Dialects. Midland Area.

Some Dialectologists (for instance, Hans Kurath) have differentiated three different regions, in which it’s spoken different dialects: Northern, The Midland and Southern, although there are some of them who distinguish just two different regions, northern and southern.

First of all, I’m going to define the concept of dialect: A dialect is a variety of a language that is distinguished from other varieties of the same language by features of phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, and by its use by a group of speakers who are set off from others geographically or socially.

In this entry, I’ll focus on the Midland area, which corresponds to Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Connecticut.

So few scholars have addressed the question whether the Midland dialect actually exists. Midland dialects does, in facts, exist. The scholars Primer(1890) and Hempl (1896) appear to have been the first to use Midland as a label for a dialect or for a dialectal area in the United States. A Midland which separates the North from the South.

As I mentioned above, Hans Kurath has widely contributed in this investigation. Kurath divided this region into two discrete subdivisions: the "North Midland" area, and the "South Midland".

The Midland does not show the homogenous character that marks the North and The south.

Some general dialectal features of American Midlands are the following:

Midland speech is firmly rhotic.

In South Midland, A ‘’TH’’ at the end of words or syllables is sometimes pronounced ‘’F’’, and the word ‘’ARE’’ is often left out of sentences as in Black English. An ‘’A’’ is usually placed at the beginning of verb that ends with ‘’ING’’, and the ‘’G’’ is dropped; an ‘’O’’ at the end of a word becomes ‘’ER’’.  ‘’T’’ is frequently added to words that end with an ‘’S’’ sound. 

Some words are: bodacious, heap, right smart (large amount), set a spell, and smidgen. 

A well-known phonological difference between the Midland and the North is that the word on contains the phoneme /ɔ/ (as in caught) rather than /ɑ/ (as in part). In some areas, words like "roof" and "root" (which in many other dialects have the GOOSE vowel /u/) are pronounced with the FOOT vowel /ʊ/.

A common grammatical feature of the greater Midland area is so-called "positive anymore": It is possible to use the adverb anymore with the meaning "nowadays" in sentences without negative polarity, such as ‘’Air travel is inconvenient anymore’’.

Many speakers use the construction need + past participle, as in the car needs washed, where speakers of other dialects would say needs to be washed or needs washing.

A peculiar dialect is the spoken in Pennsylvania, which is widely influenced by a dialect of German spoken in this country. We can see sentences like "Smear your sister with jam on a slice of bread" and "Throw your father out the window his hat." They also invented ‘’dunking’’ from the German "dunken" (which means to dip).

Here, I'll show you a video related to this:

In the following entries, I will talk about the Southern and Northern areas of United States.

I hope you have learned something with this.Sources: 


http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/dialect


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midland_American_English


http://robertspage.com/dialects.html


http://www.evolpub.com/Americandialects/AmDialMap.gif


Language Variation and Change in the American Midland : A New Look at ‘Heartland’ English
Murray, Thomas E. Simon, Beth Lee

By: Patricia Domínguez Anaya.