A Word Atlas of Northeast Texas.

Abstract

A Word Atlas of Northeast Texas is a lexical study-with phonologi cal observations-based on interviews with two hundred native informants in twenty-six counties in the northeastern corner of Texas.The survey is intended primarily as a study of the geographical distribution of folk synonyms for 127 concepts; other goals are to consider pronuncia tion and meaning, to preserve expressions which are disappearing, and to show relationships between the age, sex, education, or community size of the informant and his vocabulary.The dialect of Northeast Texas is more readily understood after the historical background of the settlement and economy of the region has been established.From the beginning of Anglo-American migrations into Northeast Texas, the population has been characterized by dominance of the southeastern United States as the source of Scotch-Irish immigrants, lack of a foreign-born element, and high percentages of Negroes in com parison with other sections of Texas.Responses to each of the items of the questionnaire are depicted by symbols plotted on maps at the location of each informant's community.For the most part, the vocabulary of the 22,000 square miles comprising Northeast Texas is highly homogeneous, but in several instances, iso glosses (word boundaries) separate areas of usage.A significant bundle of isoglosses sets the southeastern counties bordering Louisiana apart from the remainder of Northeast Texas.xi A table of percentages accompanying each map shows the frequency of the various responses according to the informant's age (in ten-year groups), sex, education, and community size.These statistics were compiled from a frequency distribution analysis tabulated on an Inter national Business Machines' 650 computer at the Louisiana State Univer sity Computer Research Center.Following each tabulation is a discussion of the lexical concept, interpretation of statistics, and comparison of Northeast Texas vocabulary with that recorded in Hans Kurath's A Word Geography of the Eastern United States and in other regional studies.A portion of this word atlas is devoted to distinctive features of Northeast Texas pronunciation.Phonetic transcriptions illustrate vowels in stressed and unstressed positions, consonants, stressing, and other phonological data which appear to be characteristic of the dialect.Correlation of results to other dialect studies shows that Northeast Texas vocabulary is closely related to the South and South Midland areas of the Eastern United States as defined in Kurath's Word Geography.On the basis of existing surveys, the greatest kinship may be established with an area comprising western North and South Carolina, southwestern Virginia, and southern West Virginia.Phonological characteristics also bear closer resemblance to the South and South Midland areas than to any other regions defined by Kurath.Other conclusions to be derived from this study are the following: l) The history of the region and its people has an important bearing upon present-day vocabulary; 2) The vocabulary within the region is highly homogeneous; geographical factors are less important in word xii distribution than the age, sex, education, and community size of the native speaker; 3) Not until linguistic atlases have been made avail able for all parts of the United States will the complete dialectal position of Northeast Texas be known.A glossary of approximately 1700 answers to the 127 items of the questionnaire is appended to the study.

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