Friday, November 1, 2019

What is the American South?

Southish

Before we define Southern quilt style we have to define the South---not just by state borders or Civil War history but the cultural South. As Floridian Teddy Pruett said on our QuiltHistorySouth Facebook page:
"Linguistics is a great indicator. I used to tell people that folks who sound southern quilt southern and the quilts follow the accent."
My map above shades Southern into the lower parts of states that might be considered Northern. You might even extend the area west into New Mexico and as far as Bakersfield, California, but this more limited map helps with our definition. Several readers objected to Delaware being in there (only the Southern county of their three counties counts) and there have been objections to Oklahoma, but I am the boss and I have spent much time in Oklahoma and I can tell you it's Southern.

We're using linguistics for our cultural definition:

Dialect: What do you call a carbonated beverage?
Blue: Soda
Green: Pop
Red: Coke (Cocola)

The discussion of the generic name for a can of "?whatever?" was fun and informative.

"What kind of cocola yall want? A NuGrape or a RC?"
Asks Teddy.


My interest in linguistics probably came from moving from New York to Cincinnati, Ohio when I was in grade school (elementary school?) and being ridiculed for calling these sneakers (They were tennis shoes). I'd get abused at school for saying Wash Cloth (Wash rhyming with posh) and at home for saying Warsh Rag. I got good at tailoring the language for the audience. Southerner Tara Miller recalled some spelling problems with Warsh.

Sneakers vs Tennis Shoes
You can see my New York City relatives who moved down there in Southern Florida skewing
the data by calling them Sneakers.

Language scholars use dialect and accent to map culture. The Dictionary of Regional English is one such project. Another is the Harvard Dialect Survey concluded in 2003, which asked a series of questions about word usage (such as What do you call that strip of grass between the street and the sidewalk?) and pronunciation (Crayon.) 

In Wichita they would tell you this garden is in "the parking,"
a useful word for what I called "that strip of grass between the sidewalk
and the street" before I fell in with a crowd from Wichita.

You can see some of the maps developed by Joshua Katz, of North Carolina State University for the New York Times at this site:
In Kansas where Wichita is South and Lawrence is North
we call these objects Ink Pens or Straight Pins because many people pronounce
the words Pin & Pen identically and there's no sense asking for the wrong thing.
Do note dark blue spot in Southern California.
Okies---to use a politically incorrect term.

Poor Jean Odom, who like me moved around as a kid, had a hard time meeting local standards for pronunciation.
"I was born in Kansas City, Mo. My family were in MO pre statehood out of Virginia, NC and Kentucky. I went to California during WW2 as a 6th grader. I was put in a remedial speech class because I talked like an 'Okie'. Next generation: we moved to Tennessee from NM in 1970. My 4th grade daughter failed her first spelling test. She couldn't hear the difference between pin, pan, and pen nor between iron and arm. My grandmother said 'chimley'. Her mother was from Kentucky. The part of MO where my family settled was known as Little Dixie even when I was a child."

Little Dixie in Missouri
Missouree? Missourah?
Depends on how Southern you are.
I knew a bricklayer once who went to school in Missouri and pronounced it Chimley --- I thought he had a speech defect.

Texan Laura Syler: 
"My very first class my freshman year at Baylor was speech... When we got to our seats our professor (Dr Stokes-The Voice of the Baylor Bears) wrote these words on the board: all, awl, oil, owl, pen, pan and pin. He asked us stand, say our hometown and pronounce each word! It was very enlightening! Especially when a girl from Texarkana-who would be a summer roommate- stretched ALL into 4 syllables!!!"

From the Encyclopedia Britannica
We're talking cultural South....


Which can be linguistically classified into narrower categories.


Iowan Virginia Berger:
"When I lived in East TN, I was fascinated by the differences in accent between East, Middle, and West TN. But I have had people in MN and northern IA tell me that I have a "southern" accent because I grew up south of Hwy 30 in IA."
What Have We Learned from Defining the South?

How important identity is to Southerners. You might get an argument in Iowa if you called Ottumwa Southern, but it's nothing like the arguments we've seen from people who live in the "Deep South" about who gets to be a Southerner---

Poor Oklahoma. 

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