America and Americans / Europeans

[Donald M Lance]

on 2/22/02 10:47 AM, sagehen at sagehen at WESTELCOM.COM wrote:

>> Carmen Fought (Pitzer College) has reported to me recently that she
> has had
>> no success in convincing some of her undergraduates that there is no
>> "real" answer to the question "Where is the Midwest?"
>>
>> dInIs
> ~~~~~~~~
> I am reassured by this.  I've always had the sneaky feeling that I was
> the
> only one who didn't really know what the boundaries of "Midwest" were.
> I
> brought up the question on a western literature list a couple of years
> ago,
> but hardly anyone seemed interested in taking a stab at it.
> A. Murie
>
A little ego-plug.  You might take a look at "Regional Variation in
Subjective Dialect Divisions in the United States" in _Handbook of
Perceptual Dialectology_, Volume 1, ed. Dennis R. Preston, John Benjamins,
pp. 283-314.  Three patterns for the location of the "Midwest" emerged in
the study.

DMLance