“SEATTLETONIAN” TO “FAUX Hick”: PERCEPTIONS OF ENGLISH IN WASHINGTON STATE

This article describes a subset of data from a larger project investigating perceptions that Washington State residents have about English spoken in their state to explore dialect variation and the social and regional evaluation of it in this under-studied region. Respondents were asked to draw on a map of Washington the places where they believe people speak “differently” and to give a label for that way of speaking. The results indicate that respondents perceive eastern Washington as very different from the rest of Washington. The analysis of the results uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to create maps of areas associated with labels provided by the respondents, such as “country,” “Spanish,” “slang,” and “gangster.” It is suggested here that, in addition to providing insight on respondents' underlying theories of language and culture, these perceptions point to linguistic and sociocultural questions that should be explored further in Washington.