The Hegemony of Four Cultural Regions

After independence, all four Anglo-American cultures began to expand very rapidly. Each of the original areas in Massachusetts Bay, tidewater Virginia, the Delaware Valley and the Appalachian highlands were what folklorists call “cultural hearths” or “seedbeds” from which four different populations overspread the nation.

These various groups intermingled very little, except along the edges of the great migration-streams. Even there, they tended to settle in homogenous communities, and regarded one another as aliens. In south-central Illinois, for example, an area settled mostly from the southern highlands, a New Englander named Lucy Maynard wrote, “Our neighbors are principally from Indiana and Kentucky, some from Virginia, all friendly but very different from our people in their manners and language and every other way.” An English traveler William Oliver observed in 1843 that pioneers from the various cultural regions were as unlike one another “as if they were different nations.”³⁰

Traces of these separate migrations are still visible today in the regional patterns of American speech. During the mid-twentieth century, linguistic geographers discovered four major dialect regions in the continental United States. They are the areas in which the four English folkways expanded after independence.

One area, the “northern speech region,” included New England, upstate New York, northern Ohio and Indiana, much of Michigan and Wisconsin, the northern plains, and the Pacific North West, together with islands of urban speech at Denver, Salt Lake City and San Francisco. A second area of “midland speech” covered the middle states, the middle west, and the middle latitudes from Pennsylvania to the Pacific coast, broadening outward in the Mississippi Valley; its cultural hearth was the Delaware Valley. The third speech region, called “coastal south,” extended from Virginia to Florida along the Atlantic coast and the Gulf of Mexico. Its soft southern drawl of this region was carried from the Chesapeake. The fourth speech region was “highland southern,” from the Appalachia and the old southwest across the lower Mississippi Valley to Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Southern California. Similar patterns also appeared in material culture, vernacular architecture, onomastic customs, folklore and many other indicators. All of this evidence describes an historical process by which four regional cultures expanded throughout the United States.