ADS-L Digest - 6 Jul 2000 to 7 Jul 2000 (#2000-190)

[David Bowie]

From:    "A. Vine" <avine at ENG.SUN.COM>

<snip>

: It's true that Texas has been independent, had its own battle for
: independence, and so it has its own culture.  But if one is lumping
: cultures, I vote for Western.

Why does it scare me to see Texas lumped into the same cultural category as
Utah?

In any event, this discussion seems to be ignoring three very important
things:

(1) Coming up with *completely* solid geographical boundaries for cultures
(and, for that matter, dialects) is a difficult task at best. (Yes, i know
dialect atlases are possible, but they can't cover *everything*--try drawing
a coherent dialect atlas of, say, Texas while including AAVE speakers in
your sample...)

(2) More importantly, linguistic and cultural facets of a population don't
necessarily match. The question of whether Texas is culturally Western or
Southern or something else is separate from whether it is linguistically
Western or Southern or something else.

(3) Most importantly, state boundaries mean pretty much less than nothing
when talking about cultural and linguistic isoglosses, especially when those
state boundaries don't coincide with important geographic features.

David Bowie                                       Department of English
Assistant Professor                            Brigham Young University
db.list at pmpkn.net              http://humanities.byu.edu/faculty/bowied
   The opinions stated here are not necessarily those of my employer