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I got a bit of that when I moved to SF. It's harder to pin Midwesterners down by accent, though (city folks, anyway).

Hey everyone, I found one! He said folk, without saying "indie" before and "music" after! Dead giveaway!

Part of that is because Chicago is considered the baseline "accent" for many news broadcasters, radio personalities, etc. As a result, most Americans have heard that accent their entire life and therefore don't really interpret it as all that different.

I've found that it's the keywords that indicate where people are from within the Midwest:

Is it soda or pop? Is it car-mel or care-uh-mel?

(I do linguistic stuff in my day job.)

Even that can differ between rural and urban. I've lived in the midwest for most of my life, and apparently there's all sorts of "terms midwesterners use" that I've only rarely heard anyone say, and most often only to point out that they don't say it.

This depends though. Did you live "all over the midwest" or in a specific state? The very same things people pointed they don't say, could be prevalent in a nearby state.

Being from Wisconsin, I always get called out for how I pronounce "bag" and "bagel".

From Minnesota. I get the same.

Is it Chicago? I used to hear it was Johnny Carson's Nebraska flat accent.

To my ear, the Chicago accent is represented but exaggerated in the "Bill Swerski's Superfans" sketches from SNL in the 1990s - "Da bearssss".

And it's "cur-muhl". :)

I've met a few glib midwesterners that still had that characteristic way of pronouncing "roots".

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