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18 Demographic Change DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE AND AMERICAN DIALECTOLOGY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY JAN TILLERY TOM WIKLE GUY BAILEY Oklahoma State University University of Texas at San Antonio abstract: Dramatic demographic changes are rapidly reshaping the population of the United States in ways that make the research questions that motivated twentieth- century dialectology outmoded. This paper outlines some of the most important de- mographic changes currently affecting the United States and suggests some research questions that are implicit in those developments. While twentieth-century dialec- tology was driven by questions regarding the sociospatial structure of the Founder Dialects and their relationships to settlement history and British regional varieties, twenty-fi rst-century dialectology must examine the linguistic consequences of newly emerging demographic divisions, the consequences of widespread urbanization, and the relationships between Anglo dialects and a rapidly growing non-Anglo population. These questions require some fundamental changes in how we do dialectology, but they also position the discipline in a way that will enable it to address fundamental social and educational issues that stand at the center of the intellectual life of the twenty-fi rst century. It has been almost 75 years since Hans Kurath articulated a set of research questions for American dialectology and outlined a methodology, adapted from European predecessors, for answering those questions.1 During the past 75 years the methodology outlined by Kurath has changed significantly to embrace technological innovations, to broaden the target population, and to incorporate more sophisticated ways of selecting infor mants. Thus tape- recorded interviews have replaced transcription in the field, corpora have become computerized, and telephone interviews have arisen as al ter na tives to field interviews.2 Likewise, while early projects in dialectology focused largely on white informants in rural communities and small towns, recent projects have included samples that are more repre sen ta tive de mograp h i cal ly, and dialectologists have explored a variety of pro ce dures for obtaining these samples, including various sorts of probability sampling.3 In contrast to methodology, the research questions that Kurath pro posed are still the ones that for the most part drive dialectology at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The sociospatial structure of the dialects formed dur- American Speech, Vol. 79, No. 3, Fall 2004 Copyright © 2004 by the American Dialect Society 227 228 american speech 79.3 (2004) ing the initial settlement of the United States, the linguistic content of those dialects, and their relationships to settlement history and British regional vernaculars are still questions that underlie a significant amount of work in dialectology.4 Dramatic demographic changes that are rapidly reshaping the population of the United States, however, suggest that the research questions Kurath articulated are in need of revision. This paper outlines some of the most important demographic changes affecting the United States and the research ques tions that those changes imply in developing a prospectus for dialectology in the twenty-first century. The demographic forces that Kurath encountered in 1930 were re- mark ably different from those shaping the population of the United States today. The completion of transcontinental settlement had occurred only 40 years before Kurath began his enterprise, and after more than half a century of massive immigration, especially from central and eastern Euro pe and Scandinavia, the influx of new arrivals had begun to slow dra mat i cal ly with the beginning of World War I and the passage of restrictive immi gra tion laws in the 1920s. By 1940 the foreign-born population comprised less than 9% of the total population of the United States. While urbanization had begun to transform the demographic landscape of the United States a century earlier, in 1930 only a little more than half of the population lived in urban areas (that is, in communities with populations of 2,500 or more); less than 40% of the population of the South lived in such areas. Further, although Americans have always been more mobile than their European counterparts, most Americans remained near the place of their birth for their entire lives. For instance, in the 1920 U.S. census (the census Kurath used in planning a linguistic atlas that he hoped would eventually cover all of the United States and Canada), 76.1% of the Amer i can pop u la tion lived in the state of their birth, a figure virtually identical to the 76.7% in 1850 and the 76.5% in 1890 (Haines 2000). Moreover, the massive population movements that crossed tra di tion al di a lect boundaries lay ahead. The northward migration of blacks and whites from the South was still in its infancy and would not reach its apogee until after World War II, while the large-scale movement of Northern whites to the South would not occur for another 40 years.5 More important, though, the reflexes of much of the traditional regional culture implanted in the original settlement of the United States were still evident, especially in rural areas. Dialectologists in the twenty-first century are faced with three de mo - graph ic forces that have eliminated many of the vestiges of traditional regional culture and that are radically reshaping the United States. These include (1) continuing and accelerating urbanization (or more accurately, metropolitani- zation), (2) resurgent foreign and domestic migration, and (3) expanding ethnic diversity. They all pose significant challenges for dialectologists. Demographic Change and American Dialectology 229 CONTINUED URBANIZATION The movement of the American population to cities and metropolises that had begun well before 1930 has accelerated rapidly since that time. Figure 1 tracks the urbanization of the population of the United States as a whole and of the South and Texas separately. As figure 1 indicates, the urban population of the United States (i.e., the population living in communities of 2,500 and more) grew from just over 50% in 1920 to 75% in 1990. After World War II, urbanization involved migration not just to cities, but to very large cities, so that by 2000, 80.3% of all Americans lived in 280 metro pol i tan areas.6 In 2000 some 30% of Americans lived in metropolises with pop u la tions of more than five million people, and another 27% lived in me trop o lis es with populations between one and five million. An addi tion al 16% lived in metro- politan areas with populations between 250,000 and one million (Perry and Mackun 2001). The magnitude of the urban trans for ma tion of the American population over the last century and a half is stunning: in 1860, 80% of the American population was dispersed in rural areas and communities with populations less than 2,500; in 2000, roughly the same proportion of the population was concentrated in 280 met ro pol i tan areas. Urbanization and metropolitanization have not progressed at the same pace throughout the country, however. The South lagged behind the rest of the United States by about 50 years, beginning to accelerate only after 1880 and beginning to approach rates in other parts of the country only after World War II. Nevertheless, by 1990 almost 70% of all South ern ers lived in urban areas, and the percentage of the Texas pop u la tion which was urban was greater than that of the United States as a whole. Both in the South and in the nation as a whole, the primary effect of this urbanization, especially figure 1 Urbanization of the Population of the United States, American South, and Texas 80 70 United States 60 South 50 Texas 40 30 20 10 Percent of Total Population Percent of Total 0 179018101830 1860 188019001920 1940 19501970 1990 230 american speech 79.3 (2004) in combination with the geographic mobility of the American population, has been the obliteration of a great deal of the regional folk culture of the United States.7 Urbanization has had a demonstrable linguistic effect too, as tables 1 and 2 show. Table 1 summarizes the effects of urbanization on 12 features elicited in the Texas Poll portion of the Phonological Survey of Texas (PST), a project conducted during 1989.8 As table 1 indicates, the distribution of 7 of the 12 features is strongly conditioned by rurality. (Note that in tables 1 and 5, different letters indicate statistically signifi cant lexical differences; PR > F refl ects the level of signifi cance. In all 7 instances, the linguistic divide is not simply between rural and urban areas, but rather between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas. Since other data sug gest that all 7 linguistic features represent changes in progress at various stages, it is clear that in Texas the speech of metropolitan areas is diverging sharply from that of rural areas and towns (see Bailey et al. 1996). The work of Thomas (1997) provides strong confirmation of the Texas metropolitan-nonmetropolitan split.9 Evidence from Oklahoma provides additional confirmation for a met ro - pol i tan-nonmetropolitan split. Table 2a provides the results of a multi variate analysis of the effects of 14 sociodemographic factors on 22 lin guis tic fea- tures elicited in the telephone portion of the Survey of Oklahoma Dialects (SOD). Rurality significantly affects 14 of the features, more than any other sociodemographic factor in SOD.10 When the evidence from PST and SOD table 1 The Effects of Rurality on Some Features of Texas English (summary of results
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