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Abstract
Clarke and Oconee County, GA are two communities which are geographically located within a few miles of each other, but display strong cultural difference. Clarke County is a diverse, artistic, and politically liberal city shaped by the presence of the University of Georgia, while Oconee County is a rural, conservative, White, upper-middle-class community. Given that Southern accents are perceived as indexing rurality and conservatism, it might initially be assumed that speakers from Oconee would exhibit a higher use of Southern US English (SUSE) features than their Clarke counterparts. However, previous research has indicated that this is not the case, at least in the aggregate; instead, political beliefs, rather than county, was predictive of linguistic variation (Bridwell 2024). The present study examines an expanded version of this dataset through the lens of a new variable, rootedness, or local place attachment, which is considered in tandem with political affiliation in order to determine which ideological variable is better suited to predicting the presence and strength of SUSE features. Based on vowel trajectory data collected from sociolinguistic interviews with 20 participants from each county, results indicate that both politics and the interaction of county and rootedness are significant predictors of linguistic variation. Conservative political beliefs correspond to the use of more SUSE features; similarly, higher rootedness in Oconee County and lower rootedness in Clarke County correspond to more SUSE features. Despite the interrelatedness of the two concepts, the correlation between politics and rootedness does not emerge as significant, suggesting that both ideological metrics can be useful for predicting linguistic variation.