An Approach to Urban Word Geography

W HHEN THE BLUES SINGER from Mississippi came to Chicago and made that observation, he spoke of words as well as music and suggested a central problem of American linguistic geography. In a world where speed can be purchased in a capsule and the most intimate personal relations are graphically reproduced for distribution at the corner bookstore, the artifacts and attitudes investigated by conventional, rural-oriented methodology seem remote and dissociated from language and people today. The problem is obvious to general linguists but, perhaps, is most dramatically apparent in dialectology and the record it provides for lexicography. Confronted in the streets by an almost totally mechanized technology and a significantly modified-if not really new-morality, language students might seriously question the preoccupation of the linguistic geographer with obsolescent and antiquarian aspects of culture. Although most urban Americans cannot distinguish a felly from a clevis or a swingletree from a sycamore, they are even more bewildered to learn that their ancestors actually butchered with a butcher knife but were squeamish about the designations for male breeding animals

Geography · Linguistics · Sociology · Word (group theory · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · Philosophy