Source: Wiki Commons

Last week, I came across an interesting article in the Washington Post about the Chesapeake Bay. The piece was written about five years ago, but is still no less important to the full understanding of the bay’s effects on this region.

The headline:

“Bay’s Dialects Slowly Dying: As City Encroaches and Watermen Leave, Linguists Try to Preserve Vernacular”

During this course spring and summer, we’ll explore how the bay’s restoration rhetoric and efforts impacted the citizens in the Northeast region. Seafood, agriculture and pollution will undoubtedly be hot topics. But from a culture standpoint, the linguistics of the people on the coast of the bay are as much a telltale sign of the bay’s vitality as any other factor.

“*Now, linguists are trying to record and preserve these ways of speech. They fear that soon the bay will be overtaken by a suburb’s interchangeable sense of place — and that the land and language here will be the same as anywhere else.”

I’m very much interested in the differing dialects among the many different coasts in the six states that the bay touches. Though there are a “vast array of vocabularies and accents” along the bay, there is something to be said about language as a preserver of history and community. As with gentrification, the language of an area is altered by the incoming group. In the case of the bay, language is becoming more homogenized toward mainstream culture (“kyar” becomes “car or “Bawlmer” becomes “Baltimore”).

How does this linguistic change relate to the conditions of the bay? Is it mere correlation or does one’s alteration cause the other’s?