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Urban Matters: Current approaches in variationist sociolinguistics
Edited by Arne Ziegler, Stefanie Edler and Georg Oberdorfer
[Studies in Language Variation 27] 2021
► pp. 61–88

Urban/suburban contact as stylized social practice

ORCID logo | Newcastle University

This study highlights the importance of urban/suburban contact to linguistic variation. I explore two case studies of intra-metropolitan contact and their effect on variation in the English of Greater St. Louis, USA. Data comes from 14 white women born 1971–1991 from outer-ring suburbs in St. Charles County who differ in their length of commute, and twelve white women born 1935–1952 from the City of St. Louis who differ in whether they moved to suburbs in adulthood. The results suggest that in contact situations, the city and suburb accommodate to one another: commuting towards the city yields more ʻcity-likeʼ speech, while moving away from the city yields more ʻsuburb-likeʼ speech. However, identity mediates these contact situations through stylized social practice.

Keywords: suburbs, contact, migration, commuting, social practice, Northern Cities Shift, St. Louis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Contact and identity in metropolitan areas
    • 2.1Migration to suburbs
    • 2.2Commuting to cities
    • 2.3A role for identity?
  • 3.Greater St. Louis
    • 3.1Background
    • 3.2Linguistic features
  • 4.Methods
    • 4.1Interviews
    • 4.2Questionnaire
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Production
    • 5.2Questionnaire
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 16 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/silv.27.03dun
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