The Atlas of North American English


The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change is an overview of the pronunciation patterns in all the major urbanized regional dialects of the English language spoken in the United States and Canada. It is the result of a large-scale survey by linguists William Labov, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg. Speech data was collected, mainly during the 1990s, by means of telephone interviews with individuals in metropolitan areas in all regions of the U.S. and Canada. Using acoustic analysis of speech from these interviews, ANAE traces sound changes in progress in North American English, and defines boundaries between dialect regions based on the different sound changes taking place in them.
The Atlas of North American English received the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award at the 2008 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America.

Notation

ANAE employs a "binary" phonemic notation system designed to be maximally abstract and economical so that it can be used to describe chain shifts with ease. The checked vowels are represented by single letters, and each of the diphthongs and historically long vowels is represented by a nuclear vowel followed by a glide,, or. represents any kind of front upglide, represents any kind of back upglide, and represents an inglide or long monophthong. The following tables provide a comparison between ANAE's notation and.
ANAEExample
bit
bet
bat
foot
hut
hot

ANAEExample
beat
bait
quoit
bite
suit
boot
boat
bout
balm
bought

ANAEExample
fear
fair
fur
far
moor
four
for

Overview of results

The Atlas defines several major dialect regions on the basis of distinctive phonological patterns and sound changes taking place in them—often chain shifts among the vowel phonemes. Major regions include:
On the basis of changes such as the Northern Cities Vowel Shift and the Canadian Shift, the Atlas concludes that regions are becoming more dissimilar to each other, and thus the dialect diversity of North America is increasing.