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Karly Sharp
Microethnography Brief
Journalism 104
Feb. 18, 2016
Geographical Effects on American Linguistics
When I was in the eighth grade, my English teacher introduced me to the concepts of two
closely related language phenomenons – accents and dialect. He began this introduction by
pulling up a picture of a winter hat on the classroom overhead projector. After asking the class
what the object was called, he switched the slides to a picture of a narrow sled and repeated his
question. After the class had labeled both images as a toboggan, he then presented us with a
dialect map to show us that only a few counties in east-central Indiana identified a toboggan as
being anything other than a sled. The fact that such a small geographical area had a homophone
in their speech that the rest of the English-speaking world did not have was intriguing to me and
influenced me to research how location has shaped the English language.
Before beginning my research, it was imperative that I was able to distinguish between an
accent and a dialect. An accent is how someone says something and a dialect is the specific
words that belong to one’s speech that make it unique (Oxford University Press ). For example,
an American southern accent can be audibly distinguishable by its elongated vowel sounds and
syllable breaks. Contrary to popular belief, a southerner’s use of the word “y’all” is associated
with their dialect rather than their accent.
To begin my study, I looked to the 2003 Harvard Dialect Survey which is an international
database of geographically categorized linguistic statistics. As one can imagine, there is an
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excessive amount of information present in this database so to narrow down my research I
referred to a dialect map published by Kate Grise in The Daily Caller. In her report she uses
colorful maps to show the distribution of words pronounced with distinct accents and where in
America words possess different meanings. Grise uses pecan, caramel, and crayon as the focus
of her accent specific maps and tennis shoes/sneakers, coke/soda/pop, and firefly/lightning bug
as the focus of her dialect specific maps. For my own convenience, I decided to organize my
research under these same six word categories.
My qualitative research included interviewing of four Ball State students from four
different regions of the United States. The interviewing process included gathering brief
background information on my interviewees and finding out whether or not they believed they
had an accent. Next I would show them a series of six flashcards and ask that to verbalize what
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