Christopher Strelluf y Tasha Cardwell
«Surveying borders in a speech community»
Dialectologia, n.º 22 (Winter 2019)
Dialectologia. Revista electrònica | Universitat de Barcelona | Facultat de Filologia | GEHCI (Grup d’Estudis d’Història de la Cultura i dels Intel·lectuals) | Departament de Filologia Catalana | Barcelona | ESPAÑA
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«Introduction
»This paper reports responses to a language questionnaire administered in Kansas City, a large metropolitan area in the US Midwest. Data are drawn from the Missouri Language Survey (MLS), an instrument originally developed and written by Matthew J. Gordon anddescribed in Gordon’s (2006) study on the low back vowel merger in Missouri.
»The present study makes use of a slightly modified version of the survey.We present this research with three inter-related goals.
»First, we wish to document several phonological, lexical, and grammatical features that have been identified in the region, but not systematically studied in Kansas City.
»Second, we wish to follow up on previous sociolinguistic fieldwork in Kansas City, which identified several salient geographical, social, and political borders that may affect residents’ linguistic practices.
»Third, we wish to examine the extent to which a large metropolitan area can be thought of as a “speech community”, and to identify what sorts of divisions within that speech community can be observed in responses to a written questionnaire.
»Goal 1: Document Features of Kansas City English
»Our first research goal is rooted in traditional dialectology (or, as re-framed in Chambers (1994), “dialect topography”). There is a long precedent in language study for documenting speakers’ conscious knowledge of their language, either through a survey administered by a fieldworker or through a questionnaire completed by informants (see Chambers & Trudgill (1998:15-21); Milroy & Gordon (2003:51-56); or Dollinger (2015:21-51)for detailed histories).
»While the written questionnaire suffered a period of disuse among linguists in the late-twentieth century, since the 1990s it has re-emerged as a viable tool for rapidly capturing large amounts of language data, especially following Chambers’s (1998) defense of questionnaires (also see Dollinger (2015:53-86)).
»We are particularly drawn to the variety of language features that the MLS allows us to report on. Previous studies of English in Kansas City —especially Lusk (1976) and Strelluf(2016, 2018)— examine phonetics and phonology to the exclusion of lexical andgrammatical data. But surveying different language features may derive different dialectological conclusions. Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006) rely on phonological data to classify Kansas City as part of the Midland dialect region, but lexical data was the basis of Carver’s (1987) rejection of the Midland as a distinct dialect region, and Murray &Simon (2006:15-28) offer a list of seventeen grammatical features that they argue define and validate the Midland’s regional status.
»With the exception of Ash’s (2006) report on responses from five Kansas Citians surveyed for the Atlas of North American Englishon a few lexical and grammatical items, we are unfamiliar with any published study of English in Kansas City beyond the realm of phonology.
»MLS data, therefore, allow us to offer a much broader characterization of Kansas City English. While our treatment will be necessarily superficial given the number of items we hope to cover from the survey and the limits to the depth of information that can be gleaned from a written questionnaire, the presentation of this data will fill in important details about language in the community.
»Goal 2: Explore the Role of Borders in the Community’s Language Practices
»Shortridge (2012:204) describes Kansas City as “a community split by rivers, a state line, and race”.
»These geographical, political, and social borders that cut through the community affect Kansas Citians’ physical and psychological spaces in complicated ways. For instance, historically Kansas City was sited on the south bank of the Missouri River, just east of the bend where the river’s course turns from north-south to west-east. The bend came to mark the territorial border between Missouri and Kansas, so that to the north Missouri and Kansas were separated by the river, but to the south the states were separated by just a cartographic line.
»In Missouri, the river bisects Kansas City, and the “Northland” is the salient label for the entire region of Kansas City north of the Missouri River on the Missouri side of the border. Communities in Kansas, however, are not separated from each other by the Missouri River (the “Northland” label does not apply to any communities in Kansas, even if they are geographically northern). The communities in Kansas are also not separated from the communities in Missouri that are south of the river.
