Lexical Complexities in the St. Louis Dialect Island

Abstract

The Greater St. Louis “dialect island” poses interesting problems for dialect documentation, partly because Greater St. Louis is a transitional area where many overlapping linguistic influences have left their mark, and also because is an area with new immigrant communities, racial divides, and an aging population.Using a sample from survey and interview data from 815 participants over a seven-year period, we examine lexical diversity in Greater St. Louis, comprising counties both in Missouri and Illinois. We discover that both age and place are robust indicators of lexical selection in Southern Illinois and St. Louis. Our findings provide a concurring rationale with phonologically-based studies that supports the existence of a unique dialect island in Greater St. Louis. KEY TERMS: Midlands Dialect, Midwest, Metro East, St. Louis Corridor Hans Kurath, who observed in the 1930s that the Midland area of the Eastern United States was “highly complex,” would today find the dialects of Illinois just as challenging. While many states contain an array of language regions, none contain as many as Illinois. According to the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), there are thirteen identified regions in this transitional state, permitting us to examine the influences of linguistic features common to the Midland, North Midland, South Midland, West Midland, Great Lakes, North, North Central, Inland North, Ohio Valley, Mississippi Valley, Upper Mississippi Valley, Lower Mississippi Valley, and Ohio-Mississippi Valleys. Here, we examine lexical variation in Illinois, relative to the region in Southwestern Illinois known as the “Metro East,” five counties of Southwestern Illinois which, together with the city of St. Louis and St. Louis County, form a larger entity: “Greater St. Louis.” Basing findings primarily on phonological features, some researchers have regarded Greater St. Louis as a dialect island. We furnish some lexical evidence that supports this claim, but use a novel approach for examining lexical data within this dialect area. The specific wording of lexical items investigated were based on the Harvard Dialect Study (HDS) (Vaux & Golder, 2003). However, this study yields a new data collection focused on Greater St. Louis, and uses statistical models to analyze the data that have not commonly been used in dialect studies of this area. The term “dialect island” extends the metaphor of the “language island” (“Sprachinsel,”) first coined in 1847 to describe the relationship of a Slavonic community to the surrounding German-speaking areas in East Prussia (Mattheier & Besch, 1985; Rosenberg, 2005; Riehl, 2010). While several dialect islands exist in Europe (see Auer, Hinskens, & Kerswill, 2005), the phenomenon is found in numerous places worldwide, including in the United States. Riehl notes that early studies considered dialects spoken in language islands, “as ‘pure’, ‘uncontaminated,’ and ‘homogeneous,’” however, later research found, “that most of the linguistic spaces under investigation not only used a mixture of different dialects, but also developed their own koiné...” (2010, p. 336). While not entirely homogeneous, linguistically or socially, and although they may differ in size and settlement history (Rosenberg, 2005), dialect islands all share the quality of being distinct from the areas that surround them. They are pockets, enclaves or colonies of dialect that have shared linguistic characteristics unlike those outside the island. Greater St. Louis is one such island, and an examination of co-occurring phonological, lexical, and syntactic linguistic features confirms that this island, like many other islands, this one is not entirely homogeneous. We demonstrate that while both the Metro East and St. Louis proper form a language island whose characteristics differ from the rest of Illinois, there are fissures inside this island such that the two parts of the island are also distinguished from one another. Our data provide numerous instances of this finding. For example, respondents inside Greater St. Louis are less likely to use the term shopping cart than Illinois respondents outside the metropolitan area. However, there are also differences between the two halves of Greater St. Louis in regards to this term, with neither of the halves replicating responses found outside the metropolitan area. We structure our analysis as follows: the first section discusses aspects of the settlement history of Illinois and situates Illinois and St. Louis with respect to earlier dialect research on these areas. Then, we present the methodology and research variables used for quantitative and qualitative analysis of survey and interview data. Two sections present the results, first from the quantitative analysis and then from the qualitative findings of collected interview data. Finally, we discuss the results, conclude, and elaborate the ways in which others can build on this research. SETTLEMENT