Them and us - linguistic, mental, and social boundaries in a local community

The cartographic representation of linguistic borders and areas on maps is a central part of dialectology, and has furthermore had a revival with the advent of computers and information technology. However, geographical space, prototypically represented as drawings on a map, is often taken for granted, as something given, even in modern sociolinguistics. But geographical space is also the subject of cognitive and social construal. In this article, I present a small example of such a construal. I try to show how a very basic linguistic coding of spatial relations in a small Danish community (using directional adverbs like ud ‘out' and ind ‘in') is part of more complex conceptualizations of the specific geographical space in question (the island, and community, of Helnæs off the southeast coast of Funen) - conceptualizations which can be connected to specific, socially entrenched discourses and practices (centre vs. periphery).