The Speech Island of the American Bottoms: A Problem in Social History

W ITHIN A FEW YEARS, several new linguistic atlases for regions of the United States will be in print. Their maps will raise questions about the social forces active in this country a century and more ago, forces that remain elusive, since records of the lives of ordinary people are at best fragmentary. Fortunately, the work of the social historian offers the dialectologist an array of methods and ideas to apply to problems raised by the atlases. This paper considers a phenomenon noted over the years by several dialectologists closely associated with the Linguistic Atlas of the North Central States and related studies; it shows that some issues arising from Atlas data are not so much purely linguistic questions as problems in social history. More than twenty years ago Albert Marckwardt's initial dialect maps of the North Central states set off several islands or sharply delineated geographical areas of usage different from that of the surrounding area. Two of these, the Lead Region of Illinois and Wisconsin, and the Marietta colony of Ohio, have received extensive attention elsewhere. A third speech island, however, has not been adequately accounted for. This area, the part of Illinois opposite Saint Louis, once known as the American Bottoms, was delineated on Marckwardt's third map by a single isogloss indicating the presence of the Northern term stone boat in the midst of an otherwise Midland dialect area.