The Influence of Settlement Patterns
on the Dialects of New England

by Noreen Swanson

If attitudes are stereotypical, how then can one account for the plethora of evidence that our own senses and numerous studies have found supporting linguistic differences between geographic areas? In order to interpret these differences accurately, it is necessary to note that all of the studies have either explicitly or implicitly, as a result of biased sampling methods, detailed a concomitant correlation between dialect and social variables. By subjecting linguistic data to multivariate analysis, researchers can observe that the confluence of geographic and sociological factors responsible for speech

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variation within our country, and especially within New England, has a strong correlation with settlement patterns dating back as far as the first English colonies and that the employment of an historic approach in which linguistic information from the past and present is compared can yield information about the importance of cities as the source by which future language trends can be projected.          When the first English colonists landed on Roanoke Island off the coast of North Carolina in 1585, the land that would become the United States was inhabited almost exclusively by Native Americans. Spain had explored some of the southwest, but its colonization of the eastern part of the continent was limited to the area around St. Augustine in Florida. It took nearly 130 years, from the Spanish settlement at St. Augustine in 1565 to the English colonization of Georgia in 1733, for the East Coast to become settled by Europeans (Figure 1). The majority of these newcomers had left the south and midland areas of England for economic and religious reasons (Figure 2). Most were from the middle or poorer classes, although a small group of well-educated, upper-class men of affairs also came. Taken as a whole, these settlers were better educated, physically stronger, and materially better off than the average English citizen.          All of these attributes were important to the colonists' survival in a new, largely virgin land. In addition, economic and social factors also played a role. Money was needed to buy supplies from overseas until goods could be produced in the colonies. Meanwhile, land had to be cleared, laws had to be made, children had to be taught. Most importantly, food had to be raised. The agricultural population that was thus formed during this period was fairly evenly distributed around port cities. Group cohesion within each of the settlement pods, or clusters of immigrants, was strong, the result of shared

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religious and economic centers. The port cities maintained close ties with England through trade and became cultural centers that dominated their surrounding areas. These seaports tended to preserve some of the class distinctions of the English system they sought to emulate in the new colonies.          One way of maintaining a social hierarchy was through the use of language. While the backcountry and frontier areas of the New World were, of necessity, more democratic and the language therefore tended to be more leveled, the traders in the port cities dealt with educated, well-to-do men from England on a regular basis and hence their language reflected their contacts. By dint of their location, the people in the port cities also had greater access to written materials from England, materials that would have been printed in the upper-class south-east Midland dialect which William Caxton, the originator of the printing press, favored and which was in the process of becoming the standard for written English. This dialect, while not yet Standard British English, was more prestigious than the northern dialects of England (Graddol 140-152). Three of the main phonological features of this favored dialect were the merger of long and short o, a rounded [a] rather than [æ] in words like can't, and the constriction of preconsonantal [r] in words like barn. The vowel patterns noted can be seen in the sonnets of the area's most famous inhabitant, William Shakespeare: "For how do I hold thee but by thy granting / . . . / The cause of this faire guift in me is wanting (5-7) and "They that haue powre to hurt, and will doe none,/ . . . Who mouing others, are themselues as stone" (75.1-3).          Yet the language in the colonies did not maintain the sharp social divisions found in England. Instead, there was a continuum from cultivated speech through common

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speech to folk speech which generally corresponded to the shift from urban areas to farm country, and finally to secluded areas (Kurath, Word 5).           While each colony maintained contact with England, however, each settlement pod in the New World was relatively isolated from the other pods because of the demands and limitations of the wilderness. Travel was both difficult and dangerous; moreover, other colonies were not likely to have the goods needed by the settlers. Communication and trade were therefore focused overseas. Had the settlements been totally isolated, a host of new languages would have developed over the next several generations. Instead, because of continued contact with the mother country, language developed fairly independently in each area and over time became distinct regional dialects.           This process can be clearly seen by looking at the settlement patterns of New England. Although the Pilgrims who landed in Plymouth in 1620 were the first Europeans to settle in New England, their small numbers and the limited geographic area they inhabited kept them from having a great deal of influence on language. Instead, two dominant centers settled by the earliest colonists had a much larger effect on the region's language: the Massachusetts Bay area, first colonized in 1628 by Puritans, and an offshoot, the lower Connecticut River Valley area. The Connecticut settlement was founded in 1635 by several new families from England who had traveled overland from the Boston area in search of more and better land in the Hartford area. It is noteworthy that this settlement area had no nucleus; no port city served as the unifying cultural center for the region. Instead, colonists continued to arrive from southeastern England and

