Distribution Patterns of Place-Name Pronunciations

Abstract

THIS ARTICLE will support an obvious generalization with new evidence. It will pinpoint the general knowledge possessed by every traveler who has gone from here to there from [teksen] to [tusan] Tucson, from [la jala] to [la hoya] La Jolla, from [piEr] to [pir] Pierre, South Dakota, from [bitres] to [biretres] Beatrice, Nebraska, from [bOIZ]to [bolzi] Boise, Idaho, or from [mmkanrok] to [mrekeno] Mackinac Island, Michigan. It is simply the general knowledge that local residents constitute their own supreme court in determining the pronunciation of their own community, and that as a traveler approaches that community he finds learned pronunciations and spelling pronunciations giving way in the face of the ineluctable force of the native speech. Evidence for this pinpointing is taken from the field records of the The Linguistic Atlas of the Upper Midwest, one of the independent but correlated proj ects within the framework of the The Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada. It includes Minnesota, Iowa, both Dakotas, and Nebraska. The records were made in close phonetic transcription by trained fieldworkers, who in these five states interviewed 208 selected informants who were lifelong residents of their communities. These informants fall into three groups: Type I, old-fashioned with no more than 8th grade schooling; Type II, middle-aged ,vith high school training; Type III, forty-ish with college education obtained within the state. For a number of reasons, as the accompanying list indicates, a number of place-names were included among the 807 items in the fieldworker's questionnaire. A few of these provide evidence indicating a consistency in the variation of place-name pronunciation distinctions.