Sociohistorical background

The territory under consideration here includes lands that came into the possession of the United States over a period of roughly 70 years. The eastern edge of this region (western Pennsylvania) stood as the western frontier during the colonial period. This frontier was expanded in the 1780s with the opening of the Northwest territories which included Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 extended the U.S. holdings across the plains and into the Rocky Mountains. An 1846 settlement with Great Britain brought the Oregon Country under sole control of the U.S., thereby stretching the border to the Pacific. The final stages in this American expansion came after war with Mexico, which led to the cession of California and the rest of the Southwest to the U.S. in 1848, an acquisition that was extended southward in 1853 by the Gadsden Purchase of land that became part of Arizona and New Mexico.

This review of territorial expansion paints the broad strokes of the picture of American settlement of the region. The sections of the Old Northwest that are of concern here were settled mainly by two streams of emigrants from the Atlantic states: one coming west across Pennsylvania and the other coming north from the Mountain South. These settlers generally established themselves south of the Great Lakes which contributed to a cultural and linguistic divide with the northern lands which were settled primarily by New Englanders.

West of the Mississippi River the same general pattern held: northern states like Minnesota and the Dakotas tended to attract emigrants from western New York and New England while states like Iowa and Missouri were settled primarily by Midlanders with many of the new Iowans coming from Pennsylvania and Ohio and many of the Missourians coming from Kentucky and Tennessee (Hudson 1988). As American settlement moved west, the population became much more mixed in origin. For example the gold rush that began in 1848 drew people from across the US to California and helped to establish San Francisco as a cosmopolitan urban center. Further north in Oregon, migration in the mid-nineteenth century “drew about equally from the Free States and from the Slave States of the Border South” (Meinig 1972: 165). An exception to the usual diversity found in western settlement is seen in the relative homogeneity of the Mormon population that settled in Utah beginning in 1847.

The preceding account has focussed on settlement by English-speaking emigrants from the eastern US. These emigrants were, of course, moving into lands populated by speakers of other languages. It is probably fair to say that the hundreds of American Indian languages spoken across the West have had little if any impact on the phonology of the dialects of English spoken by Anglos. On the other hand, the legacy of Spanish in the Southwest has had a much greater impact on the English spoken in this area. Also significant has been the linguistic influence of numerous European immigrants. Many of these immigrants settled in urban areas such as Pittsburgh and St. Louis, establishing ethnic neighborhoods. There was also a tremendous push to attract immigrants to farming areas in order to build the agricultural economy. Many Germans responded to this call and settled throughout the Midwest. Scandinavians also contributed to the westward flow. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century an estimated one-fifth of the population of Norway and Sweden emigrated to the States, many of them settling in Minnesota and other areas of the Upper Midwest.

The central lesson to be taken from this sociohistorical overview is that the story of English in the American Midwest and West, while fairly short, nevertheless involves a diverse cast of characters. Given the mix of people from varied origins that settled the region, we might consider the relative uniformity of speech heard here – speech represented in the popular notion of the General American dialect – to be the result of dialect leveling. The process of dialect leveling can be useful in understanding the phonological characteristics discussed below because it accounts for not only the elimination of highly localized features but also the diffusion of innovations across a large region (e.g., Watt and Milroy 1999).