People move more often and over longer distances than ever before. What does this mean for our dialect words? Do mobile individuals take their local dialect words with them, or do they pick up the word used in their new village, town, or city?
The maps below follow people who took our survey and told us that they had moved, tracking their movements from where they reported growing up to where they live now. We focussed on words with the strongest local patterns, then looked at what happens when people move into those areas, or away from them.
The shaded dialect-word ‘areas’ show where a word was especially common in our survey. This doesn’t mean that everyone there uses that word, or that people outside the area never do. Instead, the maps show the area where each dialect word has its strongest concentration of users.
Moving into a new area
We found that moving into a new area doesn’t automatically mean picking up the local word. In fact, people were much more likely to carry dialect words with them than to adopt new ones after moving. When people did report using the local word, they were most likely to do so after moving only a short distance. This may be because dialect areas don’t have neat borders: someone moving 30 miles may already know or hear a close variant of a regional word.
Moving away from a dialect area
For people who moved away from a dialect area, family was especially important. Across the board, people were more likely to keep local dialect words after moving if they had grown up in the same place as both parents. This suggests that dialect words aren’t just tied to places on a map; they’re tied to family, childhood and a shared sense of where we are from.
Moving south
People moving south were even more likely to keep words from where they grew up than people moving north. This was especially clear among those southward movers with dual northern parental roots, while those with one northern and one southern parent were less likely to report using their local words after moving. This may be because their dialect input at home was more mixed, or because they had a less fixed sense of one shared family place.
Family influences
This fits with another finding from the survey: over 60% of reported dialect words were learned from nuclear family. In other words, dialect words often come from the people closest to us.
In the playground
School-age speakers, however, were the least likely to carry local dialect words into a new place. At that age, the playground may be more important than the dinner table – friends and classmates can have a powerful influence on the words young people use, sometimes more so than our families. We also know that school-age speakers are using fewer traditional dialect words overall, meaning there may be fewer local words for them to carry with them in the first place.
Mobility doesn’t make dialects disappear
Overall, mobility doesn’t make dialects disappear. Moving can sometimes weaken older local patterns, but it can also carry dialect words into new places. The strongest patterns of retention show that dialect words are rooted in family, identity, place and belonging.
