Although it is a common tree throughout the United States (with the exception of the Southeast), the aspen is particularly associated with the Rocky Mountain region, where tourists flock every autumn to witness the awesome beauty of these trees as their leaves change to a golden hue. In addition, the spectacle of the tree's rustling leaves has stirred interest among people around the world for centuries, giving rise to the myth that wood from the tree was used to make the cross that Jesus was crucified on, hence its leaves quiver out of fear of God's wrath (Elliot 2001: 82).

As noted in Pederson (2001: 285) and Antieau (2004, 2006: 167-68), folk speakers of Rocky Mountain English have several variants that they use in reference to aspen. As a result of an open question asking for the names of local trees and a follow-up question specifically designed to elicit the name of a tree "whose leaves shake" or that "tourists come to see," the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (LAMR) shows the following distribution of variants (on the X axis) and the number of LAMR informants* who used them (Y axis).

Thus, the figure shows that even a relatively commonplace term exhibits a great deal of lexical variation among groups of speakers. More specifically, it shows aspen(s)** to be the most commonly used variant for this item among LAMR informants, followed by quaking aspen and quaking asp, then quaker(s) and quakies, and finally, several low-frequency variants. As this blog will continue to show as it presents findings from the study of other words, this is a typical distributional pattern for lexical variants in LAMR, as well as other texts and corpora: there is usually one variant that clearly outnumbers others, then several less frequently used variants, and finally, there are the hapax legomena (or oncers) that generally comprise the bulk of unique variants in any collection of words.

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* (Out of the total number of 70 LAMR informants.) Informants were allowed to provide multiple variants, each of which is reflected in the figure. Informants who did not provide a response to this question are not represented in the figure.

** Singular and plural forms of the same variant were collapsed in this analysis; thus, in this example, aspen and aspens are represented as aspen(s), where the parentheses are used to indicate an optional element.

A word search puzzle for this collection of terms can be found here.

References

Antieau, Lamont. (2006). A Distributional Analysis of Rural Colorado English. University of Georgia dissertation.

Antieau, Lamont. (2004). “Language.” In Rick Newby (ed.), The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Regional Cultures—The Rocky Mountain Region, pp. 255-85. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Elliot, Anne. (2001). "Aspen in myth and culture." In Peter Cosgrove and Andy Amphlett (eds.), Biodiversity and Management of Aspen Woodlands, pp. 81-83. Kingussie, Scotland.

Pederson, Lee. (2001). “Dialects.” In The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume VI: English in North America, edited by John Algeo, 253-90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.