Some Wyoming Speech Patterns

Abstract

HANS KURATH'S Word Geography of the Eastern United States2 presents in i graphic form a model for speech analysis. Speech patterns are neatly bounded, and heavy black lines mark with confidence the New England, the Pennsylvania, and the Southern speech areas, or indicate more local pockets of idiom. It is unlikely that such clearly marked isoglosses would appear as often on dialect maps of the Western states. Population is mobile and more recent, and often of mixed origin. Hence, conclusions must be more tentative than in the older parts of our country. Since no study has yet been made of Wyoming, I venture here a few preliminary observations based largely on population statistics and on questionnaires answered by some two hundred Wyoming-born students at the State University. The questionnaire, based on a form used at the University of Michigan and the University of Colorado, deals only with word distributions, not with pronunciations. Furthermore, it appears now that this questionnaire needs revision for the Western states, since it makes no provision for, say, the Spanish infiltrations into New Mexico and Texas, or regional cowboy terms in Wyoming and Montana. My paper has thus only a preliminary or introductory value. Wyoming until I890o presented the smallest population figures of any territory or state in the Union, and even now, though sixth in area among the states exceeds only Nevada in population. In 1870, Wyoming territory had five counties, running in parallel lines from south to north, from Colorado to Montana. The total population was but 9,118 persons, of whom, except for the few at Fort Laramie and South Pass, none was north of the recently completed Union Pacific railroad line. Located chiefly at Cheyenne and Laramie, this population was fully one-third foreign born, as compared with a national average of slightly over 13 percent, and more than one half was of foreign parentage.3 Twenty-one percent of the total population was from the British

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