Issued by: Laura Hunt
414-229-6447
llhunt@uwm.edu
Date: March 3, 2004
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Issued by: Laura Hunt Date: March 3, 2004
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Linguistics Professor Bert Vaux wants to know: What do you call a sweetened carbonated beverage? (Photo by Alan Magayne-Roshak) |
MILWAUKEE – If you call a sandwich made with cold cuts on thick, crusty bread a "grinder," you are likely from western New England. A large road that you drive relatively fast on may be a "highway" in most of the country, but in Southeastern Wisconsin and along the West Coast, most people prefer the word "freeway."
And while most of the North refers to a sweetened carbonated beverage as "pop." Eastern Wisconsin is a "soda" zone, like New England and California. Southerners overwhelming use the word "Coke," regardless of the flavor or brand of soft drink.
Across the U.S., the vocabulary Americans use still gives away a lot about their geography, in spite of the homogenizing effects on English of today's mass culture, according to Bert Vaux, professor of linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM).
"When people have a strong attitude about which word is right," says Vaux, "it’s highly unlikely that its usage will change."
Vaux came to UWM from Harvard University, where he launched several
online surveys of regional word usage that have provided the data for his project,
the "Harvard Survey of North American Dialects." The results show
that local terms are entrenched in many areas.
"The Internet probably increases your exposure to standardized
vocabulary," he says, "but it also increases your exposure to non-standardized
language because the content isn't edited."
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Before starting the Harvard project, Vaux found that no atlas
for American dialects existed except for one compiled in the 1930s and '40s.
Smaller studies existed, but he wanted more than 1,000 respondents to his questions.
His last Web survey attracted more than 50,000 participants. In addition to
the statistical results his Web sites also include detailed maps showing where
each usage is prevalent.
To overcome the issue of time in collecting large amounts of
data for statistical analysis, Vaux turned to the Internet, though he concedes
that the respondents are limited to socioeconomic classes that use the medium.
"I'm not interested in slang – that changes too quickly,"
he says. "I'm interested in words with strong geographic conditioning that
are long-lasting. I wanted to know which words used today would give you away
as being from a certain part of the country."
Vaux has done other language-related surveys. In one, he found
15 different methods of forming "Pig Latin." In another, he explored
the preferences of people who use "shm-reduplication," the process
that produces expressions like "fancy shmancy" and "bagel shmagel."
In the future he hopes to conduct a survey of African American
English, with specific focus on the dialect variations within black English.
He also plans a survey of "Wisconsin words," such as "bubbler,"
"frozen custard" and "butter burger," focusing on how such
words are used in various parts of the state.
Although it may sometimes seem trivial, Vaux believes the language
of location carries important information about the collective way people behave
or have behaved in the past. He has discovered some words that share cultural
boundaries with an area’s immigrant past, political leanings and even consumer
preferences.
Word choice also points to U.S. migration trends, he says. Usage
tends to follow four distinct zones: In the eastern U.S., the North, Midlands
and South zones were formed by the population moving westward in three horizontal
bands – from Colonial settlements in Massachusetts Bay, Philadelphia and
the Chesapeake Bay. The fourth zone is the West, which uses a combination of
terms and pronunciations from of the other three.
With other words, why certain pronunciations are favored is a
mystery. Take the word "pajamas," for instance.
The survey's national numbers broke down along North-South lines, with the word pronounced “pa-JAM-ahs” mostly in the North and “pa-JAHM-ahs” preferred in the South. Just over 86 percent of those in Wisconsin say "jam."
Sounds like George and Ira Gershwin were right.
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Take Vaux's new online survey of English, a sequel to his Harvard survey, at http://www3.uwm.edu/Dept/FLL/linguistics/survey.
For more results from the Harvard survey, go to http://www.hcs.harvard.edu/~golder/dialect/maps.php.
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