Socioeconomic Language

I found this chapter to be very interesting because I find sociolinguistics absolutely riveting. I spend a lot of my free, everyday time listening to the way people talk and, essentially, "reading between the lines" of their speech. While it may not be polite, I think you can learn a lot about someone just by the way they speak. I'm sure some people will consider it unfair profiling, but, for me, it's just second nature. You can learn a lot just by listening to people. For instance, this past summer I spent a week in Old Orchard Beach, Maine and the New England accent was striking. Of course, to us here in Pennsylvania that accent is always striking, but what really made me stop and take note was how different people working different jobs had different strengths of the accent. To help you visualize this, let me give you some examples. One day, I was walking back from the beach and there was a garbage truck in the alley between our hotel and the beach and the man that was tossing the trash into the track had one of the thickest New England accents I have ever heard in my life. It was the prototypical that you hear in movies and hear in your head when someone talks about the New England accent. Conversely, the guy who owned the parking lots near the pier and attractions didn't have a thick accent like the garbage man did. Now, I don't know if the owner of the parking lots was from Maine or even the New England region, he did have a New England hint to his speech. Despite not knowing the owner's birthplace or origins, I was confident that he was a man of higher intelligence. There were a lot of other factors that went into this prediction like dress, hygiene, etc. As my travel companion and I traveled through Massachusetts on our way to and from Maine, I noticed thick and less than thick accents. It seemed like a lot of the difference lied in where I saw this people and what they were dong.

So, for this post, I really want to hear your stories about your experiences with sociolinguistic and if you ever do what I do and try and pin-point someone's SES based on their speech. 

Linguistic Holes

So, one thing that caught my eye whilst reading chapter five, looking at dialect maps, and reflecting on conversations from English 282 and this class was the make up of dialectal boundaries. On page 130 of the textbook (I was able to find the image on Google and attach it above), there is a map depicting the spread of the use of the word pail. I was really interested in the fact that you could pretty much draw a line across the center of Pennsylvania and separate the pail people from the bucket people. As I kept looking at the above map, I noticed the lingering parts of PA that use the pail. My theory is that these are areas that saw overflow from West Virginia and New Jersey because the flow into Western PA clearly has roots in WV. Likewise with Eastern PA having overflow from NJ. However, as we look at other states in this map, we can see somewhat random breaks in the dialectal continuation. In West Virginia, we can see the continuation in the northeast, but then there is a break that picks up again towards the middle of the state, another break, then it picks up towards the southern border of the state. This continuation on the southern border seems to stem from a chain that stretches from most of Georgia, South Carolina, and some of North Carolina.

However, like I said before, there are several spots in Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina where bucket is used over pail, so the question(s) I pose to all of you is: how or why do these gaps form? Do you think part of their formation comes from the movement of people to certain areas and not others? Why do you suppose there are non-concentrated areas surrounded by concentrated areas in the southern states in the above map?

(I apologize for the quality of the image, but that's the best I could do. A clearer, larger image can be found on page 130 of the textbook.)