Surveying borders in a speech community

This research reports responses to a language questionnaire for an extensive set of phonological, lexical, and grammatical variables in Kansas City. Linguistic variables are modeled with conditional inference trees and random forests against demographic factors like age, race, and sex, as well as several geopolitical factors. Results show that—while Kansas Citians identify many cultural, political, and social barriers that shape life in the city—race is the primary social predictor of survey responses. Among sixteen survey items with significant predictors, race is most significant for nine. Geopolitical factors that Kansas Citians imagine as meaningful do not affect linguistic practice. Based on this finding, the article considers the “speech community” as a unit of sociolinguistic analysis and concludes that the large metropolitan area can be thought of as a single speech community, as long as the sample is racially homogenous.