Ohio History Journal

DIALECT DISTRIBUTION AND SETTLEMENT PATTERNS

IN THE GREAT LAKES REGION

 

by ALVA L. DAVIS

Assistant Professor of English, Western Reserve University

The study of dialect distribution in the eastern United States

and in the secondary settlement areas of the Great Lakes Region

has now reached a point where it is possible to show some interesting

correlations between the linguistic features and the settlement

patterns of these regions. It is simple, perhaps even obvious, to say

that when large, homogeneous groups of people migrate to new

territories, they take with them the speech patterns of their old

communities and that these speech patterns will be gradually modi-

fied as various cultural influences are brought to bear on them.

However, the validity of any correlation depends upon a solid

foundation of extensive and painstaking research, rather than on

generalities, and for this particular problem, such research materials

are provided by the collections of the Linguistic Atlas of the United

States and Canada.1

The Linguistic Atlas, which proposes to be a comprehensive

survey of American English, was begun in 1931 under the director-

ship of Professor Hans Kurath, then at Brown University. In that

year the first of the regional atlases, The Linguistic Atlas of New

England, got under way. Upon completion of the records for New

England, field work was extended to the Middle Atlantic and South

Atlantic states and these records were finally completed during the

spring of 1949. The Linguistic Atlas of New England2 has been

published, and the Middle Atlantic and South Atlantic materials

1 This paper is limited to a discussion of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.

For an account of the Wisconsin data, see Frederic G. Cassidy, "Some New England

Words in Wisconsin," Language, XVII (1941), 324-339. The name "Great Lakes

Region" has been applied to this area.

Other articles based on Atlas field work in the region are Albert H. Marck-

wardt, "Folk Speech in Indiana and Adjacent States," Indiana Historical Bulletin,

XVII (1940), 120-140; "Middle English o in the American English of the Great

Lakes Area," Papers of the Michigan Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, XXVI

(1941), 56-71; "Middle English WA in the Speech of the Great Lakes Region,"

American Speech, XVII (1942), 226-254.

2 Hans Kurath, ed. (6 vols., Providence, 1939-43).

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Dialect Distribution in the Great Lakes Region       49

are on file at the University of Michigan, where they are to be

edited and prepared for publication.

The technique employed by the Linguistic Atlas is modeled

upon the personal interview methods developed by European lingu-

ists. After a careful analysis of the geography and history of the

region to be surveyed, the director of the project plots the com-

munities for investigation. These communities are spaced so as to

furnish a balanced sampling of speech forms in the area, the number

of the communities varying with the complexity of the region. A

trained phonetician then visits each community and interviews native

speakers, asking several hundred standardized questions designed to

bring out regional and social differences in dialect. Each interview

requires about eight hours and is conducted in such a way that

the informant uses his normal pronunciation, grammar, and vocab-

ulary. According to the plan of the Linguistic Atlas, two speakers

are chosen from each community, one a representative of the oldest

generation with relatively little education, and another of the middle

age group (ordinarily from fifty to sixty years old) with con-

siderably more formal education and wider social contacts. Oc-

casionally college educated informants are interviewed to represent

the cultured speech of the area. In the eastern states-from Maine

to Florida--over 1,600 field interviews have been completed. The

geographical spacing of the communities permits the plotting of

the informants' responses on maps so that regional dissemination

of speech forms can be related to topographical, historical, and

cultural influences. By using informants from different age groups

and from varying social backgrounds much useful data can be ob-

tained about innovation, obsolescence, and prestige values of speech

forms.

Since 1937 The Linguistic Atlas of the North Central States,

under the supervision of Professor Albert H. Marckwardt of the

University of Michigan, has been making steady progress.³ Work

in this region was begun with an exploratory survey of Ohio, In-

 

3 This atlas includes the five states named above (footnote 1) plus Kentucky.

The research in this area has been made possible by grants from the Rackham Founda-

tion of the University of Michigan, from the University of Illinois, University of

Wisconsin, Western Reserve University, Ohio State University, and the Ohio State

Archaeological and Historical Society.