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settle along the shore of the Connecticut River and along the coastline in Saybrook, New Haven, Milford, Guilford, and New London. By 1675, almost fifty years after the first Puritans arrived in New England, newcomers had settled the length of Connecticut's coastline and colonists from Massachusetts Bay had pushed north into New Hampshire and Penobscot Bay in Maine. The two settlements did not have intensive contact for several generations, in large part because of their separation by the sparsely populated, rugged, hill country of eastern Connecticut and central Massachusetts. Over time, however, the two centers spread inland, especially along the rivers, where they met and mixed in Springfield. From there they continued to spread north as far as Northfield. Another smaller settlement area had been started in the Rhode Island area in 1638, meanwhile, when Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and others fled the strict rule of the Puritans in Massachusetts (Kurath Handbook 62-104).           While the strictness of the Puritans created division among some colonists who disagreed with the exclusion of other beliefs on which the Puritan ethic rested, the sect's obsession with purity did temper the social and geographic linguistic division which might have resulted between Boston and its outlying areas had many in the city and surrounding countryside not shared the desire for a unified language. The Puritan group who settled Massachusetts Bay, most commonly associated with a wish to purify the Church of England, also wished to cleanse England from 'the Norman yoke' which had existed since the Norman conquest in 1066 and by which "the continuity of English culture was ruptured and the continued existence of the English language threatened" (Graddol 120). Puritans championed a pure English language and set forth the

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"possibility for an understanding of English as a 'national' language capable of uniting all English people in the eyes of God" (153). This dream of a pure, universal English language, passed by way of trade from the Anglo-Saxon region of the old country to the Puritan section of the new, set the stage for the linguistic pattern still in evidence in the United States whereby language radiates out from port cities to the surrounding areas.           This purity was possible and even probable in New England because while other areas of the colonies received an influx of other nationalities in the years preceding the American Revolution, New England, which was "mostly staked out by the original Puritan migrants, showed the least diversity" (Bailey 56). By the time larger numbers of other nationalities such as Scotch-Irish, French, Italians and other European immigrants arrived during the 19th century, the English Puritans had established a strong religious, economic, and educational base in New England. The influx of new languages therefore brought limited change. Most of the newcomers migrated to frontier areas or worked in or near port cities where they were assimilated into the prevailing culture of the long-time English residents, albeit at lower-paying, less prestigious jobs. Their children quickly learned the increasingly standardized English language being taught in public schools.           Significantly, slaves from Africa, the second largest linguistic group in the colonies, did not have much influence on the New England's language either, the result both of their lowly status within the colonial hierarchy and the small numbers in New England, an area which did not depend upon the plantation system. The speech of Native Americans, considered "savage" by many of the English, also had little impact on the English language spoken in New England. Place names, particularly of bodies of water,

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tended to be Indian borrowings, but overall, the English language in New England maintained its preponderance of British influence.           As a result of this settlement history, when Hans Kurath was tapped to record and analyze the speech of the United States for a project of the American Dialect Society in the 1930s, the regional dialects he found in New England coincided with the earliest settlement by English colonists (Figure 3).           His study for the Linguistic Atlas of New England divided New England into two main dialect areas, east and west, which roughly corresponded to the two major settlement areas of Massachusetts Bay and the Connecticut River Valley. These, in turn, were divided into seven subregions. As might be expected, the northern area where the two settlements merged was divided into an eastern half that shared some linguistic features with the Massachusetts Bay settlement and a western half that was more closely aligned with the Connecticut area. This linguistic distribution is consistent with the settlement patterns: the majority of settlers in the eastern half were from Connecticut; in the western part, from Massachusetts. Subregions were also established for the Plymouth area, the Narragansett Bay area, the Merrimack Valley, and coastal Maine.           Fieldworkers for the Linguistic Atlas interviewed 416 informants from 213 communities and analyzed the results for phonological, morphological, and lexical features. According to Kurath, "the most distinctive feature in the pronunciation of [western New England] is the rather general use of r in all positions, contrasting with the eastern habit of pronouncing r only when followed by a vowel, as in Standard British English" (Handbook 19). On further refinement, Kurath suggests that usage is divided

