1. INTRODUCTION For several reasons the Mesabi Iron Range region of St. Louis County, Minnesota, is a challenging area for dialect investiga­ tion. Avoided in the 1800’s by both westward-migrating Ameri­ cans and European immigrants seeking agricultural land in Minnesota, the Mesabi Iron Range has a unique population his­ tory resulting from the opening of mines after the discovery of rich iron ore in 1890. Since dialect differences are carried along routes of migration, the Mesabi Iron Range poses an intriguing question: When an anomalous community springs up well within the boundaries of a recognized dialect region and when this community is overwhelmingly populated by people whose native language is not English, what are the characteristics of the variety of English that comes to be spoken in this community? The notion of a unique Iron Range dialect persists in Minnesota folklore. Furthermore, preliminary scholarly findings suggest that there may well be an empirical basis for the layman’s intui­ tive impression of a unique Mesabi Iron Range dialect. For these reasons, and others, there is strong impetus for a detailed survey of the English spoken in the Iron Range communities. Investigation by linguistic geographers has revealed that the Midland and Northern dialect areas of the eastern United States (see Figure 1) have their reflexes in the Midwest.1 Preliminary analyses of evidence from the Linguistic Atlas of the North- Central States by Albert H. Marckwardt indicate that the North­ ern dialect area includes all of Michigan and Wisconsin and the northern thirds of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois.2 Furthermore, Harold B. Allen, drawing upon the files of the Linguistic Atlas of the Upper Midwest, has shown that the Northern-Midland boundary extends across the Upper Midwest, the Northern area including all of Minnesota and North Dakota, approximately the northern third of Iowa, and the northeastern half of South Dakota, and the Midland area including the southern two-thirds of Iowa, Nebraska, and the southwestern half of South Dakota.3 (See Figure 2.) The validity of this Northern-Midland division has been supported by conclusions drawn in several studies,4 although a recent statistical study concludes that the Northern-Midland boundary is not maintained in Iowa.5 Allen’s investigation, however, led him to postulate a putative 1 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/67/1/1/451421/0670001.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 2 From H. Kurath, A WORD GEOGRAPHY OF THE EASTERN STATES Midland enclave in the area of Duluth and the Mesabi com­ munities. Candidly tentative, this postulated enclave is based upon the study of six fieldrecords—four from Duluth and two from Virginia, one of the Range communities—and his evidence consists of 16 Midland vocabulary variants and five Midland phonological variants which are found in these records.6 Al­ though Allen’s possible enclave is based upon sketchy evidence and it includes Duluth as well as the Virginia area, it tends to suggest that there is a legitimacy to the layman’s recognition of an Iron Range dialect. A thorough investigation of the dialect of the Mesabi Iron Range is clearly warranted. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/67/1/1/451421/0670001.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 on 30 September 2021 by guest Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/67/1/1/451421/0670001.pdf r-------------- - Northern - Midland boundary Area covered by Figure 3 Figure 2 : ···························· ········· LOCATION OF THE MESABI IRON RANGE IN RELATION TO THE NORTHERN-MIDLAND BOUNDARY 100 200 300 400 500 .... ···· .......... r····················· .................../ (.):) 4 AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY T h e P u r p o s e o f t h e S t u d y This study of the English of the Mesabi Iron Range seeks to provide reliable answers about the so-called Range dialect: to do so five questions about Iron Range English are considered: (1) What dialect area or areas of the eastern United States does the dialect of the Mesabi Iron Range most closely resemble? (2) How does the dialect of the Range differ from the dialect of the rest of Minnesota, which is characteristically Northern with an infusion of some Midland features? (3) How does the language of high school graduates differ from that of informants with less education? (4) Can linguistic features which have regional distri­ bution in the eastern United States and which occur on the Mesabi Iron Range be correlated with the ethnic background of the informants having these features in their idiolects? (5) Do any of the Iron Range communities investigated have distin­ guishing characteristics that set them apart from other Range communities? T h e M e s a