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Secondary education as a group marker in St. Louis, Missouri

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2020

Daniel Duncan Open the ORCID record for Daniel Duncan [Opens in a new window]
Daniel Duncan*
Affiliation:
Newcastle University, UK
*
Address for correspondence: Daniel Duncan, School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Percy Building, Newcastle University, NE1 7RU, United Kingdom, [email protected]
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Abstract

This article calls attention to the saliency of secondary education within the community and its utility in constructing social categories, in order to consider how it affects linguistic variation. Older St. Louisans draw on secondary education to construct a divide between those who attended Catholic high schools and those who attended public schools. I show that speakers in a sample of older St. Louisans differ in production of the thought vowel based on education type. This effect is weakened in apparent time when we consider a larger sample that includes both older and younger speakers. I draw on Brubaker's (2004) view of groups as events and actions to argue that these categories were indexed only while they had a high degree of groupness, and suggest that social changes that led to diminished groupness between Catholics and Publics also resulted in the loss of a linguistic distinction between the groups. (Education, groups, Northern Cities Shift, Catholicism)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 50 , Issue 5 , November 2021 , pp. 667 - 694
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

*

An earlier version of this work was presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation 46. Thank you to John Singler for helpful discussion and guidance, as well as Renée Blake, Robin Dodsworth, Greg Guy, Laurel MacKenzie, Jenny Cheshire, and two anonymous reviewers for insightful comments. Data collection was supported by NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant BCS-1651102 DDRI.

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