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within the western part of New England, the area having no port city for a nucleus: The pronunciation of r is uncommon in the cities which would have had the most contact with Englishmen, most widely found in the western areas in close contact with the Dutch of the Hudson Valley in New York, and has mixed usage in Massachusetts and Vermont, areas which had dual claims by Massachusetts and Connecticut because of trade with the two major settlement areas. Meanwhile, "[t]he postvocalic r in words like barn, beard, chair, and the r-vowel in words like thirty, girl, Saturday, and father are now rarely heard from the old stock in Eastern New England, except on [isolated] Martha's Vineyard and in Marblehead and Rockport . . ." (5). This geographic division and the fact that r is found even still in dialects of the western part of England, led Kurath to conclude that usage must have been divided from the earliest times of the colonies and that the cities, as cultural centers, must have resisted its use (20) (Figure 4).           The two linguistic areas were also highlighted in LANE's results detailing the merger of short and long o in Eastern New England (Figure 5). The longer o sound first appeared in "bookish words" but the short o continued to persist in "farm words" so that usage is sometimes split between long o in words such as stone but short o in grindstone and stone wall (Handbook 3). "A down-gliding diphthongal vowel [o] in words like coat, road, home is in general use in . . . the greater part of rural England south of the Wash, excepting the counties surrounding London" (3). This is precisely the area from which the majority of the New Englanders came and with whom they continued to trade.           LANE's focus, however, was on the vocabulary spoken in New England . Words such as tonic, another word for soda found only in eastern New England, and

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Buttonwood / buttonball, substitutes for sycamore used in eastern and western New England respectively, were found by LANE to have clearly divided regional usage (Figures 6-7).           Yet, as sociologist Glenna Pickford argues persuasively in "American Linguistic Geography: A Sociological Appraisal," Kurath's samples suffer " . . . from biases of selectivity" (217) because the informants he chose for LANE were generally older, less provincial, and less educated types who lived in rural areas. These informants were precisely those who would call into relief the speech of earlier times. In addition, she comments, Kurath's study did not control for other sociological factors such as sex, ethnicity, race, occupation, and economic level (223). (See appendix A for an explanation of the process by which the Linguistic Atlas of New England was completed.) As Pickford later suggests, and Kurath himself admits in his book, Word Geography of the Eastern United States, published ten years after LANE, the "[r]egional and local expressions are most common in the vocabulary of the intimate everyday life of the home and farm . . . " (9), the vocabulary, it should be noted, most likely to be spoken by LANE's informants in the more rural areas that predominated the sample. Kurath's study, by his own admission, is skewed in favor of regionalism.           It is easy to understand why the Linguistic Atlas should stress regional lines. The population density of New England in the 1930s still closely mirrored the English settlement of the area, with the heaviest populations found in the areas of the earliest settlements (Figure 8). The transportation system, particularly that of the railroads, likewise retained the pattern (Figure 9). Even higher education was split between the major institutions of Harvard in Boston and Yale in New Haven.

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New England, however, was changing. The invention of the automobile and the concurrent improvement of roads had given people greater mobility. The Rural Electrification Administration, begun by President Roosevelt in 1935, brought telephones and electricity into rural areas and further opened communication between regions. People could now more easily visit others who were not on train lines. Those in the country could talk to people in other areas, read with less stress after dark, and listen to radio broadcasts from far away cities.           At the same time, a new wave of immigration had begun which was changing the face of the nation, and many southern blacks were moving to the industrial north in search of jobs as the south's farming became more and more mechanized. The populations of northern cities swelled in response to the influx.           Yet Kurath's intensive study of the region's history had predisposed him to focus on the linguistic habits of people in outlying areas and to view LANE's findings in a particular way, ignoring the vast changes going on around him. The importance of his study, therefore, lies primarily in its use as an historical catalogue with which to compare later studies.           Before long, therefore, it was deemed necessary to reexamine the dialect areas of the country. Face-to-face interviews for The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) were begun in 1965 in order to ascertain the extent of regional words and expressions. The Dictionary, which took into account information about informants' age, sex, race, education level, occupation, etc., chose informants from rural, semi-rural, suburban, and metropolitan communities in proportion to their representation in the overall population distribution of an area. Questions asked these informants covered a

