Folk Linguistic Perceptions and the Mapping of Dialect Boundaries

THE MAPPING OF DIALECT BOUNDARIES in the United States has traditionally been based solely on production data. This traditional approach neglects a rich data source, namely, perceptions of and attitudes toward language varieties. Perceptual dialectology, also known as folk dialectology, is concerned with the beliefs that nonlinguists—"the folk"—have about language variation, factors that can play a critical role in language maintenance and change. Folk perceptions of dialects have been compared to traditional dialectological and sociolinguistic findings, and such comparisons have demonstrated that the folk employ factors other than linguistic differences in constructing their mental maps. While some perceptual studies have shown that folk boundaries parallel linguistic divisions to some extent (e.g., Mase 1964; Lance 1999), others have found that subjective regions are influenced by such factors as political and civil demarcations (e.g., Sibata 1959; Preston 1986; Inoue 1996; Lance 1999). Does this render the findings of studies in perceptual dialectology invalid? Certainly not. Studies in perceptual dialectology need not be used only to confirm or contradict production boundaries. Indeed, studies in perceptual dialectology can inform our understanding of the criteria that are important to the folk in defining dialect regions and should be considered in the construction of dialect maps.

In the United States, the state of Ohio is an ideal area in which to investigate the folk perceptions of boundaries and their relationship to production boundaries. Several traditional studies have examined dialect diversity in the area, and the proposed boundaries have raised a number of interesting questions. Ohio is a linguistically complex region, where dialect mixture appears to be a defining characteristic (Marckwardt 1957, 8; Carver 1987, 192; Thomas 1989/93, 205; Frazer 1996, 85). Most dialect projects, including the Linguistic Atlas Projects (LAP),1 the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE 1985-), and the Telephone Survey (TELSUR) conducted by sociolinguists at the University of Pennsylvania (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 1997), have typically divided Ohio into three dialect areas. Although it is unfortunate that the Linguistic Atlas of the North Central States (LANCS), the atlas project relevant here, never produced a definitive map of the dialect boundaries of the area (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, and Wisconsin), some scholars, including Marckwardt (1957), Dakin (1966), and others, have used LANCS data to postulate boundaries within this region. Lance (1994) incorporated Marckwardt's and Dakin's findings into his map of United States dialects, seen in figure 1, which is based on the largely phonetic/phonological and lexical data from LAP. The lexical data collected for DARE were mapped by Carver (1987), as shown in figure 2. Finally, the TELSUR project data, based on the phonological features of 240 respondents in urban areas of the United States, is mapped in figure 3 (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 1997). In the remainder of this paper, these proposed boundaries are referred to as LAP (fig. 1), DARE (fig. 2), and TELSUR (fig. 3). I now present a brief description of production boundaries in Ohio based on these mappings.

LANCS data support an extension of the previously established LAP Northern dialect boundary westward through the northern quarter of Ohio, the boundary line below "A" in figure 1 (Marckwardt 1957, 4, 8). The DARE-based Northern dialect boundary is similar, as shown in figure 2 (Carver 1987, 202). The TELSUR map differs slightly in that only the northeast corner of Ohio is in the Northern dialect area, as seen in figure 3 (Labov, Ash, and Boberg 1997). (More recent work by Labov, Ash, and Boberg [forthcoming], however, puts the northern third of Ohio in the Northern dialect area.)

The dialect areas south of the Northern boundary, that is, in the central and southern parts of Ohio, are not uniformly agreed on. LAP data led scholars to divide central and southern Ohio into two parts: a North Midland area that extends from the Northern dialect boundary down to the Old National Road, an...