The Secret Life of Pronouns_ What Our Words Say About Us - James W. Pennebaker [113]
What accounts for these regional differences? As we have seen with the language style matching, people quickly adjust their speaking styles to others around them. The more time spent conversing, the more individuals begin seeing their worlds in similar ways. As a general rule, my neighbors have the same weather, eat similar foods, share the same community events, and deal with the same schools, tax collectors, stores, and bureaucracies as I do. The people in my community share many of the same issues with those in the next town and, to a certain degree, with those in the neighboring state. But as I travel farther and farther away from home, the weather, food, cultures, and concerns begin to change. As the social and physical environments change, so do the ways people approach their worlds and talk with others.
ALTHOUGH LANGUAGE DIFFERENCES should become more pronounced over greater distances, some variations in language can spring up in neighborhoods separated by only a few blocks where weather, terrain, ethnicity, social class, and every other factor is similar. I grew up in an oil-boom town in West Texas, where most families would move in for about four years before being transferred elsewhere. Even with the constant migration, new neighborhood children would quickly adopt accents and slang consistent with that neighborhood.
Even within schools, researchers have been able to isolate different language patterns among different subgroups. In an important analysis of a Detroit high school in the early 1980s, Penelope Eckert demonstrated that the language of the school’s jocks was as distinctive as that of its burnouts. Not unlike most secondary schools in the world, the different tightly knit groups adopted their own language styles in a way that reflected their group’s identity.
It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that different schools in the same geographical region could develop their own language styles. We have found evidence for this by analyzing over fifty thousand college admissions essays submitted by students who were accepted at the University of Texas at Austin over several years. Working with the school’s admissions office, linguist David Beaver and I looked at about two thousand essays from students from nine different high schools surrounding a single large metropolitan area in Texas. The students from the various high schools did equally well in high school and their first year in college and varied only modestly in their social class and ethnic makeup. Nevertheless, the ways they used pronouns, articles, prepositions, and other function words in their essays differed from school to school. In other words, each school had its own linguistic fingerprint.
College admissions essays, like This I Believe stories, are unique forms of writing. Most people will write something like them only a few times in their lives—if ever. Usually, the authors sit alone in their rooms (or coffee shops) and reflect on some of the bigger issues in their lives. Their stories reflect their families, their friends and community, and their society. The inner voices that guide their word choices are driven by the ways they think, what they attend to, their emotional states at the time, and their language history.
It is little wonder that self-reflective essays mirror people’s sense of place and the groups with which they spend most of their time. Even with relatively crude computer models, we can do much better than chance at estimating which part of the country, what city, and possibly what part of a city a person is from by the ways they use function words in their essays. If we are analyzing transcripts of people in conversations, these same function words provide hints to what people are doing, the situations