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wider range of subjects, including the homespun topics of the earlier LANE, but adding more abstract topics such as honesty, emotions, and relationships among people. DARE's analysis of the region's language, as generalized by Craig Carver in American Regional Dialects, limited the number of dialectical subregions in New England to four: Western New England, which was made up of Northwestern New England and Southwestern New England, Eastern New England, and the Narragansett Bay Area (Figure 10). Again, the delineated areas reflected early settlement patterns. Most of the exclusively regional words it found, however, were related to the unique geography and occupations of a region: as a result, many words were found to be illustrative of social as well as geographic dialects. A case in point is the word chist. While its use is scattered, it is found especially in New England. At the same time, however, DARE clearly delineates its place in the social scheme by the inclusion of the information that it is a "Negro and illiterate white pronunciation of chest" (Vol. 1. p641). The fact that the word is also used outside of the region indicates that, while geographic and social dialects can overlap, one is not a subset of the other.           This overlapping network of geographic and social dialects was accepted by many people long before DARE ever existed. Samuel Clemen's introduction to Huckleberry Finn, written a century before DARE, expressly intimates that "[i]n this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary 'Pike-County' dialect; and four modified varieties of this last" ( Baym 27). Sara Orne Jewett likewise alludes to this feature when, in "A White Heron," the speech of an uneducated character from a rural Maine background contrasts with that of an educated narrator. "You can sleep on husks or feathers," she

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proffered graciously. "I raised them all myself. There's good pasturing for geese just below here towards the ma'sh" (my emphasis) (486). The difference in word choice speaks volumes about the places the two hold in the social hierarchy. The author's omission of her character's r sound in marsh, coupled with her previous inclusion of it in the character's word towards, suggests that Jewettt, who was from Maine herself, was aware of the Eastern New England propensity for omitting the r sound before consonants but was also aware that writing reflected a form of the English language in which r's were always recorded. The split usage is again shown in a later speech found in her short story, "The Foreigner" when Jewett omits the r in toward in a character's speech: "He said he'd shift the sugar an' get along somehow . . . an' off they all set tow'ds their ships with their men rowin' . . ." (495), then includes it in the character's next sentence. This variation might be attributed to the author's desire to draw just enough attention to the omission to show regional dialect without becoming intrusive, but the fact that the author never omits the r in her narrator's speech, a narrator from the same region as the character, suggests otherwise. Rather, her similar treatment of the long and short o merger associated with New England shown by her character's pronunciation of boat spelled as both "bo't" (491) and "boat" (507) and her narrator's use of the letter o only in the western New England fashion, coupled with her use of double negatives, missing letters, dialectical words such as chist (502), and rural subject matter for her character, suggest a rural, uneducated, social dialect as well as a regional one. Readers' comparison of the eye dialect and lexical features used in the character's words with the standard written form used by the narrator focuses attention on the spoken dialect.

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It is interesting to note that Jewett, a doctor's daughter, often went along with her father on his country rounds in Maine (483). Having enjoyed the cultivated life as the daughter of a prominent family, she had access to an elite education at Miss Rayne's School and the Berwick Academy, a home-library well-stocked with many of the world's great books, and the pleasure of frequent visits to Boston for cultural events (Lindemann 3-7). As a result, the author's language, both written and spoken, differs from that of the common people who inhabit her stories.           Still, strong evidence continues to mount concerning geographic dialect areas in the United States. Current research, for instance, uses information from past studies to substantiate a focus on phonology as indicative of truly regional speech, recognizing that most lexical variation is more properly viewed in social terms. At the same time, the historic pattern of language flow whereby language is disseminated from cities to the surrounding areas has been used to validate urban areas as sites for linguistic study.           Chief among these more recent studies is that of William Labov, a sociolinguist from the University of Pennsylvania who has headed a group of linguists charting the phonological systems of urban areas throughout the country. Using TELSAR telephone interviews, the group subjected voice recordings of people from major cities to computer acoustical analysis and have found speech areas with a high degree of internal homogeneity which closely match both those found by Carver when he analyzed the lexical data from DARE and Kurath's LANE study. Not only did the more recent study find the same basic division between eastern and western New England, the phonological markers it found for the region were similar to those found by Kurath in the 1930s involving the merger of o sounds and the vocalization of r (Figure 11). Still, while much

