The West

The youthful West, with all its wonders, is as interesting as it was to the people who first came to the land. It's barely a hundred years old, and that's one third of the age of the Atlantic States. The West didn't come around as a recognizable region, when compared to what is called the "Middle West", until the 1870's. The language of the west, when reckoned with the dating of the atlas and DARE fieldwork, has barely gone through two or even three generations. They say American English, as a whole, is a youth compared to European national languages. If that's so, then western speech is still an infant. And like an infant, its personality and features are not yet well formed.

In contrast to the east, the west is often known as being half of the nation. The mid-west would just mean the western part of the eastern half of the nation. Other more obvious contrasts are, of course, physical environments. This may be one of the reasons language from Europe never really made it that far. People travel beyond the mountain, but even more people don't. Now that particular language never gets really introduced into the west. Not for a maybe a generation. The west has a variety of people, including Native Americans, Mexicans, Chinese, Mormons, Cowboys, Miners and still others. In this mix of people, there was a great insular settlement pattern, meaning either the ocean or the rugged areas of what used to be the American Desert cut them off from theirprimary cultures. The eastern settlements were relatively comprehensive and "integrated into a generally contiguous pattern."

South Texas

Texas was split into two first order culture regions: the area dominated by Anglo-Americans north of approximately the San Antonio River, and the Hispanic cultural region south of the river. The southern region spreads out to the west, close to the Rio Grande and fades out more gradually along the northern "edge" in West Texas than in south Texas, where the core and hearth of the region is located.

They have many loanwords in all parts of Texas. Mostly borrowed from Spanish words. There are many words that are widely known, but are rarely are used outside the southwest. These words are most likely to be associated with cattle raising. Such words are Toro, for bull, and hacienda, for main ranch house.

When American English came to Texas, it had no name for the broad treeless plains and arid prairies of much of the state and so adopted the indigenous Spanish term llano. This barren land was forbidding to newcomers. One of the high arid plateaus call the Llano Estacado, the staked plain, covers forty thousand square miles of western Texas and eastern New Mexico. In 1834, a visitor to the land captured the trepidation it inspired when he wrote: "The Llano Estacado, on whose borders we then were encamped, and which lay before us like a boundless ocean, was mentioned with a sort of terror..."

Audio clip of Texas speech

Northern California

California is the most populous western state. And like Texas it is complex culturally and linguistically. In 1848, gold was discovered. This is how California got its population. About two years after this discovery, the population climbed from a handful of mountain men to about 92 thousand souls. By 1860, the population more than quadrupled, and that means people from all over were coming to this place, bringing more and more diverse languages. This booming mining economy only helped people find easier ways to travel to the west, which means people of different languages had to come to a common way of speaking so trade could be well established. So then, trains were brought along, built only to help move things along smoothly.

The idea of year-round sunny weather and an attendant laid back life quickly grabbed the imaginations of many eastern folk. New Yorkers had become the largest emigrant element in California . At least until 1930, when their numbers dropped to 4th behind Illinois, Missoiri and Iowa. To give you a better picture of what that did to the language, imagine a Native New Yorker with all the latest speech meeting with a real native westerner. How would communication be for them?

Audio Clip of California Speech

This is mostly how things got started with American dialects-migration. The more diverse languages are introduced to other languages, the more both those languages will blend.

I would also like to take this time to note that Language has no particular boundries. For the sake of this project, we have given boundaries to these Regions so that you have a better understanding of where this all takes place. You cannot withhold something as strong and as needed as communication. We will all find a way.

Carver, Craig M. American Regional Dialects. Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1989.