#lexical variation

A couple of years ago I helped the Linguistics Roadshow produce a survey and some very lovely maps of word variation across Australia. It was a nifty illustration of how most people who rhyme ‘dance’ with ‘aunts’ are from South Australia:

It also showed the battlelines in the potato cake/scallop wars:

I’ve teamed up with Linguistics Roadshow crew once again to turn these maps into a classroom activity, aimed at teaching Australian high school students about language variation. From the activity description on the Superlinguo resources page:

This activity will introduce students to some of the differences in Australian English, and encourage them to consider reasons why languages vary and change. Students will first think about which words they use for particular things, and then explore data showing the patterns across Australia via an interactive map.

You can find this activity, along with others on the Superlinguo resources page.

See also:

Original post on the results of the Australian Words Survey

In today's post, I look at variants of "God" that were elicited from native English speakers in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming as part of a Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies. These terms were elicited during a set of questions on church life of the form "What is the name of the being who one prays to at church?" The quantitative distribution is illustrated in Figure 1 below.

As illustrated, "God" was the most frequent response, by far, but many other variants were also offered, often as additional responses to follow-up questions. Some of these variants appear as the inevitable, perhaps, result of the concept of the Holy Trinity, in which any of the three components can be selected for. Many of the answers also offer a view of this concept as masculine and patriarchal.