A History of English Language

A history of the english language 356
THE DIALECTS OF AMERICAN
ENGLISH
Southern and carving out a third major dialect, straddling the traditional boundary and
extending from the Middle Atlantic area to the Mississippi and beyond. This area was
divided into North Midland, which comprised most of Pennsylvania and the central areas
of the Great Lakes states; and South Midland, which continued to be referred to as the
Upper South or the Southern Uplands, and which included the southern Appalachians, the
Ozarks of Missouri and Arkansas, and parts of Oklahoma and Texas. Subsequent studies
have supported or modified particular isoglosses and dialect boundaries, the results
varying from study to study with the phonological and lexical criteria used. The main
point of controversy has been whether the selection and weighting of isoglosses supports
a distinct Midland dialect. Although Kurath’s tripartite division was widely accepted for
forty years, recent investigations have led some dialectologists to reemphasize a primary
North-South linguistic boundary. Craig M.Carver, for example, proposes Upper South for
South Midland and Lower North for North Midland. 28 Ellen Johnson, while supportive of
Kurath’s Midland, prefers the term Appalachian for that dialect, and for Kurath’s South
the term Deep South. 29 These and other differences among dialectologists are partly
matters of nomenclature, though not merely that, because it is nomenclature linked to
culture and history; the differences also result from the indeterminacy of the concept
dialect itself. Unlike state and county boundaries, which can be found demarcated on the
land, dialect boundaries are abstractions of linguists, artifices that are built on empirical
28
American Regional Dialects, p. 181.
29
“Yet Again: The Midland Dialect,” American Speech, 69 (1994), 419–30.