Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change
| Date: 28 April 2011, 07:55
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Product Description:
Recently hailed as a 2006 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title!
Print Volume Only
The Atlas of North American English provides the first overall view of the pronunciation and vowel systems of the dialects of the U.S. and Canada. The Atlas re-defines the regional dialects of American English on the basis of sound changes active in the 1990s and draws new boundaries reflecting those changes. It is based on a telephone survey of 762 local speakers, representing all the urbanized areas of North America. It has been developed by Bill Labov, one of the leading sociolinguists of the world, together with his colleagues Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg.
The book contains:
- 23 chapters that re-define the geographic boundaries of North American dialects and trace the influence of gender, age, education, and city size on the progress of sound change;
- findings that show a dramatic and increasing divergence of English in North America;
- 139 four color maps that illustrate the regional distribution of phonological and phonetic variables across the North American continent;
- 120 four color vowel charts of individual speakers.
The multimedia CD-ROM supplements the articles and maps by providing:
-a data base with measurements of more than 100,000 vowels and mean values for 439 speakers;
-the Plotnik program for mapping each of the individual vowel systems;
-extended sound samples of all North American dialects;
-multimedia applications to enhance classroom presentations.
Summary: Tracking American Accents and Pronunciation
Rating: 5
This is fascinating to see the regional dialects mapped for the United States. My husband studied linguistics, so we take an interest still even though he is retired. I've lived in Baltimore, after growing up in the midwest. I was amazed at the differences in speech. Baltimore residents say am-BU-lance, for example. Even after being away from the mid-atlantic for 15 years now, I still recognize a Virginia accent by the way they say "house." It's actually very similar to one area of Canada.
Summary: Worth waiting for: a magnificent achievement
Rating: 5
In the 1960s, William Labov went to New England to discover what had happened to English there since it had been surveyed in the 1930s. What he found opened his eyes to the speed at which linguistic change takes place, and the trip set him on a course that culminates in this Atlas, a survey of English in cities across the U. S. and Canada.
Beautifully produced in a boxed set (the other "volume" contains a CD-Rom), this is an expensive book but filled with beautiful color maps and displays, also in color, of the shifting vowels of English. The clearly-written narrative explains the mechanisms of sound change in progress and the regions of distinctive varieties.
Everyone interested in the pronunciation of English in America must consult this masterpiece.
Richard W. Bailey
Fred Newton Scott Professor of English
The University of Michigan
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