Much has been written on the generic names for sweet, carbonated non-alcoholic beverages in American English and their areal distribution throughout the United States. For instance, the question of soda vs. pop (vs. coke) is one of the few linguistic questions with a website devoted to its study, and results from an online dialect survey were recently used to make heat maps, one of which showed the areal distribution of lexical variants for these beverages. Earlier studies on this question took data from the Dictionary of American Regional English, for instance, into account (e.g. Schneidemesser 1996). Several of these studies show the primacy of coke as the generic name for soft drinks in the South and pop throughout the North, with large pockets of soda usage in New England and California, Arizona, and New Mexico, and smaller pockets of soda use in eastern Wisconsin and in the Greater St. Louis area.

This post looks at the distribution of such terms in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (LAMR), which comprises 70 speakers, many of whom were elderly at the time of interviewing and were lifelong residents of rural communities in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. Figure 1 shows the words that LAMR informants provided in their interviews when asked for the generic term for soft drinks that people used in the community and that they themselves occasionally used in relatively free discourse elsewhere in their interviews.

As the figure shows, pop was indeed the most frequent term used in this regard, just as earlier studies have found for the area and for a large portion of the North in general, and it is used throughout the region. However, the data also show that, as is often the case for linguistic variation, it is not all members of a group -- in this case, LAMR informants -- use one form or another (or another); rather, there is a much more varied and diverse landscape in terms of the use of these variants. For instance, despite the Middle Rockies being a relatively great distance from areas in which soda is the preferred variant, soda(s), soda pop(s), and soda water all occur in the collection, and while not presenting a challenge to pop as the top-ranked variant, they do battle with each other for runner-up position. Interspersed among lexical variants on the left side of the figure are instances of NA (not asked), which may have occurred with this frequency because of the large number of Mormons interviewed for the survey and the oft-misunderstood policy on the use of soft drinks by members of the Mormon Church, which was only recently clarified. NR (no response) represents the number of informants who did not give a clearly valid response to the prompt, for instance, those who only offered an identical form suggested by the fieldworker (resulting in a doubt flag being thrown by the analyst). And even the supposed Southern variant Coke appears in the mix for these Middle Rockies speakers. The map below shows the geographical locations of the informants and, to some extent, the responses they provided.

Thus, in the analysis of generic names for "soft drinks" in the Middle Rockies, we find a linguistic variable that is not chaotic in its output distribution, providing as it does a relatively frequent and stable variant at the top of the heap (pop). Rather, we find a complex situation that reflects the linguistic experience of people in the community as being exposed to variant forms of this lexeme in their own travels, as well as from friends and family and, even, strangers and the media. It might also be the case that individual informants were influenced in this regard during different points in their lives, which may have seen shifts in the popularity and overall use of individual variants.

References

Schneidemesser, Luanne von. (1996). "Soda or Pop?" Journal of English Linguistics 24(4): 270-87.