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50       Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

diana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan, limited to ten field records

in each state. This initial survey was completed in 1940 and the

project was then expanded to cover from fifty to seventy records per

state. The additional field work has already been done in Wisconsin

and Michigan and is currently being carried on in Illinois and Ohio.

The historical background for dialect distribution in the Great

Lakes Region is well known. The settlement patterns for Ohio,

Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan are easily traced, partly because the

region is new, comparatively speaking, and partly because a wealth

of information on the subject is available.⁴ Three main streams of

migration entered the area. The southernmost and earliest of these

used the Ohio River system and peopled the lands within easy reach

of the river and its tributaries. This group of settlers was for the

most part from the Middle Atlantic states and the hill regions of

the old slave states. In the north the important avenue of approach

was the Great Lakes. Although some New Englanders, following

Moses Cleaveland's party of 1796, had settled in the Connecticut

Western Reserve, the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 started the

great land rush into that area, made up principally of Yankees

from New York state. This migration, which reached its peak in

the 1840's and 1850's, completed the settlement of the Ohio counties

bordering Lake Erie and filled up most of Michigan and northern

Illinois. The third general migration was the overland movement,

especially along the National Road. The Conestoga wagon carried

Pennsylvanians into Ohio and westward, and Buckeyes and Hoosiers

themselves joined in this search for cheap land.

Within the Great Lakes Region are two important small areas

distinctive in the composition of their population: in southeastern

Ohio, the Marietta colony, founded in 1788 by the Ohio Company,

from Massachusetts, and in northwestern Illinois, the Lead Region

settled in the 1820's by miners from all parts of the country.5

 

4 Information concerning settlement is available in such works as Frederic L.

Paxson, History of the American Frontier 1763-1893 (Boston, 1924); Lois K.

Mathews, The Expansion of New England (Boston, 1909); Beverley W. Bond, Jr.,

The Foundations of Ohio (History of the State of Ohio, edited by Carl Wittke, I,

Columbus, 1942); Solon J. Buck, Illinois in 1818 (Springfield, 1917). Tables I and

VII, U. S. Census, 1870: Population, are of great value for determining the geo-

graphical extent of these settlements.

5 The Lead Region also includes southwestern Wisconsin. See Cassidy, loc. cit.,

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Dialect Distribution in the Great Lakes Region          51

Even though much field work is still to be done in the Great

Lakes Region, the present data is adequate for a preliminary com-

parison to the Eastern findings. The handiest material for such a

comparison is the folk vocabulary, the everyday words of life around

the house and farm.

On the basis of the vocabulary variants of the Eastern Atlas

records, Professor Kurath has discovered three main dialect areas,6

differing considerably from the traditional three-fold Eastern,

Southern, and General American classification.⁷ The Eastern records

show a Northern area including New England, New York, the

northern half of New Jersey and approximately the northern quarter

of Pennsylvania; a Midland area including the rest of Pennsylvania

and New Jersey, parts of Delaware and Maryland, and the moun-

tainous South, beginning at the Blue Ridge; and a Southern area

consisting of the coastal South from Delaware to Florida.

None of these areas is completely uniform, but divided into

several subareas. The North is composed of Eastern New England

(roughly from the Connecticut River) Western New England

and Upstate New York, the Hudson Valley, and metropolitan New

York. The Midland may be divided conveniently into two large

subareas: North Midland for most of Pennsylvania and northern

West Virginia, and South Midland for the speech of the mountain

area to the south. The South (identified most easily by loss of post-

vocalic r) contains many subareas, many of them centering around

such cities as Richmond, Charleston, and Savannah.

The general patterns which folk terms make in the Great Lakes

Region are shown on the accompanying map.⁸ The "Yankee" settle-

ment is consistent in using Northern words, and the area to the

south of it is almost without exception Midland. Between the two

 

326. Foreign population settlements, such as that at Holland, Michigan, may be of

importance but our present data shows little permanent influence on American

English in this area.

A Word Geography of the Eastern United States (Ann Arbor, 1949). This

work gives a detailed explanation of the Eastern areas, with helpful maps.

7 George Philip Krapp, The English Language in America (2 vols., New York,

1925), I, 35-42.

