A history of the English Language

Upper South
for 
South Midland
and 
Lower North
for 
North Midland
.
28
Ellen Johnson, while supportive of 
Kurath’s 
Midland,
prefers the term 
Appalachian
for that dialect, and for Kurath’s 
South
the term 
Deep South
.
29
These and other differences among dialectologists are partly 
matters of nomenclature, though not merely that, because it is nomenclature linked to 
culture and history; the differences also result from the indeterminacy of the concept 
dialect
itself. Unlike state and county boundaries, which can be found demarcated on the 
land, dialect boundaries are abstractions of linguists, artifices that are built on empirical
28 
American Regional Dialects
, p. 181. 
29 
“Yet Again: The Midland Dialect,” 
American Speech,
69 (1994), 419–30. 
A history of the english language 356

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observations but that depend on the diagnostic features chosen. We shall use the terms 
“Upper North,” “Lower North,” “Upper South,” and “Lower South,” and we shall 
recognize Eastern New England as a distinctive enough subregion within Upper North to 
merit separate description. 
The boundary marking the main North-South division begins in central Delaware, runs 
westward near the old Mason-Dixon Line and continues approximately along the Ohio 
River, eventually extending south into Oklahoma and Texas.
30
The line separating the 
Upper North (Kurath’s Northern) from the Lower North (North Midland) runs northwest 
across New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania and then in a fairly regular westward 
progression across the northern parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. As the 
boundary approaches the Mississippi in northwestern Illinois it turns north and, to the 
extent that it can be traced as a boundary at all, continues that general course across the 
upper Midwest. The division between the Upper South (South Midland) and the Lower 
South (Southern) begins at the Atlantic Ocean at a midpoint on the Delmarva peninsula, 
describes a northward arc through Maryland, and turns southwest, skirting the eastern 
edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia and North Carolina and turning west just 
north of Atlanta. To the east lie the Piedmont and the coastal plain. To the west the 
Midland-Southern boundary continues through northern Georgia and Alabama, then turns 
north into western Tennessee. West of the Mississippi the boundary becomes predictably 
more diffuse, but it can still be traced through Arkansas and east Texas. 
At least six regional dialects in the eastern half of the country are prominent enough to 
warrant individual characterization, and three additional dialects of considerable 
importance extend over several regions: 
1. 
Eastern New England.
This includes the whole or parts of states that lie to the east of the Connecticut River in 
Massachusetts and Connecticut and east of the Green Mountains in Vermont. Although 
not all features of the dialect are uniform in their distribution, we may recognize as 
characteristic the retention of a rounded vowel in words like 
hot
and 
top,
which the rest 
of the country has unrounded to a shortened form of the 
a 
in
 father;
the use of the broad 
a 
in
 fast, path, grass,
etc.; and, as we have seen, the loss of the 
r
in 
car, hard,
and the like 
except before vowels 
(carry, Tory)
. Boston is its focal area.
31
30 
The boundaries (especially the broken lines) on the accompanying map are approximations that 
are crossed by individual features, lexical and phonological. The Norfolk, Virginia, region, for 
example, is included in the Virginia area but has largely escaped the Piedmont influence and is 
more closely related to the adjacent part of North Carolina. 
31 
A focal area is one that because of its political, commercial, cultural, or other importance (e.g., 
social) has influenced the speech of surrounding areas. 
Tonic
(soft drink), for instance, has spread 
apparently only to communities served by distributors whose headquarters are in Boston. 
The english language in america 357

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2.