks.

Orange becomes arr-inj. On becomes awwwwwwwwwn, but it almost starts with the w- instead. Home becomes hewm, but sometimes my southern ears hear huuuuuuume. Coupon (coo-pon to my ears) becomes kyew-pon. These are all common to hear in the Mid-Atlantic region.

Even still, Philly has its own particular ways of differentiating itself from other dialects. My favorite of these is definitely the word water.

Water is a funny word you might take for granted, assuming everyone says it the same way. The funny thing is that the more common the word is, the more people seem to twist it with a dialect, and Philly has done a number on water. It has become something more akin to wooder, and one of my favorite treats to have when I visit has always been wooder ice.

Schismogenesis strikes again. This is when a group shows off my deliberately embracing their differences with another group, intentionally amplifying them so that there is no doubt about which group one is a part of.

In the 1930s, an anthropologist named Gregory Bateson noticed that among the Iatmul people of Papua New Guinea, certain patterns of interaction led to escalating behaviors.

Whenever one tribesman showcased a particular achievement or skill, another tribe member would not just appreciate it but would feel compelled to outdo his rival.

Soon enough, another would rise to outdo the last, creating a spiraling cycle of one-upmanship, leading to an ever-escalating dance of reciprocity. This vicious cycle became almost cartoonish over time, amplifying explainable behavior into something almost farcical in nature.

Go Iggles is the linguistic version of this phenomenon, and you can see the way other Eagles fans react whenever they hear it.