Sunday, January 29, 2012

Mating With Migrants

Outsiders are alluring. The locals can't compete with the accent. Or can they? The art of seduction in Dallas, Texas:

In Austin and other big cities in the state — Houston, Fort Worth, Dallas, San Antonio — the Texas twang is being infiltrated by what linguists call General American English, a more-or-less Midwestern accent, the standard heard on TV and other spoken media.

Blame it on the girls, say University of Texas researchers.

"The typical pattern for any language change is always the young women," says Lars Hinrichs, assistant professor of English language and linguistics at UT and director of the Texas English Project. "If you pronounce things the new way, you have power — you're hotter. The more popular girls lead the way." ...

... "Who's picking up on this new transition? It's not the old people. It's the young people doing it," Hinrichs said. Young white females are the earliest adopters.

And like other adaptations that are steadily transforming the Texas accent, it emerged first in Dallas and its suburbs. Then it spread to Houston, then on to Austin and San Antonio, he said.

Emphasis added. I'd bet that the diffusion of General American English followed the same road those from out of state used to move to Texas. The local agents of linguistic change have to compete with the new girl, whom all the boys are chasing. We seem to be hardwired to mate with migrants.

A major variable to geographic mobility is gender. Women are more rooted in place, figuratively and literally. To be crass, a woman on the move is a whore. She's attractive because she is exotic, which makes stuck locals very uneasy. The traditional power hierarchy is upset. Migration is too damn sexy.

5 comments:

Tom Roland said...

“We seem to be hardwired to mate with migrants.” >>Seeding the blog with potentially controversial statements, are we? OK, I'll bite....

Your bet that linguistic changes “followed the same road those from out of state used to move to Texas” might be a winner. But in this wager I would place my money on the migrants from the state to the south of Texas, with their Spanish-speaking influence trumping the General American English influence of migrants from northern, eastern or western states. I think there's something more complex going on here than simply the attractiveness of “out-of-state” accents, otherwise we would see the Texas twang replaced by Spanish melodies, not General American English grunts.

Jim Russell said...

I think you underestimate the influence of the state to the south of Texas on the "indigenous" accent.

Tom Roland said...

So you mean those from the state to the south no longer count as "migrants" in this equation? I suppose they've assimilated so well that this is true.

Jim Russell said...

Anyone who relocates is a migrant. When the German influence arrived many moons ago, the migrants from the state to the south were already there.

Matthew Hall said...

It's about money. The mexicans are on average far poorer than the Anglo-Americans. That is why the midwestern accent is growing despite the demographics of Mexicans and those of mexican descent. People like to speak as the people with money speak.