Whether you call a long cylindrical sandwich a hero, a submarine, a hoagy, a
torpedo, a garibaldi, a poor boy, or any of at least half a dozen other names tells
us something about where you come from. Whether you call it cottage cheese,
Dutch cheese, pot cheese, smearcase, clabber cheese, or curd cheese tells us
something more. If you call the playground toy in which a long plank balances
on a fulcrum a dandle you almost certainly come from Rhode Island. If you call
a soft drink tonic, you come from Boston. If you call a small naturally occurring
object a stone rather than a rock you mark yourself as a New Englander. If you
have a catch rather than play catch or stand on line rather than in line clearly you
are a New Yorker. Whether you call it pop or soda, bucket or pail, baby carriage
or baby buggy, scat or gesund-heit, the beach or the shore—all these and
countless others tell us a little something about where you come from. Taken
together they add up to what grammarians call your idiolect, the linguistic quirks
and conventions that distinguish one group of language users from another.
A paradox of accents is that in England where people from a common heritage
have been living together in a small area for thousands of years, there is still a
huge variety of accents, whereas in America, where people from a great mix of
backgrounds have been living together in a vast area for a relatively short period,
people speak with just a few voices. As Simeon Potter puts it: "It would be no
exaggeration to say that greater differences in pronunciation are discernible in
the north of England between Trent and Tweed [a distance of about 100 miles]
than in the whole of North America."
Surely we should expect it to be the other way around. In England, the prolonged proximity
of people ought to militate against differences in accent, while in America the
relative isolation of many people ought to encourage regional accents. And yet
people as far apart as New York State and Oregon speak with largely identical
voices. According to some estimates almost two thirds of the American
population, living on some 80 percent of the land area, speak with the same
accent—a quite remarkable degree of homogeneity.
Some authorities have suggested that once there was much greater diversity in
American speech than now. As evidence, they point out that in Huckleberry
Finn, Mark Twain needed seven separate dialects to reflect the speech of various characters, even though they all came from much the same area. Clearly that
would not be necessary, or even possible, today. On the other hand, it may be
that thousands of regional accents exist out there and that we're simply not as
alert to them as we might be.
The study of dialects is a relatively recent thing. The American Dialect Society
was founded as long ago as 1889, and the topic has been discussed by authorities
throughout this century. Even so, systematic scientific investigation did not
begin until well into this century. Much of the most important initial work was
done by Professor Hans Kurath of the University of Michigan, who produced the
seminal A Word Geography of the Eastern United States in 1949. Kurath
carefully studied the minute variations in speech to be found along the eastern
seaboard—differences in vocabulary, pronunciation, and the like—and drew
lines called isoglosses that divided the country into four main speech groups:
Northern, Midland, Southern, and New England. Later work by others enabled
these lines to be extended as far west as Texas and the prairie states. Most
authorities since then have accepted these four broad divisions.
If you followed Kurath's isoglosses carefully enough, you could go to a field in,
say, northern Iowa and stand with one foot in the Northern dialect region and the
other foot in the Midland region.
But if you expected to find that people on one side of the line spoke a variety of
American English distinctively different from people on the other side, you
would be disappointed. It is not as simple as that. Isoglosses are notional
conveniences for the benefit of geographical linguists. There is no place where
one speech region begins and another ends. You could as easily move the line in
that Iowa field 200 yards to the north or 14 miles or perhaps even loo miles and
be no less accurate. It is true that people on the Northern side of the line tend to
have characteristics of speech that distinguish them from people on the Midland
side, but that's about as far as you can take it. Even within a single region speech
patterns blur and blur again into an infinitude of tiny variations. A person in
Joliet sounds quite different from a person in Texarkana, yet they are both said to
live in the Midland speech area. Partly to get around this problem, Midland is
now usually subdivided into North Midland and South Midland, but we are still
dealing with huge generalities.
So only in the very baldest sense can we divide American speech into distinct speech areas. Nonetheless these speech areas do have certain broad
characteristics that set them apart from one another.
People from the Northern states call it frosting. To southerners it's icing.
Northerners say "greesy." Others say "greezy." In the East groceries are put in a
bag, in the South in a poke, and everywhere else in a sack—except in one small
part of Oregon where they rather mysteriously also say poke. Northerners tend to
prefer the "oo" sound to the "ew" sound in words like duty, Tuesday, and
newspaper, saying "dooty" instead of "dewty" and so on. The Northern and
Northern Midland accents are further distinguished by a more clipped pattern, as
evidenced by a pronounced tendency to drop words at the beginning of
sentences, as in "This your house?" and "You coming?" People from the same
area have less ability to distinguish between rounded vowel sounds like -a-and
"ah" such as exist between cot and caught. In the South, on the other hand, there
is a general reluctance or inability to distinguish clearly between fall and foal, oil
and all, poet and pour it, morning and moaning, peony and penny, fire and far,
sawer and sour, courier and Korea, ahs and eyes, are and hour, and many others.