As we would expect, the area of New England between New York and Boston is not neutral ground for baseball fans. You’ve got your fervent Yankees fans closer to New York, and your die-hard Sox believers outside of Boston. A map of the boundary demarcating Sox and Yankees territory in the New York Times this morning got me thinking.
The Connecticut river marks a historic dividing line. Those east of the Connecticut river don’t pronounce the /r/ after a vowel, and pronounce the words can’t, dance, half, and bath differently. This is usually attributed to settlement patterns. Settlers from the Massachusetts Bay colony expanded southward until they hit less favorable land between the Thames and Connecticut river. Western New England, further south along the coast, was settled by English settlers who had not spend much time in the Massachusetts bay colony, and therefore had not picked up the culture or speaking patterns of Eastern New England.
In the map below, the orange line shows the settlement line between Eastern and Western New England, and the yellow line shows the dividing line between those who pronounce /r/ at the end of words and those who don't.
from Mary, Darling, Make Me Merry; Say You’ll Marry Me:Tense-Lax Neutralization in the Linguistic Atlas of New England, by Aaron J. Dinkin
This interesting linguistic and settlement history in Connecticut produces maps that fairly track the boundary between Sox and Yankees fans. Could this be where our team loyalty comes from?
2 comments:
btw, dear readers, the above comment is written by my brother, who is doing his Ph.D. in linguistics, and who has generally been obsessed with dialect & language stuff like this his whole life. (what I'm saying is he knows what he's talking about)
Born, bred and living in CT, I can only express my dismay. All three offspring are Red Sox fans, despite being brought up outside of New Haven. The triumph of the infracaninophile (yeah... look it up) over good sense? What's a Dad to do? I stay up nights.
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