8 The atlas records have been augmented by a correspondence questionnaire

given to 233 informants in these four states. See Alva L. Davis, A Word Atlas of

the Great Lakes Region (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan,

1948). It should be noted that most of the information thus far obtained is from

the older age group.

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Dialect Distribution in the Great Lakes Region          53

major areas, some smaller transition areas of mixed usage occur.9

The Lead Region of northwestern Illinois reflects its different

settlement history by the retention of many Midland forms, and the

Marietta region retains many Yankeeisms.10

The following words, arranged according to their Eastern

distributions, may be used to demonstrate the folk vocabulary dif-

ferences in the Great Lakes Region:

 

NORTHERN WORDS

A. GENERAL NORTH:

pail; swill, 'food for hogs'; comforter, 'tied quilt'; johnnycake;

whiffletree; boss!, 'call to cows'; angleworm; (devil's) darning

needle, 'dragonfly'; sick to his stomach

B. HUDSON VALLEY:

stoop, 'small porch'; sugar bush, 'sugar maple grove'; coal scuttle

C. THE NORTH EXCEPT THE HUDSON VALLEY:

spider, 'cast-iron frying pan'; dutch cheese, 'cottage cheese'; fills,

'shafts of a buggy'; nan(nie)! and co-day!, 'calls to sheep';

curtains, 'roller shades'; scaffold, 'improvised platform for hay';

rowen, 'second crop of hay'

D. WESTERN NEW      ENGLAND AND UPSTATE NEW         YORK:

fried-cakes, 'baking powder doughnuts'; loppered milk, 'thick,

sour milk'; hard maple, 'sugar maple tree'

This group of words, as a whole, is limited to northern Ohio,

Michigan and northern Illinois, with rare instances in the Midland

area. Those words restricted to subareas of the East--as in B, C, D--

do not make any definite geographical patterns within the Great

Lakes Northern area, though further research may show that some

new subareas are to be set up.11 Most conspicuous is the fact that

many of these words are becoming old-fashioned, being supplanted

 

9 Raven I. McDavid, Jr. and Alva L. Davis, "Northwestern Ohio: a Transition

Area," Language, XXVI (1950), 264-273, is a preliminary study of one of these

areas.

10 Among the Yankee terms in the Marietta area are pail, swill, dutch cheese,

boss!, and angleworm. In the Lead Region are found roasting ears, sook!, and

fishworm.

11 Sewing needle, 'dragonfly,' for example, is current in the Upper Peninsula

of Michigan and in the Duluth area of Minnesota.

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54      Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

by words of wider regional and national usage, or being forgotten

with changes in customs. Johnnycake is a childhood memory for

many speakers, dutch cheese and fried-cakes are now cottage

cheese and doughnuts most commonly, the whiffletree (sometimes

whippletree) and the fills (or thills) are of little use in a tractor

and automobile age, the old spider is likely to be an aluminum frying

pan, and the more fashionable term window shades is taking the

place of curtains. Rarest on this list are scaffold, rowen, and loppered

milk (sometimes lobbered milk): the general terms are loft or mow

-the improvised platform is now a permanent structure in the

modern barn-second cutting, and sour milk.

MIDLAND WORDS

A. GENERAL MIDLAND:

quarter till (eleven); blinds, 'roller shades'; skillet; dip, 'sweet

sauce for pudding'; sook!, 'call to cows'; sheepy!; fish(ing)

worm; snake feeder, 'dragonfly'; poison vine, 'poison ivy'; belling,

'noisy celebration after a wedding'

B. NORTH MIDLAND:

spouting, 'guttering at edges of roof'; smearcase, 'cottage cheese';

hay doodles, 'small piles of hay in the field'; sugar camp, 'sugar

maple grove'; baby buggy

C. SOUTH MIDLAND:

fire board, 'mantlepiece'; clabbered milk, 'thick, sour milk';

trestle, 'implement to hold planks for sawing'

D. SOUTH MIDLAND AND SOUTH:

evening, 'afternoon'; light-bread, 'white bread'; clabbered cheese,

'cottage cheese'; hay shocks, 'small piles of hay in the field';

nicker, 'noise made by horse at feeding time'

E. MIDLAND AND SOUTH:

dog irons, 'andirons'; bucket; slop, 'food for hogs'; comfort,

'tied quilt'; pully bone, 'wishbone'; corn pone, 'corn bread';

cherry seed; butter beans, 'lima beans'; roasting ears, 'corn-on-

the-cob'; singletree; polecat; granny woman, 'midwife'; Christ-

mas gift!, 'familiar greeting at Christmas time'

NOTE--No terms limited to the South are common in this region.

