What is the Portland Dialect Study?

Downtown Portland with the Cascade Mountains in the background

The goal of the Portland Dialect Study (PDS) is to characterize the speech and the people of an important urban center in the Pacific Northwest. At the north end of the Willamette River Valley near where the Willamette joins the Columbia, the city of Portland sits astride the Willamette and has been many things to many people. Here are some typical opinions from different periods found in Carl Abbott’s recent book, Greater Portland, Urban Life and Landscape in the Pacific Northwest (2001, University of Pennsylvania Press):

• “Slowness”
• “Smug”
• “Solidness, venerability, dignity, conservatism”
• “To know what Portland would do under the stress of any given circumstance, it is only necessary to imagine how Calvin Coolidge would act.”
• “Portland remains casual, friendly, and above all, available.”
• “Portlanders are pleased provincials, and Portland’s conceit is the satisfaction of self-sufficiency.”
• “Portland presents a civic character of complexities … though many of its leading men have wanted the place to become another New York or Chicago, just as many others have been quite content with the status of the moment, whether that moment was 1850, 1900, or 1950”

In terms of its thoughtful city planning, Portland has also been seen as a city with vision limiting sprawl with its famous Urban Growth Boundary. Portland is also the most ethnically homogeneous American City, and the city and its state have not been hospitable to those not contributing to its homogeneity. Abbott concludes his introductory chapter with a summary:

• In Portland, in short, we see multiple meanings of community, multiple understandings of the future, and multiple uses of the past in service to that future (Abbott 2001:16)

Through the study of Portlanders’ language, the PDS seeks to uncover those meanings and understandings, to get at what it means to be a Portlander and whether Portlanders feel united in their orientation to Portland. The PDS does so by collecting and analyzing linguistic data from a cross-section of native Portlanders.

These people represent different social constituencies of the city, and vary as to age, gender, ethnicity, class, and other social categories. The PDS seeks to document the changing social identities of Portland residents through the changing and variable language varieties spoken by its citizens.

Contact us

If you are interested in participating as a subject in the Portland Dialect Study, please send an e-mail message to childst@pdx.edu.

Last updated: Sept 2003