»Indeed, the only indication ofthe Missouri-Kansas border in the south is the mixed residential-commercial street, State Line Road. While the communities in Kansas City south of the Missouri River are not physically separated, though, the Missouri-Kansas border nevertheless forms a significant boundary. The last quarter of the twentieth century saw a shift of population and economic prosperity from Missouri to Kansas (Shortridge 2012; US Census 2013).
»This shift has led to different popular valuations of Kansas City on either side of the state, with the Missouri side often being associated with poverty, danger, and bad schools and the Kansas side associated with wealth, safety, and good schools.
»Nicole_P_1972, who was interviewed for the projects reported in Strelluf (2016, 2018), had just moved from Kansas City, Missouri (MO) to a house just across the border in Kansas. She described the difficulty in moving from Missouri to Kansas in terms of class solidarity: “Unless you grow up here, it's hard to understand how being a poor Missouri kid from a public school...like, how you have a chip on your shoulder”.
»She concluded that the move “wasn't by choice”butwas necessary for her family’s well-being. State-border ideologies are codified locally in popular media, such as a “Kansas City Barbie” meme that periodically circulates online in the area (we cite a 2008 posting, but found a number of more recent postings, and the first authorreceived the meme by email in the early 2000s).
»In the meme, Barbies are stylized against Kansas City communities south of the Missouri River. Barbies from the Kansas communities of Leawood, Mission Hills, and Overland Park are connected to materialism, vanity, and nuclear family. E.g., Mission Hills Barbie “comes with an assortment of Kate Spade handbags, Lexus SUV, long-haired foreign dog named Honey and cookie-cutter house. Available with or without tummy tuck and facelift. Workaholic Ken sold only in conjunction with the augmented version”.
»Barbies from the Missouri communities of Belton, Grandview, and Independence are connected to crime, poverty, and dysfunction —e.g., Independence Barbie “comes with 9mm handgun, Ray Lewis knife, Chevy with dark-tinted windows, and Meth Lab Kit”. (Valuations of race —to be discussed below— also factor heavilyin this meme.)
»The Missouri-Kansas separation is reified by governmental actions. In recent years, Kansas City has gained notoriety as the site of a “border war”, where Missouri’s and Kansas’s competing tax incentives aimed at attracting jobs have made it possible for Kansas City companies to save huge sums of money by shifting office locations.
»By one estimate, over five years the tax incentives resulted in 10,000 jobs shuffling around Kansas City without any net job creation and a half billion dollars in lost tax revenue for Missouri and Kansas (“The New border war” 2014; “Jobs tug of war” 2016).
»Racial divisions, especially between whites and African Americans, create yet another internal border. Across most of the twentieth century, combinations of racist real estate development (Brown & Dorsett 1978:170-175; Worley 1990), school district boundaries (O’Higgins 2014), and white flight away from the urban core have deeply entrenched racial segregation in Kansas City. Troost, a north-south street in Kansas City, MO, is codified as the racial border, with African Americans living to the east and whites living to the west.
»A locally popular YouTube video, “A Tour of Kansas City”, illustrates the social salience of Troost in the psyche of white Kansas Citians (Bottoms Up Comedy 2013). At the 40-second mark, the video—which is otherwise a series of shots taken standing in front of local landmarks—is shot from inside a moving car. The “tourguide” says “This is Troost”. The “visitor” asks: “We going to stop?”. The tour guide shakes his head, looks scared, and says only: “No”. The initial comments on the video refer to the hilarity of this joke, and to the need to mention streets farther east of Troost that also run through (perceptually) African American neighborhoods.
»While Troost is perhaps the most symbolic racial border in Kansas City, the racist history it embodies has created parallel borders throughout the community. For instance, today’s North Kansas City, MO —which seeded the growth of the Northland— was initially populated in 1912 as a company town for the Armour and Swift meatpacking companies. In order to “attract ‘better’ workers”, the company banned African American, Mexican, and South European families from the city (Shortridge 2012:75-76). While today’s demographic facts are, of course, not absolutely determined by historical foundations, the doctrine of first effective settlement (e.g., Zelinsky 1992) suggests that early strictures on populations may have outsized effects on future generations.
