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

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.

Urban/suburban contact as stylized social practice

“…In this paper, I have explored linguistic variation in what in most respects amounts to a metropolitan dialect in Greater St. Louis. This dialect is changing; suburbs are leading the city in retreat from traditional urban features (Duncan 2019). As such, the metropolitan dialect exists on a continuum in some ways, with advanced and conservative speakers.…”

“…The St. Louis area also participates in the Northern Cities Shift (NCS), which includes the raising, fronting, and diphthongization of TRAP; fronting of LOT; lowering of THOUGHT; and backing of DRESS (Goodheart 2004;Labov, Ash and Boberg 2006). Duncan (2019) County, which is closer to the city than St. Charles County. They all thus commute toward the center, which is different from living and working in the periphery as their peers do.…”

“…At the same time, because the regions are so fragmented, approaches which treat suburbs and the central city as separate communities are also justified. Recent work that combines these approaches has in fact shown that patterns of linguistic variation in metropolitan areas can involve effects of both political fragmentation and regional cohesion (Duncan 2019).…”

“…Wagner et al 2016 for Lansing, MI, and Driscoll and Lape 2015 for Syracuse, NY). Greater St. Louis shows this pattern as well; both LOT and TRAP are in retreat, It is worth considering what the variants mean, and what we expect to see.Although the entire region is retreating from use of the traditional low NORTH vowel (merged with START) and NCS TRAP and LOT, because the suburbs lead retreat(Duncan 2019), we can view the traditional features as more ʻcity-likeʼ and the outcomes of retreat (nasal TRAP system, backed LOT, raised NORTH) as more ʻsuburb-likeʼ. Essentially, while the whole of Greater St. Louis is retreating from traditional features, the City of St. Louis appears to be most conservative in this respect, and we will thus be treating conservative speakers as ʻcity-likeʼ.…”

“…with TRAP undergoing phonological reorganization to the nasal system common to North American Englishes, in which a raised and fronted allophone is present in pre-nasal contexts(Duncan 2019).Duncan (ibid.) additionally shows that St. Louis' suburbs are leading these retreats.We thus have three vowels-, NORTH, TRAP and LOT-for which speakers in the city and suburbs appear to have different patterns and which may be stereotyped or show evidence of social evaluation.…”