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of the country has been undergoing shifts in phonology evident in vowel mergers and the opposing Northern and Southern Cities Shifts (NCS and SCS) in vowels (Figure 12), New England in general, and Eastern New England in particular, have been largely unaffected by the change. Yet as Labov reminds readers of the Online Phonological Atlas: " . . . most of the people who settled the Inland North came from [western New England], and . . . the generating conditions for the NCS may be found there. In this respect, we note with interest that our Hartford speaker satisfies the NCS criterion" (Western New England).           This examination of the various dialect studies that have been done over the past seventy years reveals a picture of a nation which has been undergoing constant changes throughout its history, some of which have led to the creation and maintenance of dialects and others which have brought it closer to a standard American English. Significantly, these changes have direct implications for the way American English will be spoken, and possibly written, in the future.           Census statistics on population movement, for instance, have shown a number of trends in recent years. In general, young minority residents of the United States have a higher rate of movement than whites, partly because of the age structure among different racial groups. Moves tend to be from north to south, cities to suburbs, with renters four times as likely to change their residence. In addition, over a million people migrate to the United States each year: two thirds are between the ages of twenty and sixty four, over a third are Hispanic, and about a fifth are Asian or Pacific Islanders. In New England, the population of the suburbs is generally wealthier and better educated than their counterparts in the cities. The cities, meanwhile, are disproportionately higher in the

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numbers of ethnic and racial minorities, and have a larger number of single parent households. These households tend to be headed by women and have a lower than average income. Young adult households are also more prevalent in the cities.           These trends demonstrate that the South is becoming more diverse while the North becomes more homogenous (Sink 25). Cities are becoming increasingly inhabited by new immigrants who speak foreign languages, ethnic and racial minorities who speak group dialects, and young, often female, heads of households who have a social dialect of their own. Many have religious and cultural practices that differ from those of the area's dominant group. In general, the people who live in cities have less money than those living in the suburbs so educational disadvantage resulting from a lower tax base and higher need are pronounced. The suburbs, by contrast, tend to be more uniformly inhabited by white European-Americans of a higher socioeconomic level who enjoy better educational systems. All of these factors combine to create a situation in which the populations of cities and suburbs are becoming more and more unlike, possibly paving the way for increasingly different language development.           At the same time, other trends are working to promote uniformity within the language. As people move more, they come in contact with others different from themselves in some way. With this movement comes a cultural drift (Axelrod 14) in which language is leveled among people who live and work together and who are therefore exposed to new ways of using language. Programs aimed at integration of various groups accelerate this process. University culture, with its rich mix of different peoples, is representative of this new trend. Yet, even people who do not go on to college experience linguistic leveling to some degree. Despite the fact that educational inequities

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still exist in public education, more Americans are literate and have completed a high school education than in the past. As such, these people have all been exposed to, if not the same spoken language, the same standard written language. Likewise, with the proliferation of television and the Internet, more people have the opportunity to hear and see the same language. A young, black inner-city man from Mississippi may view the same programs on national television as an older, white, suburban woman from Michigan. International companies have also brought people from different cultures into contact and hence created a need for a common language.           Where these conflicting tendencies will take us is anyone's guess. Depending on the continued relative strength of each of these factors, and others as yet unaccounted for, dialects within the country and region might become more and more pronounced until the speech of those in the city and those in the suburbs is mutually unintelligible and new languages develop. Then again, the forces of homogeneity might bring about a truly World English. It seems more likely, however, that the historic trend will continue whereby language change beginning in the cities filters out to the surrounding areas while constraints imposed by group cohesion within an area hold the amount of change in check. Dialects, both geographic and social, will continue to exist. This linguistic mixture holds the promise of helping to further shape a nation in which the voices of diverse cultures can contribute to solve the problems we face in an ever-changing world. Each group, and each individual within the group, has experienced both language and life from a different perspective. This rich mix of people, with unique experiences and ideas, is America's greatest treasure. Hopefully, we, as a nation, will have the sense to use its cumulative wisdom well.

