Indiana Historical Linguistics 101

I’d always been told that the Midwestern dialect was the most neutral in the United States – the dialect that news broadcasters were trained to use when reporting the evening news. So I was a little confused when we moved here to Muncie and kept hearing people talk like they were from backwoods Kentucky or the hills of Tennessee. Not everyone talks this way, mind you – quite a few people do in fact speak very neutrally. But that handful of people who dip and drawl when they talk have thrown me through a linguistic loop! Like the friendly young lady who sold us a vacuum a few weeks back – she could lay it on thick! But as our casual chatting developed, it became apparent that she had been born and raised in East Central Indiana – so where did her twangy dialect come from?

Well, yesterday, during a most random office conversation, I was enlightened. So get comfortable while I share my newfound wealth of knowledge.

In the mid-1880s, natural gas was discovered here in East Central Indiana. It was so plentiful, and quickly attracted so many manufacturers (because who wouldn’t be enticed by free natural gas, which burned hotter, cleaner, and generally much better than coal, and as well as other the equally generous offers of cheap land and railroad access?) that this period became known as the Indiana Gas Boom. New companies and factories of all sorts popped up everywhere here, but it was the glass manufacturers that grew the fastest. Companies like Ball Brothers Glass Manufacturing (think canning jars), drawn to the area’s apparently unending natural gas supply, planted themselves in the area and grew rapidly.

An abundance of swiftly growing industries demands an immediate need for manpower. For reasons unknown to myself, these companies decided that they would heavily recruit workers from the hills of eastern Tennessee. (Perhaps this was because the auto parts manufacturing companies took all the ready recruits from Kentucky and so the natural gas boomers had to gather farther east.) Before you knew it, hoards of twang-talking mountain folk were relocating in East Central Indiana. These laborers, though eager for work with high wages, always planned, however, to one day soon return to their “homeland.” They considered their time in Indiana to be only temporary.

Because of the wealth of natural gas freely available, and the monetary wealth it consequently brought to the area, the citizens of East Central Indiana grew a bit prideful. They burned their gas constantly and flamboyantly. But at the turn of the 20^th century, there were no state and federal agencies to oversee energy efficiency, and before they all knew it, the gas ran out. The Gas Boom ended almost as quickly as it had started.

You would think, then, that the East Tennessean laborers, who had openly planned to go back home would have done just that. But they didn’t. They stayed put. For three, four, and now going on five generations, they’ve stayed put. Funny thing is, though…they still talk about going home to Tennessee. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren of these original laborers, who have all been born and raised in this part of Indiana and who have only vacationed in their “home state,” still talk about going home to Tennessee. This attitude of transience is often evident in the homes of these people. Old and long in disrepair, these people ask each other what need is there to fix anything because, after all, they’d be going back to Tennessee soon anyway, so why bother? Only it was forty years ago that the front screen door grew a hole, but it still isn't fixed, and you still haven’t gone back to Tennessee.

So there you have it: an explanation for the East Central Indiana Twang and a historical linguistics lesson all wrapped up into one educational piece of cultural enlightenment. Delicious, wasn’t it?