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The influence of suburban development and metropolitan fragmentation on language variation and change: Evidence from Greater St. Louis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2019

Daniel Duncan
Daniel Duncan*
Affiliation:
School of English Literature, Language & Linguistics, Newcastle University, Percy Building, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RUUnited Kingdom
*
Author for correspondence: Daniel Duncan, Email: daniel.duncan@ncl.ac.uk
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Abstract

The distances between urban and suburban spaces, while small in Euclidean terms, have a rather large social reality. This paper calls attention to two reasons for this—suburban development and metropolitan fragmentation—and situates these phenomena within the context of sociological and historical thought about metropolitan areas. I test their role in linguistic variation through a case study of three Northern Cities Shift features (raised trap, fronted lot, and lowered thought) in English of the St. Louis metropolitan area. I show that these features diffused throughout the region in three different ways. Additionally, phonological conditioning of lot-fronting differs between urban and suburban speakers, and retreat from urban dialect features is led in the suburbs. These findings highlight the need to consider the geography of metropolitan areas more deeply in studies of language variation and change in metropolitan areas, as similarity across a metropolitan area should not be assumed a priori.

Keywords

suburbanizationmetropolitan areasNorthern Cities ShiftSt. Louisdiffusionretreat
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Linguistic Geography , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , October 2019 , pp. 82 - 97
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019 

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