HISTORY AND PREVIOUS STUDIES Illinois has an unusually high level of dialect mixture that may be linked to the settlement history of the state, through which successive waves of migration deposited linguistic resources. Wolfram & Schilling (2016) report that prior to 1830, the U.S. interior was affected by the direct westward expansion of settlers who brought their dialects with them. These dialects partly replicated the dialect maps of the Eastern states but with an intensification of dialect mixture and some leveling out of dialectal differences due to language contact, especially for speakers in “the ever-expanding Midland dialect region” (American English, p. 114). Migrations of Southern woodsmen into the Wabash, Sangamon and Mississippi River Valleys brought early southern dialectal influences into the region (Frazer, 1987), while physical geography played a key role, with northward movement along the rivers. Early settlement of Chicago brought movement from the north, with further extensions into the mining communities in Northwestern Illinois. We have an incomplete picture of the exact nature of the dialects spoken in Illinois in late 1800s, but have some spoken clues coming from characterizations of literary dialect (see Fenno, 1983). Later influences came as a result of the National Highway that extended into Southern Illinois from the east, an antecedent to today’s I-70, and movement to the south from Chicago to St. Louis along historic Route 66, the precursor of today’s I-55, sometimes identified in dialect studies as the St. Louis Corridor. The resulting picture is a state with many layers of dialects, a region that “...not only represents a crossroads of migration, a conduit from the East to the West, but also a transitional corridor between the two major cultural regions, the North and South” (Carver, 1989, p. 190). Many have observed that Greater St. Louis, the St. Louis Corridor, and regions of Southern Illinois outside these areas pose interesting problems for dialect documentation (Callary, 1975; Carver, 1989; Friedman, 2015; Labov, 2007; Labov, Ash, & Boberg, 1997, 2006; Murray, 1993, 2002; Frazer, 1978, 1987; Kurath, 1972; Marckwardt, 1957; Wolfram & Schilling, 2016). One important piece of this complexity is found in Southwestern Illinois, where researchers have long observed that Greater St. Louis forms a dialect island within the broader Midland region (Frazer, 1987). Map 1 situates the dialect island within the United States, and Map 2 provides a visualization adapted from the Atlas of North American English (ANAE) (2006) showing that the surrounding Midlands dialect in Southern Illinois differs from the St. Louis area with a corridor that extends certain northern features southward. Map 1: Location of the St. Louis Dialect Island Map 2: St. Louis Corridor Extending into Midland’s Dialect (adapted from the Atlas of North American English: “NAE Dialects”) The ANAE (2006) further reports on St. Louis Island phonological characteristics that do not match the general Midlands dialect, such as solid contrast of /o/ and /oh/, general raising of /æ/, with extreme fronting of /æ/ in bat and bad. The ANAE reports vowels in both cut and coat further back than the vowel in cot, and a spreading loss of its traditional merger of /ahr/ and /ɔhr/ to coalesce with the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCS). The ANAE additionally finds St. Louis Corridor characteristics similar to the Inland North and western New York State in that, unlike the Midland dialect surrounding this area, resistance to low back merger coincides with the raising of /æ/. Labov (2007) states that the front-back approximation of /e/ and /o/ is “generally absent in the Midland region, except for St. Louis and nearby communities” (p. 373, italics added). Labov (2007) also suggests that the NCS features not only reveal the strongest differentiation from the Midland dialect outside the St. Louis Corridor, but also that St. Louis speakers are further along on this shift than those from smaller cities within the corridor. This may be taken as evidence for diffusion along the corridor and not incrementally spread by children within the communities (i.e., transmission). While documenting the alignment of St. Louis with the Inland North, the ANAE notes that in numerous ways, St. Louis remains “more or less aligned with the Midland” (2006, p. 277). Even for the spread of the NCS, Labov notes another difference between the St. Louis Corridor and the Inland North: the change in the Inland North involved consistent chain-shifting rotating six vowels, while the corridor displays “a more irregular result,” showing that sound changes diffuse “...individually rather than as a system” (2007, p. 383). The data used here are all phonological, date from the late 1990s, involve four Teslur speakers, and demonstrate somewhat differing language behavior. The ANAE view of St. Louis concurs with Murray’s (1993, 2006) accounts that documented other well-known features in th