Regional Patterns of American Speech

The Midland Pattern Unlike Coastal speech, the Midland dialects that form a transition area between the North and South grew up in the interior regions of the country. From Pennsylvania to Georgia, the eastern boundary of the Midland dialect area coincides with the geography of the old frontier. Settlers took the land in the great migrations out of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia during the half century that preceded the Revolutionary War. Thomas Walker’s discovery of the Cumberland Gap in 1750 provided a southern gateway to the Midwest and a passage into Kentucky for the ancestors of both Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln. Before the War of 1812 the frontier extended in the north out of Pittsburgh and down the Ohio River and in the south out of the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina, across Tennessee and Kentucky along the Wilderness Road of Pennsylvania’s Daniel Boone. 26 Like other American dialects, the Midland varieties arose from a British English base in Pennsylvania, but the social composition on the frontier was different. Besides the British, Pennsylvania included Scottish, Irish, Welsh, French, Dutch, Swedish, and German settlers, with seven of these eight groups not speaking British English before they arrived in North America. And with further migration inland, these pioneers felt less influence from English culture, especially the prestigious London forms that continued to influence the coastal communities. More important, the frontier people occupied themselves mainly with survival in a hostile region. Those factors influenced the disparate groups in a uniform way: Midland dialects resisted the phonological changes under way in England and in the coastal colonies to the north and south; English, Irish, and Scots folk speech reinforced the regional grammar and vocabulary, giving these American dialects identities of their own. 27 North Midland The Midland pattern contrasts most sharply with the interior varieties of Northern and Southern speech. Extending from western New England and upstate New York along the southern shores of the Great Lakes and then northwestward into the upper Midwest, the Inland Northern dialect spread from its eastern source after the War of 1812. The construction of the Erie Canal from Albany to Buffalo gave upstate New York and New England access to the Great Lakes, as had the wagon roads that preceded the watercourse and as would the railroads that followed it. As Northern speech extended out of upper New Jersey and northern Pennsylvania, a major dialect boundary was established with the southern limit of darning needle (dragonfly), pail, and whiffletree, contrasting with North Midland snake feeder, bucket, and singletree. From upstate New York and across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa westward, the division of Northern and North Midland remains apparent in the pronunciation of fog and hog, which are pronounced with the vowel of father in the North and the vowel of dog in the North Midland; in the pronunciation of the diphthong of cow, house, and towel, which in the North begins with a lower vowel that is closer to that of father, and in the North Midland begins with a vowel that is closer to that of lather; and in the existence of an epenthetic r in "warsh" and "Warshington" in some Midland speech. Formerly distinctive are the Northern terms stone wall, pail, swill, teeter-totter, faucet, pit (of a cherry or peach), and firefly, contrasting with the Midland terms stone fence, bucket, slops, seesaw, spicket (spigot), seed, and lightning bug. In the West the Northern/Midland distinction is most clearly heard in the pronunciation of car, yard, and similar words: the Northern pronunciation is marked by a vowel closer to that of father; the Midland pronunciation, by one closer to the vowel of saw. 28 Prior to the Civil War other interior forms spread from south of the Great Lakes to the fringes of the plantation cultures from Virginia to Texas and gave rise to the principal Midland varieties, North Midland and South Midland. The Midland area is perhaps best divided between those contrasting cultures by a phonological Mason-Dixon Line established by the pronunciation of the medial consonant of greasy, with [s] to the north and [z] to the south. On the Atlantic Coast the boundary replicates the historic Mason-Dixon Line, the common border of Pennsylvania and Maryland. Philadelphia, with the pronunciation [s], must be considered a Northern territory. Westward, however, the difference in pronunciation marks the division within the Midland territory, from Ohio to Missouri. Heading south, a traveler encounters the line at approximately the same place where grits replace hash browns on the breakfast menu, and where the words nice, white, and rice are all pronounced with a vowel Northerners confuse with the vowel common to cat, hat, and sat. With this feature comes the first suggestion of the drawl. Along the same line, the northern extent of Southern cultural penetration appears in these contrasts: North Midland bunk, wishbone, husks, headcheese, fritters, bag, and turtle, versus South Midland pallet, pulley bone, shucks, souse (or pressed meat), flitters, sack, and terrapin. 29 South Midland South Midland speech is a Southern dialect formerly called Hill Southern in contrast with the Upcountry and Lower Southern patterns to the south and east. The principal South Midland/Southern boundary follows the Blue Ridge across Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. In South Carolina and Georgia the boundary coincides with the 180-day growing season for cotton, the waterways, the soil types, and the cultural organizations inseparable from the plantation systems devoted to the cultivation of indigo, rice, and sugar cane, as well as cotton. 30 Those geographic features and cultural factors underlie the Midland enclaves as far south as the Florida Panhandle and their Southern counterparts as far north as the St. Francis Basin of Arkansas and the boot heel of Missouri. These Midland dialects include a constricted r after a vowel in bird, car, and horse, and monophthongs in right and ride, whereas Southern dialects vocalize postvocalic r and preserve a diphthong in right and similar words. Lexical contrasts include South Midland green beans, red worm, fireboard, French harp (for harmonica), and tow sack (for burlap bag), versus Southern snap beans, earthworm, mantelpiece, harp, and crocus sack. In the east, South Midland contrasts with Virginia Piedmont Southern: snake feeder, peanut, and terrapin, versus snake doctor, goober, and cooter. In the Mississippi Valley the South Midland dialect occupies the territory bypassed by the plantation cultures as unsuitable for the production of cotton, sugar cane, and rice. 31

Contents -AUTHOR INDEX -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD