The South: Still Different

At LAVIS II I suggested that the South was a touchstone for dialect perception in the United States (Preston 1997). I based that conclusion on two related facts drawn from folk linguistic or, more specifically, perceptual dialectological investigations. First, the South was the most frequently drawn area of the US when respondents were asked to outline on a blank map the parts of the country where people speak differently. This was as true of Southern respondents as it was of those from every other area of the country where this hand-drawn dialect map task had been done (e.g., Preston 1986). Second, the South, along with New York City and its environs, was the worst-rated area of the country when respondents were asked to rate the fifty states, New York City, and Washington D.C. for language correctness. Third, at last as far as some Northerners were concerned, the South was the most dialectally different area of the country. Figure 1, for example, shows that, when respondents from southeastern Michigan were asked to outline the areas of the United States where people speak differently, a whopping 94 % of them outlined a South. The next most frequently rated area was the local one, but it was recognized by only 61 % of the respondents. 2 Figure 1. A computer-generated composite of the hand-drawn maps of regional speech areas by 147 southeastern Michigan respondents Figure 2 shows that, when southeastern Michigan respondents rated the fifty states, New York City, and Washington, D.C. on a ten-point scale for language correctness, the states in the South were lowest-rated, although New York City and New Jersey were poorly-rated as well, but, as Figure 1 shows, that area was also frequently identified as distinct.