b i I r o n R a n g e C o m m u n it ie s The Mesabi Iron Range is the name given to the network of communities situated along the vein of iron ore with the same name.7 The Mesabi range, the largest of the three Minnesota iron ore deposits, is a thick band of ore stretching in a shallow “S” in a northeast to southwest direction from west-central Lake County to Grand Rapids on the Mississippi River in Itasca County. Approximately 110 miles long, the ore vein varies from one to three miles in width. Communities and mines are located along the entire length of the ore deposit from Babbitt to the northeast to Grand Rapids in the southwest, but this study is concerned only with the communities in the eastern part of the range in St. Louis County. The area covered, which extends from Aurora to the east to Hibbing in the west, constitutes the region of first settlement on the Range. The communities in Itasca County are excluded from this study for two reasons. First, the towns between Hibbing and Grand Rapids—Keewatin, Nashwauk, Marble, Taconite, Bovey, and Coleraine—are newer than the St. Louis County settlements, all being laid out since 1900 when ore was discovered in these locations west of Hib­ bing, and being settled primarily from people moving from the Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/67/1/1/451421/0670001.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 INTRODUCTION 5 eastern Range towns. Second, Grand Rapids, on the western fringe of the Mesabi Iron Range, was a logging community populated largely by Swedes as early as the 1870’s. Its history is considerably different from the Mesabi communities in St. Louis County. Throughout this study the terms Mesabi Iron Range, the Range, and the Mesabi are used to refer to the network of communities in St. Louis County (see Figure 3). In 1890 when the Minnesota population had already reached 1,310,283,8 the Mesabi Iron Range was virtually uninhabited. The census of that year records no population in the region. The Americans who had migrated westward to Minnesota, and the immigrants from Europe had avoided the Mesabi. This was poor farming country. Although heavily forested, it was swampy, and it lacked a navigable river such as the St. Croix or the Mississippi. Consequently, neither farmers nor loggers were drawn to the region. In 1890 the area was inhabited only by a few transient timber cruisers and mineral prospectors. Iron ore had been discovered to the northeast on the Vermilion range in 1854, and mining had begun at Soudan in 1882. The discovery of rich ore at Mountain Iron in 1890 and, in quick succession, in the vicinities of present-day Biwabik, Hibbing, Virginia, Eveleth, and McKinley resulted in a rapid growth in population. Within five years of the discovery of ore and three years of the first shipment from the Mountain Iron mine the population of the area had jumped to 9,286.9 In another five years the population had increased to 16,834. Ten years later, by 1910, the popula­ tion increased by over 300% to 56,321. The rate of growth de­ clined dramatically in the next decade, but the population con­ tinued to climb, reaching its highest point, 71,203, in 1920. In the years that followed, as underground mines were shut down in favor of the more economical open pit mines, with the depres­ sion of the 30’s, and with the depletion of high-grade ores, the population dropped to 64,108 in 1930, to 62,754 in 1940, and to 59,335 in 1950. The development of taconite processing, the mining of low-grade taconite and semi-taconites, and the estab­ lishing of new plants along the range is reflected in the jump in population to 68,223 in 1960. Although it has been obvious from the earliest days that the Mesabi Iron Range is a true melting pot of ethnic groups, accu­ rate statistics on the composition are lacking. Since the United States census reports classify population by place of birth only Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/67/1/1/451421/0670001.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/pads/article-pdf/67/1/1/451421/0670001.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 INTRODUCTION 7 for cities of 10,000 inhabitants or more, none of the U. S. census reports provide such information for the Iron Range. Figures on nationality composition are available for only one census, the fifth decennial state census of 1905. According to this census, 57% of the 31,737 Iron Range inhabitants were foreign born. They were born in the following countries (the numbers indicate the number of inhabitants in the Mesabi communities): 10 Finland 6,829 Austria 3,163 Sweden 2,150 Canada 1,498 Norway 995 England 512 Germany 345 Russia 321 Ireland 185 Poland 172 Denmark 42 All other countries 1,889 These figures, as well as those in Table 2, are inadequate for two important reasons.