Regional Patterns of American Speech

The Influence of Social Dialects As creolization reflects the blending of languages and cultures, so slang, argot, and social dialects mark the activities of subcultures within communities, and these basic forms of English have steadily modified native speech. Most slang originates in the specialized conversations of particular groups, in which usage reinforces group identity and develops into private codes that may later gain widespread acceptance. These include such now-familiar terms as clout and gerrymander from politics, blues and jazz from music, headline and editorial from journalism, and by a nose, inside track, front-runner, shoo-in, and sure thing from the vocabulary of horseracing. The distinctive words of other groups—pickpockets, CB operators, and computer specialists—suggest the ways in which the subcultures function and illustrate the ways in which language develops. 46 Social dialects also underlie the regional patterns of speech, reflecting absolute factors such as sex, age, and ethnic origin, and relative factors such as education, experience, and social position. Since a healthy language is always changing, the age and experience of its speakers are recorded by incipient, dominant, and recessive forms, as demonstrated in the vocabulary of automobiles: the recent gas-guzzler and SUV, the durable sedan and limousine, and the relics tin lizzie and roadster. Ethnic terms are the cultural birthrights of individual speakers and great linguistic resources for society at large. Yiddish schlock, chutzpah, macher (fixer, operator), and schmaltz have moved from the Jewish communities to the national language. Education reinforces language trends with the spread of generalized patterns of pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary, but these are challenged by migrant accents in Chicago today just as they were in London 400 years ago. As Latinos made macho an American word, African Americans have put many Southern regionalisms, such as funky, up-tight, and right on, into common usage. The language reflects cultural patterns refined and strengthened through association and social status. 47 Social dialects also mark the evolution of a language. In America the middle classes have generated great changes. These include the absorption of immigrant cultures at the lower level and influence upon the dominant culture at the higher level. As linguistic and cultural forms are traditionally conservative in both aristocratic and folk groups, however different their social styles, middle-class society and speech alter those conventional patterns from below and from above. Just as members of the secular and regular clergy, educators, lawyers, politicians, and physicians helped shape the London Standard from the early Middle Ages through the English Renaissance because they were conversant with both the ruling class and the common people, so new patterns of widespread American usage grow today through the influence of upper-middle-class dialects. Even stronger influences appear from the speech of the lower middle class, especially in urban centers, where large numbers of workers come in contact with the entire community in their daily work. Of these, ethnic dialects preserve the most complicated social varieties of language and reflect the essential spirit of American culture. 48 Outlook for American Regional Patterns The old regional patterns, especially of the East and Midwest, seem to grow less distinctive with each new generation of young adults. Many people assume that the mass media of radio and television have homogenized American speech into a nondescript variety called "General American" or "Network English." This is hardly the case, however. As a product of communication, speech patterns rarely feel the influence of radio and television because those media concern only speech transmission, and listeners and viewers usually limit their participation to speech reception. No evidence has appeared to demonstrate that the speech of inner-city children, for example, has been influenced in any way by the bombardment of "Network English." 49 Familiar regional patterns, nevertheless, have lost much of their distinctiveness since World War II (1939-1945), mainly through physical and social mobility. During the second half of this century, mass transportation and the automobile have revolutionized American residential patterns. Like the family farm, the family homestead has become an obsolescent concept. People change residency every few years and travel over former dialect boundaries on their way to work, in visits to relatives and friends, or on vacation. Those dialect boundaries reflect an older, rural way of life, seen in old-fashioned names for plants, animals, and cultural activities. Even many of the urban speech patterns that emerged during the first half of the 20th century have given way to more modern forms. 50 Despite these developments, many rural patterns endure beside new patterns of urban speech appearing across the country. The process suggests a binary division of regional dialects that reflects the declining influence of geographic factors. The new migration pattern carries middle-class settlers across great distances to communities that are strikingly similar to the places they left. Today, distant suburban communities such as Edina, Minnesota, and Alpharetta, Georgia, are more nearly alike in language and culture than such suburban communities are to their nearby rural communities. Consequently, dialects have begun to reflect pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary that conform to social more than geographic factors. Ethnic origins, social class, gender, age, and education unite to create new and complex patterns of American speech. These new social varieties will complement the traditional regional patterns, and American speech will continue to change, reflecting the form and substance of the national language and culture. 51

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