»In the 2010 Census, Clay County —the county that formed aroundArmour and Swift’s company town— had an African American population of 5.2 percent and LatinX population of 5.9 percent, compared with 23.9 percent and 8.4 percent in Jackson County, where Kansas City’s urban core is located (US Census 2016).
»Finally, beyond these physical, political, and racial boundaries, psychological spaces seem to operate in nuanced ways. Strelluf (2018: 12) describes a qualitative change in attitudes toward Kansas City between interviews conducted during fieldwork in 2012-2013 and fieldwork in 2016. The former period was characterized by derisive comments like Seth_P_1972’s comparison of Kansas City to the idea of New York embodied in Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York”: “If you can make it in Kansas City, you can just make it in Kansas City. [...] There’s no real prize”.
»The later interviews were characterized by Stephanie_1982’s description of herself as “completely Kansas City crazy” who believes “that we just live in awesome city and I never wanna leave”. Strelluf (2018: 12) speculatedthat these attitudinal changes might be linked to downtown revitalization projects and the Kansas City Royals winning the 2015 Major League Baseball World Series. Strelluf (2018: 7-8) alsoqualitatively notes a generational change in attitudes toward Kansas City.
»He describes two relatively older interviewees, Carol_1959 and Molly_1973, who spoke of growing up in the Northland and pointedly denied having lived in Kansas City, MO —though it turned out that Molly_1973, who described the Northland as “God’s Country”, lived in a house that actually was in Kansas City, MO. Carol_1959 and Molly_1973 are juxtaposed against two relatively younger interviewees, Danielle_1991 and Maya_1991, who both grew up in the Northland, but were both very particular about indicating that they were from Kansas City, MO and not the small independent enclave of North Kansas City, MO.
»These interviewees give the impression of orientations away from Kansas City, MO for the two older interviewees and toward Kansas City, MO for the two younger interviewees.
»Similarly, the second authorwho moved to Kansas City from Wisconsin, impressionistically notes sharp divisions among friends and colleagues based on where they live relative to the Missouri River. People who live north of theriverview the city south of the river variably as a “ghetto” or as a destination for special events like professional sports.
»People who live south of the riverthink of the area to the north as farmland that they drive through to get to the airport.While these descriptions of perceptual borders in Kansas City are clearly unscientific, they suggest that Kansas Citians may be carving out spaces for themselves based on a range of internal and external factors. We want to study whether either established or perceived geographical, political, and social borders correlate with borders in linguistic practices.
»Goal 3: Explore the Cohesiveness of the Speech Community
»Our third goal is, in a sense, closely connected with Goal 2. In another sense, though, Goal 3 suggests a much more ambitious question for our research —and, regrettably, one that our data does not ultimately equip us to achieve.
»Nevertheless, we are motivated to look at MLS data in Kansas City as a way to explore a larger theoretical question of what constitutes a “speech community”. Bucholtz (1999:207) describes the “speech community” as “a central analytic tool of sociolinguistics” (see also Holmes & Meyerhoff 1999; Meyerhoff 2006).
»Referring to projects like Labov’s (1966/2006) foundational study of New York City English, she notes that through the lens of the speech community sociolinguists have successfully identified quantifiable community-level patterns in language variation and change despite differences in linguistic practices at the individual level.
»Bucholtz advocates the “community of practice” as an alternative analytic unit, which examines micro-level linguistic practices, often emerging inductively among small groups of speakers who use language as part of a set of strategies to construct identities. (Bucholtz (1999) further credits Eckert &McConnell-Ginet (1992) for introducing the community of practice to linguistics.) Eckert (2012) also contemplates the unit of variationist sociolinguistic analysis in her historicizationof the field into three “waves”.
