Regional grammar can be just as rich and diverse as regional vocabulary. The Yale Grammatical Diversity Project maps grammatical features that vary across American English, using research and survey data to show where they cluster. Examples include double modals such as might could, constructions such as needs washed or needs fixed in the Ohio River Valley, and so don’t I in the Northeast. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Yale Grammatical Diversity Project Maps Regional American Grammar”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.
And I’m Grant Barrett.
When we talk about language on this program, we spend a great deal of time talking about the Lexus. That’s the great store of words that we have at our disposal. And my car out in the parking lot. It’s L-E-X-I-S, Lexus. And it’s related to lexicon and lexicography and those words.
What we talk about a lot less, actually, is grammar, right? And so I wanted to share with you a project called the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project. What they’ve done is map the different ways that we speak in the United States. There are some modes of speech, some grammar that we have that aren’t universal, and they belong to particular kinds of people or a particular region of the country. And some of these we’ve talked about on the program before.
Oh, yeah, we hear about them all the time, right? Like double modals, like might could, right? Or needs fixed in or needs washed, stuff like that. Or so don’t I, right? We’ve talked about all of these. And so these folks at this Yale Grammatical Diversity Project have done a survey of the academic research that’s out there. They’ve talked to people, just regular Joes and Janes, and they put little pins in a Google map so you can see that there tends to be clusters for this kind of stuff.
I love it. I really love it because it’s actually doing a certain kind of job that I don’t think is done enough, which is to show you in a graphic form what you ordinarily talk about in words. Does that make sense?
Sure. So much of talking about grammar is hard to do on the radio because you can’t compare sentences very easily. Or it’s easy to forget the slight variations between the two lines so you can really understand how the grammar varies. It’s interesting.
So I love this. So you get a visual then on this site where people say might could or needs washed, which is concentrated in what? Indiana, Western Ohio. Yeah, actually the Ohio River Valley. And for example, so don’t I is clustered in the Northeast. How cool.
Yeah, it’s pretty great, right? Yeah, so it’s a picture of us grammatically. And it looks like a growing project, so it’s the kind of place you might check in once in a while. And that project, again, is the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project. You can Google that. It’ll be the first hit. And we’ll link to it on the website as well.
If you’ve got questions about grammar or anything else related to language or reading or writing or speaking well, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.
