Culture
Culturally, the area is tied heavily to Chicago, and most residents of Northern Illinois tend to root for Chicago teams, lean towards the Chicago media market, and visit the Chicago Loop often. In college football, most fans in Northern Illinois root for the NIU Huskies. Other teams present are the Illinois Fighting Illini, Notre Dame Fighting Irish and the Iowa Hawkeyes. In Central and Southern Illinois, residents are tied primarily to St. Louis. Additionally, regional dialects in Northern Illinois vary from those in other parts of Illinois. Surprisingly, different areas in Northern Illinois have their own independent cultures. Typically, areas west of Interstate 39 have more ties to Iowa and the Quad Cities area, as that is roughly the location of the westernmost terminus of the Chicago media area. Even dialects within Northern Illinois are different, emphasizing the above. Depending on location and ethnicity, a resident of the Chicago Metropolitan Area may have the stereotypical Chicago dialect, whereas those in more affluent areas, such as DuPage County, may have a more crisp, "sophisticated" manner of speaking. Those west of Chicago have more stereotypical Midwestern dialects, and might not be able to be distinguished from people in Iowa or Nebraska.
Depending on how close to a specific metropolitan area a county is, their culture and media reflect that of the metro area. There are exceptions, however. McHenry County may sometimes be considered Chicago-influenced, and, at times, Rockford-influenced. Areas such as the Ottawa-Streator Micropolitan Statistical Area have a comfortable mix of culture from the Chicago area, Quad Cities area, and Peoria, perhaps being due to its location in the center of the region.
Read more about this topic: Northern Illinois
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“Insolent youth rides, now, in the whirlwind. For those modern iconoclasts who are without culture possess, apparently, all the courage.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)
“... there are some who, believing that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds, and that to-morrow is necessarily better than to-day, may think that if culture is a good thing we shall infallibly be found to have more of it that we had a generation since; and that if we can be shown not to have more of it, it can be shown not to be worth seeking.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)