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Dialect Distribution in the Great Lakes Region   55

The General Midland words are in common use in the Ohio

Valley, though poison vine is obsolescent, and blinds may be. Belling

is now common only in Ohio and scatteringly in northern Indiana

and southern Michigan; it has been replaced in most of the area by

shivaree, the most common term in the Middle West.12

The North Midland contains many expressions which are

common only in Ohio; some of them have spread into Indiana (es-

pecially the northern part of the state), and occasionally they are

found in Illinois. Spouting is restricted to Ohio, hay doodle is old-

fashioned in Ohio and Indiana and very rare in Illinois, sugar camp

is most common in Ohio and Indiana, and smearcase is common in

Ohio, Indiana, and most of Illinois (clabbered cheese is fairly com-

mon in southern Illinois and Indiana). These North Midland

words as a group form an irergular wedge-like pattern: generally

current in Ohio, occasional in Indiana, and rare in Illinois. The

Upper Ohio Valley may be the home of baby buggy, which is now

the most usual of the words for the perambulator in all of the Great

Lakes Region. It is, of course, a trade term, and therefore little

affected by settlement patterns. The Dictionary of American English

gives 1852 as the first date for baby wagon, the earliest of the terms.

The South Midland has few terms of its own; in vocabulary

it seems to be a transition zone between the North Midland and the

South. Words typical of the region are those listed, along with

sugar orchard; ridy horse, 'seesaw'; pack, 'carry'; and favor, 're-

semble.' None of these words is especially common in this region,

but they are most frequent in the southern portion.

Words common to large parts of the South and the South

Midland are well represented in the Great Lakes Midland and for

this reason these terms have been included with the Midland group.

They seem to be slightly less common in Ohio than in Indiana and

Illinois, further differentiating these subareas. Light-bread, for

example, is only fairly common in Ohio, but is the prevailing term

of southern Indiana and southern Illinois. Nicker has probably spread

from the Virginia Piedmont; it is common in the entire Great Lakes

Midland, even spreading into southern Michigan.

12 See McDavid and Davis, "'Shivaree': an Example of Cultural Diffusion,"

American Speech, XXIV (1949), 249-255.

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56      Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly

The words shared by the Midland and the South are also well

distributed in the Great Lakes Midland, but many are becoming

old-fashioned. Dog irons become the modern 'andirons,' corn pone,

like Northern johnnycake, has yielded to store-bought bread, the

general term skunk occurs alongside polecat, and few communities

have a granny woman to deliver the babies. Christmas gift!, usually

a children's greeting, is rather rare in the region, but information

is not sufficient to tell whether it was ever more widely used here.

The evidence of regional differentiation shows, in this com-

parison, surprisingly little disturbance of the "expected" dialect

patterns, in spite of the steady leveling influences of national ad-

vertising, ease in transportation with its resultant mobility of popu-

lation, intermarriage, and changes in modes of living. These in-

fluences have tended to blur some regional differences, but the

vocabulary of everyday usage is so extremely conservative that there

is far from complete uniformity. As yet there is no indication that

trade and culture centers have developed distinctive dialect areas

as has happened in the case of Boston and some Southern cities.13

The dialect information makes, instead, a faithful reconstruction

of the settlement patterns. The significance of this historical com-

parison, even in its present incompleteness, is that speech habits are

brought into the realm of historical fact-the usage of the word

spider, for example, becomes as real as the use of the Cape Cod

lighter or the hip-roofed barn.

 

13 Tonic, 'soda-pop,' is one of the terms current in the Boston trade area. The

prestige of Boston pronunciation is well known.

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