The Burial Ground: A Bridge Between Language And Culture

Abstract

This paper explores the cultural and historical forces that created variation in terms for “cemetery”, including links between language and material culture, using cemetery terms found within two Linguistic Atlas data sets to demonstrate how colonial influence, cultural changes, and physical locations contribute to linguistic variation. Speakers’ lexical choices in the 1930s still show the effects of the religious and social climates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Northern and southern colonial trends were still influencing regional language use several hundred years later. Furthermore, for the LANE data we find that the physical location of historic cemeteries has an effect on speakers’ use of specific lexical items.