Regionalisms

A regionalism is a characteristic, usually pertaining to speech, of a geographic area. Most regionalisms that come to mind are differences in vocabulary. This might be pop vs. soda vs. coke or tennis shoe vs. sneaker. But did you know that some regionalisms are grammatical? I recently shared a tip on my social media pages about semicolon usage, and it contained a sentence with a regional grammatical construction that caught a lot of people's attention.

The crucial part of the sentence in question is "the brakes needed replaced." Some people commented that it should have been "the brakes needed to be replaced." I've been doing some research on regional grammatical constructions, and it seems that "needs replaced" is a construction wholeheartedly accepted by some and vehemently rejected by others.

Some researchers at Yale did a study in North America on what they call the need + V-en construction (need followed by a verb with a passive participle ending). In standard English, they say, this construction is deemed unacceptable. Yet they found that pockets of people throughout the US take no issue with this construction at all. You can read the full article on their findings here.

Have a look at their map of average acceptability of the sentence "My car needs fixed." There's also an interactive map at the bottom of the article with more details about the raw data used in their research. The regions where this sentence is fairly or wholeheartedly accepted cover quite a bit of the country, and not all of these areas are contiguous. I notice that Kansas and Northwest Arkansas (where I grew up and where I live now, respectively) are among the regions most accepting of this construction.

The discussion about this particular grammatical regionalism brings up a couple of larger questions: Should regionalisms be excluded from formal writing? And, if a significant portion of a population uses a certain construction, should it still be considered unacceptable? I'm not attempting to answer these questions here, but they are worth thinking about.

My dialect heat map from the quiz linked below.

​
​Language changes constantly. Just last month, Merriam-Webster added over five hundred words to the dictionary to reflect new terms being used in the English lexicon. Not everyone will have heard of all of these words, but enough people are using them that they warrant entries in a prominent dictionary. And I'm willing to bet that not everyone is using these words in the same way.

My point is that there is a difference between how language ought to be used and how language is actually used. In formal writing, those differences matter more. In informal writing, they may not matter as much. Ultimately, it's the writer who gets to decide where each piece of writing falls on that spectrum. 

As a proofreader, it's my job to fix what's wrong—​and leave what's not wrong alone. While some people might not agree with the need + V-en construction, others use it regularly. If something "needs fixed," the "to be" is implied. The truncated construction might be scoffed at by some, but no one is going to misunderstand the sentence.

What about you? If you live in the US, how has your region influenced your acceptance of the need + V-en construction? What about those of you who don't live in the US? Is this construction acceptable in your country or region? Let me know in the comments!

If you want to learn a bit more about regionalisms from an expert, check out Grammar Girl's article here. And if you'd like to have some fun and take a regional dialect quiz, this one shows you a heat map of your personal dialect. (Unsurprisingly, mine was centered around Kansas, as shown above.)