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The Urban-Rural Interface

Although classic dialectological studies focused on rural speakers, the era of survey studies in variation that began with Labov's New York City study has focused overwhelmingly on urban settings. More recently, there has been renewed interest in rural speech, which should begin to explore language and the social meanings that constitute life in rural areas. The meaning of variation is to be found not simply in location, but in people's sense of place. Locations like urban, suburban, small town and rural, then, need to be explored as people move around in them, and as they imagine and experience them. Vowel Shifting in Northern Arizona Towns and Ranchlands Lauren Hall-Lew My current primary research project is an English dialect survey of Northern Arizona, which includes the study of the general Western US vowel shifts, focusing on the fronted production of the vowels in words like boat and boot, and the raising of the vowel in ban. My data focuses on the residents of my hometown, Flagstaff, Arizona, and the ranchers who live in the surrounding areas. On the initial impression that these ranchers' speech patterns differ from the townies', my research goals have shifted from a basic dialect survey to an interest in people's connections to the land and to particular land-based lifestyles. Along with fellow graduate student Mary Rose, who conducted a year's worth of ethnographic research in rural Wisconsin, I'm looking at the way people talk in Arizona and what their way of speaking says about their real and imagined connections to the place and time in which they reside. Hall-Lew, Lauren. (To appear). One Shift, Two Groups: When fronting alone is not enough. University of Philadelphia Working Papers in Linguistics 10.2: Selected Papers from NWAVE 32. Rose, Mary and Lauren Hall-Lew. Linguistic Variation and the Rural Imaginary. NWAV33. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, October 2004. Hall-Lew, Lauren. May 2004. "Arizona's Not So Standard English." LanguageMagazine. <http://www.languagemagazine.com> Hall-Lew, Lauren. Between Communities: Southwestern US English. American Dialect Society. Boston, Mass., January 2004. Hall-Lew, Lauren. One shift, two groups: When fronting along is not enough. NWAV 32. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, October 2003. Hall-Lew, Lauren and Malcah Yaeger-Dror. Totally California? The Occurrence of (ow)-fronting in Arizona English. NWAV 31. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, October 2002. The town-farm interface in a Wisconsin dairy town Mary Rose This dissertation examines variation in the speech of older people in a farm town in Wisconsin. Located in a senior center that brings together people from town and country, the study seeks an understanding of rural lifetimes, and of sociolinguistic practice in later life. The research focuses on the relation between farm and town in the lives of the senior citizens who grew up there, seeking out the ways in which farm and town play out over people's lifetimes, in their identities, and in their linguistic practices. The Rural Imaginary Lauren Hall-Lew and Mary Rose Graduate students Lauren Hall-Lew and Mary Rose have joined forces to compare their findings in very different rural situations - a ranching community in Arizona and a dairy farming community in Wisconsin. They argue that the two kinds of rural enterprise emerged from very different histories, and play very different roles in national ideology. This, in turn, has interesting consequences for the meanings associated with variation in each place, and for the place of features of the two dialects in the broader linguistic ecology of the United States. Rose, Mary and Lauren Hall-Lew. Linguistic Variation and the Rural Imaginary. NWAV33. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, October 2004. The spread of sound change in the Detroit conurbation Penelope Eckert My ethnographic study of variation in the adolescent social order in the Detroit suburbs included both an in-depth examination of one school and shorter ethnographies in each of four schools around the suburban area. This established the status of the spread of change in the urban-suburban continuum, and located this spread in the social geography of the area. Each school was dominated by a hegemonic opposition between two social categories, the school-oriented jocks and the urban-oriented burnouts. Orientations to the conurbation were built into the adolescent social order, and were manifested in the use of urban and suburban linguistic resources. See my web page on the high school study Dialects of Irish on Teilifis na Gaeile R. L. Starr A study of the use of dialects of Irish Gaelic on the Irish-language television station Teilifis na Gaeilge. Discusses the roles of traditional rural varieties and emerging urban varieties of Irish in the media. Undergraduate thesis. Harvard University (Abstract) Language Shift in Gascony In the course of the twentieth century, rapid language shift eliminated non-French Romance dialects across France. The last bastion of these dialects, small peasant villages, still retain a few very old speakers and very occasionally, a young speaker who remains engaged in regional and rural ideology and activity. An important mechanism of the shift was the meanings associated with Gascon and French, based on the association of French with modernity and the consequent stigmatization of the peasant life. See my Gascon webpage for details on this research. Eckert, P. (1980). Diglossia: Separate and unequal. Linguistics 18: 1053-64.