• The Conference
  • Home
  • Programme
  • Venue & directions
  • Organizing Committee
  • Scientific Committee
  • Exhibitors & sponsors
  • Satellite events
  • Conference Party
• Past & future
  • Previous symposia
  • Finland 2014
  • Spain 2016
• About FU Berlin
  • University homepage
  • Humanities at FU

Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 814

Part of Session 157: Dialect Perceptions in the City (Other abstracts in this session)

“City talk” and “Country talk”: Perceptions of urban and rural English in Washington state

Authors: Evans, Betsy E.
Submitted by: Evans, Betsy E. (University of Washington, United States of America)

This paper will bring perceptions of the rural to the conversation about language in the city via perceptual dialect data collected in Washington state (USA).  While the role and importance of the city in modern life is undeniable, they rely in part on the juxtaposition of perceptions of the rural and urban.  Understanding perceptions of rurality are essential for a discussion of language in the city. The exploration of linguistic variation in rural contexts has received little attention since the shift to the study of urban areas accelerated by Labov (1966). So in turning attention to the city, sociolinguistics has ignored rural communities (with some exceptions, e.g. Frazer 1983, Lippi-Green 1989, Hazen 2000, Ito 2000, Marshall 2004).  Britain (2009) argues that the patterns of variation sociolinguists seek are not only found in urban areas: “the very same cultural, economic, social and political processes and conflicts can affect rural areas as affect urban [areas]” (238).  Lichter and Brown (2011: 565) call for “greater conceptual and empirical integration of urban and rural scholarship” in order to recognize the interdependence and symmetry of the urban and the rural.

The data examined here suggest that the socio-cultural and linguistic distinctions of urban and rural are very salient for non-linguists.  For example, when asked for a label for areas where they perceive English to be ‘different’ in Washington (WA), respondents’ (N=178) most frequent category label (86/336 labels or 25%) related to notions of rural life. This category, called country is comprised of labels such as “hick”, “farmer talk”, and “country”.  Figure 1 is a composite map of the spatial representation of the country category.  These country labels were most frequently associated with regions in eastern WA.  Eastern WA is, in fact, predominantly rural (US Census 2000). The labels and their geographic distribution seem to reflect standard language ideology in that they suggest that respondents doubt that standard English is spoken in rural areas.  While inhabitants from urban and rural areas seemed to agree on this, there were a few rural respondents who attributed labels like ‘normal’ to their own regions suggesting they are unaware of the perceptions of their region as non-standard. This points to the complexity of spatial perceptions and linguistic variation in urban and rural contexts.