Dialectical Variation in Contra Dance

Spoken language usually exhibits dialectical variation. Most of the variation is phonological, with specific sounds being pronounced differently in different regions. This is not, however, specific to speech; we find the same thing in contra dance. Contra is composed of short figures comparable to phonemes, and the patterns of variation in these figures suggest regional and social dialects. As with spoken dialects, the variation is not large enough to keep people from different regions from being able to dance with one another; regional differences tend to be largely alternate conventions about hand placement as opposed to full body movement. Contra dance has other parallels with natural language and this paper argues that linguistic methods are generally applicable. Thirty two weekly or monthly dances and four dance festivals, mostly restricted to the Eastern United States, were examined for this paper, providing data for isogloss maps of the variant forms. From these maps one dialect, a north eastern one, is apparent but the data suggests a dialect continuum for interpreting the variation over the rest of the studied area.∗ If I tell someone “that table is black” I am communicating something about the properties of a particular table, and perhaps through pragmatics I communicate something more by ∗I would like to thank everyone who was helpful in putting this thesis together. These include Alice Kaufman, David German, David Chudziki, David Casserly, and Miranda Weinberg, my informants on dances I was unable to visit; Emily Gasser and Annie Fredrickson, who gave feedback on drafts; Ted Fernald, my second faculty reader; and Donna Jo Napoli, my thesis adviser.