In college a lit professor breezily told us that Chicago accents have more in common with Brooklyn than with Champaign downstate. He explained that the migration to Chicago originally followed the Great Lakes whereas the people in my parts came through Indiana from Kentucky. It kind of follows with my dad’s family. Started in Boston in 1634, then to New Haven, then to the area between Erie and Cleveland, then to farms in north and western Illinois. My maternal grandmother’s family started in Paris, Ky area in late 1700s and made it to central Illinois.