Zachariah Pingenot

Linguistic Trends Across Populated Regions of the Continuous United States

Abstract: In the United States, a long history of racism and cultural domination has been apparent in both the everyday and working world. Considering the vast diversity of the country, it has become common for certain groups of people (especially minorities and immigrants) to change the way they present themselves out in public. While scholars have acknowledged a change in speech patterns being more prevalent with some people, there is a gap in the understanding of how this changes between areas of a higher diversity and a lower diversity. This study utilizes a survey approach using a likert scale system for quantitative questions and provides a more open qualitative questions to provide a nuanced view into the results of the quantitative data. The purpose of this was to identify if individuals believed they would change aspects of their personality and speech while in public. The findings of this study suggest that since tested variables produced a p-value of over 0.05 in each instance, no conclusion can be applied for selected groups of people. The results, however, when looking at how demographics performed individually, reaffirmed the general scholarly consensus that minorities and immigrants in the US were more likely to cover aspects of personality and speech. These findings suggest a need for further research into the performance of individuals in diverse and non-diverse regions as the extent to how groups will change on the basis of location is still unknown.

Keywords: Diversity, Changes in Speech, Minorities, Immigrants, Changes in Personality