Sorry for the long post, but to my mind this piece from the journal Southern Cultures answers your question. (Shameless plug: My wife Dale and I also have a long discussion of this business in our book 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About the South.) WHERE IS THE SOUTH? The South has been defined by a great many characteristics, but one of the most interesting definitions is where people believe that they are in the South. A related definition is where the residents consider themselves to be southerners, although this is obviously affected by the presence of non-southern migrants. Until recently we did not have the data to answer the question of where either of those conditions is met. Since 1992, however, 14 twice-yearly Southern Focus Polls conducted by the Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have asked respondents from the 11 former Confederate states, Kentucky, and Oklahoma "Just for the record, would you say that your community is in the South, or not?" Starting with the third of the series, the same question was asked of smaller samples of respondents from West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, the District of Columbia, and Missouri (all except Missouri included in the Bureau of the Census's "South"). Respondents from the 13 southern states were also asked "Do you consider yourself a Southerner, or not?," while starting with the second survey those from other states were asked "Do you consider yourself or anyone in your family a Southerner?," and if so, whether they considered themselves to be Southerners. The numbers below are based on pooled data from these surveys, which now give us big enough samples from individual states not only to characterize each state as a whole but also to say, for example, where in Texas the South ends. (A project is now underway to do just that.) It is clear from these data that if the point is to isolate southerners for study or to compare them to other Americans the definition of the South employed by the Southern Focus Poll (and, incidentally, by the Gallup Organization) makes sense, while the Bureau of the Census definiton does not. We already knew that, of course, but it's good to be able to document it. --John Shelton Reed Percent who say they are Southerners (percentage base in parentheses) Mississippi 90 (432) Louisiana 89 (606) Alabama 88 (716) Tennessee 84 (838) South Carolina 82 (553) Arkansas 81 (399) Georgia 81 (1017) North Carolina 80 (1290) Kentucky 68 (584) Texas 68 (2053) Virginia 60 (1012) Oklahoma 53 (410) Florida 51 (1791) West Virginia 25 (84) Maryland 19 (192) Missouri 15 (197) New Mexico 13 (68) Delaware 12 (25) D.C. 12 (16) Utah 11 (70) Indiana 10 (208) Illinois 9 (362) Ohio 8 (396) Arizona 7 (117) Michigan 6 (336) All others less than 6 percent. Percent who say their community is in the South (percentage base in parentheses) Alabama 98 (717) South Carolina 98 (553) Louisiana 97 (606) Mississippi 97 (431) Georgia 97 (1017) Tennessee 97 (838) North Carolina 93 (1292) Arkansas 92 (400) Florida 90 (1792) Texas 84 (2050) Virginia 82 (1014) Kentucky 79 (582) Oklahoma 69 (411) West Virginia 45 (82) Maryland 40 (173) Missouri 23 (177) Delaware 14 (21) D.C. 7 (15)