»She describes a first wave of large-scale, mostly urban studies that drew on sociological survey methods to treat speakers as “bundles of demographic categories” (Eckert 2012: 88) who engage in linguistic practices mostly passively in response to sociocultural norms. This was followed by a second wave that drew on network theory and ethnography, and that imbued speakers with agency for using language (among other) practices to navigate social interaction so language variation and change occuras a result of membership in locally defined social categories and movements of individuals among social groups. Finally, a third-wave recognized individuals as constructors of their own identities, and sociolinguists —often by working closely with individual speakers in a range of roles and interactions— identified language being operationalized as one of many stylistic factors to help people position themselves in their worlds.
»Eckert (2012) does not use Bucholtz’s (1999) term “speech community”, but it is easy to see the speech community operating in Eckert’s historicization as something that shifts across the evolution of variationist sociolinguistics, from a geopolitical unit (e.g., the city), to a locally defined entity within a geopolitical unit (e.g., a school), to a group of friends, acquaintances, or colleagues (e.g., a circle of friends in a school in a city) within a locally defined entity.
»Likewise, the “community of practice” might be understood to exist as a continuum across the three waves. While a community of practice can be a very small group (as in the “nerd girls” of Bucholtz (1999) or a fraternity in Kiesling (1998), which Eckert (2012) cites as a third-wave study), a much larger group of people can also operationalize linguistic resources to engage in identity construction —as when a language variety becomes “enregistered” in the sense of Agha (2003) (and as exemplified in Pittsburgh in Johnstone (2009), which Eckert (2012)also discusses in the context of third-wave variationist study).
»Bucholtz’s (1999) and Eckert’s (2012) influential articulations of evolutions in sociolinguistics, then, suggest cyclically referential relationships among sociolinguists’ methodological and theoretical commitments and their views of “communities” within these commitments. Studies like Podesva (2011) demonstrate this cyclical referentiality. Podesva (2011) examines one speaker’s operationalization of features of the California Vowel Shift (CVS) (e.g., Eckert 2004; Kennedy & Grama 2012; Fridland et al.2016) to index different identities in interactions with a group of friends, a single friend, and a professional supervisor.
»The establishment of the baseline features of the CVS that the speaker makes use of is firmly rooted in first-wave variationist approaches (in Eckert’s (2012)terminology), and CVS features exist at the macro-level of the San Francisco English speech community (in Bucholtz’s (1999) terminology). However, the focus on a singlespeaker’s construction of meaning and identity through these features is clearly embedded in third-wave variationist approaches and relies on understanding the speaker as moving among different communities of practice.In one sense, then, variationists working in different “waves” or in different levels of community can (and certainly do) provide complementary perspectives.
»First-wave variationists might describe the features that are present in a city, second-wavers might identify how those features advance and take on meaning in a school in the city, and third-wavers might discover what a clique in the school does with the features. This gives rise to circularity, though. If individuals make up communities and communities provide the linguistic backdrop for individuals, how can we know when we are identifying individual practices or when we are identifying community practices? Put another way, when are we dealing with the speech community, and when are we dealing with a community of practice? We are not, of course, making a new observation about the field. Indeed, we seem to have presented a less articulate restatement of what Labov (1972:185-187) referred to as the Saussurian Paradox.
»The question of what constitutes a speech community carries tremendous consequences for decisions researchers make as they design studies and draw conclusions from them. Can a researcher —short of decades-long projects involving scores of researchers like those that Labov and colleagues haveconducted in Philadelphia since the early 1970s— make meaningful claims about language practices in a city? Without such a backdrop of community language norms, can researchers make claims about group or individual linguistic practices or performances?
»We will make no claims to being able to answer such high-level theoretical questions with questionnaire data. Nevertheless, as we probe the MLS for data about language in Kansas City and for data about language practices across borders in Kansas City, we are conscious of a larger question. On an important level, we are asking to what extent can we think of Kansas City as a speech community?
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