The other California [electronic resource] : marginalization and sociolinguistic variation in Trinity County
Keywords: Linguistics.

Little is known about English in the American West, especially in rural towns. In fact, most of our ideas about linguistic practices across the US are derived from research on urban neighborhoods and suburban towns. I address this gap in the literature through ethnographic analyses of language variation in remote Trinity County, California. In a sense, these analyses unpack what it means to be Country in California. During the Dust Bowl era, residents of the South and Midlands dialect regions moved to California en masse. Thus, Southern- and Midlands-derived features are in competition with urban California variants in the county today. And while the urban-rural polarity has previously been argued to organize people's dialect perceptions and language attitudes (Lippi-Green 1997; Niedzielski & Preston 2003; Hall-Lew & Stephens 2011; Greene 2010), my dissertation is the first to investigate the effects of rural marginalization on language in the West through analyses of actual language practice. Trinity County, California is about the size of Vermont, but it is home to less than 14,000 people. The mountainous county flouts popular stereotypes of California as a state of sunny, easy living. And as Trinity County is far more rural than San Francisco County, rurality is recursive (Irvine & Gal 2000) within the county, too. The well-funded county seat of Weaverville (pop. 3,600) is growing more bourgeois, while the next biggest town, Hayfork (pop. 2,386), is more dominated by survivalists than ever—largely due to the bourgeoning marijuana industry that's taken root there. Similarly, residents of the 40-400-person towns in Trinity County's southern half, known collectively as Southern Trinity, are actively resistant to encroaching urbanization and gentrification. I examine how dialect features commonly associated with the South and Midlands dialect regions are used by Trinitarians as part of tough, survivalist personae that oppose California's coastal urbanity, opulence, and leisure. In particular, I discuss correlations between the pin-pen merger and Trinitarians' outdoorsy lifestyles. I then analyze residents' variable uses of TRAP and DRESS, two vowels involved in the Northern California Vowel Shift and the Southern Vowel Shift. I show that TRAP is being backed and lowered by young, less rural women—the demographic that would be expected to lead a sound change in progress. However, DRESS, like the pin-pen merger, correlates most strongly with Trinitarians' outdoorsy ideologies and lifestyles. The data suggest that less educated White men may even be raising DRESS, not simply refraining from participating in the DRESS-lowering predicted by the Northern California Vowel Shift. This is important because the raising of DRESS is particularly strongly linked, sociohistorically and ideologically, to the South. So there is some Country in Trinity County, and it is defined both by lessened participation in the Northern California Vowel Shift and participation in the Southern Vowel Shift. Finally, I explore how Trinity County's American Indians navigate the social, linguistic, and economic competition between their Northern California home and the state's metropolises. Their speech patterns are found to be both similar to and different from those of the White speakers.