The Influence of the Mississippi River on Northern Dialect Boundaries

Abstract

IT IS ALMOST AXIOMATIC IN AMERICAN linguistic geography that the pattern of settlement, more than any other factor, is responsible for the dimensions of the dialect regions. Because rivers played a major role in the settlement of America, conducting pioneers inland and creating a network for communication and trade, they often define dialect regions in one way or another. Put somewhat simplistically: rivers shaped settlement and settlement shaped dialects. This is particularly noticeable for two of the most important rivers in American history, the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. The Ohio River was one of the earliest and most used of several parallel routes in the general east-west migration. Thousands of settlers, primarily from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the Upper South, traveled this water highway westward. The Mississippi, by contrast, flows at right angles to the general westward trend. Its tendency, especially in its course as the western border of Illinois, was to deflect migration northward, creating a fault line both in the settlement and dialect patterns. Map 1 is schematic of the three main streams of settlement into Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa. The first of these streams came in the early decades of the nineteenth century from the Upper South, primarily Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina (the solid line). This was followed some thirty years later by the other two streams: the socalled Yankee invasion (which included New Yorkers), primarily by way of the Great Lakes (the dotted line), and the central influx of settlers from Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana by way of covered wagon overland (the broken line). Upper Southerners first entered the area in significant numbers after the War of 1812, settling along the Wabash and Mississippi Rivers on either side of southern Illinois. By 1830 the population of Illinois had climbed to 157,000. The farmer frontiersmen had pushed northward up the Wabash and its tributaries in the east and up the Kaskaskia and Illinois Rivers in the west reaching well into the central part of the state just past Peoria (see map 2). Over a period of several generations these

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