US Mental Maps of Michiganders across the State: Mapping perceptions of the US South region

Keywords: Mental maps, Michiganders, linguistic geography, U.S. South
Abstract Type: Guided Poster Abstract

Abstract

Language regard, or attitudes/beliefs on language variation, is a growing area of inquiry of linguistic geography. Studies show that language regard is affected by the respondents’ proximity to a region and degree of urbanization. The present study seeks to revisit language regard of the U.S. South from the perspective of both Lower Michiganders and Yoopers. This paper examines data from two studies: an 87-participant corpus from Michigan’s 2017 and 2018 Upper Peninsula (UP) datasets, and a 56-participant corpus from Michigan’s 2019 Lower Peninsula(LP) dataset. The datasets are both stratified by UP and LP Counties of residence, Age Groups and Gender. The County variable is sub-divided into UP/LP Regions, and Rurality. This paper examines participants’ responses obtained in a U.S. mental map task, and limited itself to the ``southern’’ related attributes and U.S. South geospatial boundaries when compared to variants, `Texas South’ or `Cajun’. All mental map geospatial boundaries were digitized/analyzed using ArcGIS 10.7. The findings reveal differences in the aggregated geospatial boundaries of the U.S. South differentiated by Area/Rurality, but not Region. There is west-east shift in the locus of the ``southern’’ geospatial boundary. West-side Michiganders view the ``deep South’’ to be located more west, Alabama, while the E-side Michiganders view is located more east, Georgia; this is true for the less urban Yoopers and urban Lower Michiganders. However, the rural UP counties do not appear to follow this pattern. Such findings suggest that Lower Michiganders and Yoopers share a similar west-east distinction in language regard of the U.S. South.