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The ice borrows its substance from the river, it is indeed the actual water of the river itself -- and yet it is not the river. A child, seeing the ice, thinks that the river exists no more, that its course has been arrested. But this is only an illusion. Under the layer of ice, the river continues to flow down to the plain. Should the ice break, one sees the water suddenly bubble up as it goes gushing and murmuring on its way. This is an image of the stream of language. The written tongue is the film of ice upon its waters; the stream which still flows under the ice that imprisons it is the popular and natural language; the cold which produces the ice and would fain restrain the flood is the stabilizing action exerted by grammarians and pedagogues; and the sunbeam which gives language its liberty is the indomitable force of life, triumphing over rules, and breaking the fetters of tradition. (Verdryes 275-76)

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Linguistic Atlas of New England (LANE) headed by Hans Kurath (1930s) LANE background: Why New England chosen Whole country too costly, time-consuming Seminal area: first settled; illuminate study of dialects to west because other areas had settlers from N.E. Evidence of class and regional dialects Ample prior study of population and dialects Area was easy to recruit staff How fieldworkers chosen Observant of differences of speech Approach people of different classes easily Time commitment of two or more years Willingness to seek further training How communities chosen and recorded 213 chosen; majority small towns or semi-rural Representative of area: urban and rural; central and peripheral; flourishing and declining 15 miles apart in longest settled regions; further in more newly settled Brief history recorded including original settlement, population changes, industries, etc. How informants chosen and recorded Two or three informants per community, divided into types Type I: little formal education, little reading, restricted social contacts (for achieving maximum time-depth) Type II: wider cultural experience, more varied social contacts, more education, more institutionalized attitude towards usage ((pointed to direction of change; social differences in speech) Type III (interviewed in one fifth of communities): Represented "best" cultural traditions by local estimation; speakers of standard English (attested to regional variation from standard). Usually college educated, cultured, wide reading and/or extensive social contacts All types divided into subtypes A and B. A is older or more old-fashioned; B is younger or more modern. Education level as it deviates from norm is also recorded Informants usually born and raised in area and descended from local families. No extended period spent outside of area. Biography and character sketch of each informant done by fieldworkers. Questionnaire formation 711 items in 8+ hour interview done over week or so Covered everyday concepts more likely to be transmitted orally at home than in schools Examples of topics: weather, homes, utensils, animals, foods, land features Sampling of pronunciation, lexical peculiarities, morphological variants (particularly unusual verb forms) Methodology Responses elicited indirectly, if possible without using word or phrase that could be part of answer Could also be in form of sentence completion (particularly for phrases or verb forms) Careful notation regarding types of responses; ie. in jest, announced as old-fashioned, ironic, suggested by fieldworker Very involved phonetic transcription, hard to use, therefore not as valuable as may have been

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Results of LANE: Delineated two distinct dialect areas that have a strong correlation with settlement patterns in N.E.: Eastern and Western New England. Boundary separating the areas was sparcely settled, which impeded communication, thereby emphasizing and stabilizing the boundary. Eastern and western New England had developed their own systems of transportation, which worked to consolidate them economically, socially, and culturally. Subdivided into 7 subregions: Boston area, Lower Connecticut River Valley, the Narragansett Bay area, Worcester County-Upper Connecticut River, Valley, Plymouth area, Merrimack Valley-new Hampshire Bay area, Coastal Maine and possibly the New London area Sample of maps for specific examples of results Criticisms of LANE: No strong isoglosses for subregions: It would have been difficult to pick out these areas without a knowledge of the history of the area, suggesting corruption of results In fact, Kurath's own Word Geography, published 10 years late, reduces the subdivisions to three. Because of the method of selecting informants, LANE has been criticized by sociolinguists, who point to the need to take into consideration other variables such as sex, economic level, race, etc. when describing dialects. They also charge that LANE focuses on older, provincial types as informants, thereby skewing results in favor of regionalism and away from other factors as indicators of dialects.

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Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) Frederic G. Cassidy (three volumes now published (a-o), still in progress) "For the English Dialect Dictionary and for the European dialect atlases, especially in the nineteenth century when the folk spec was being collected, a large part of the population was still firmly localized away from cities, not greatly affected by schooling, living in traditional ways, and keeping traditional speech. Not so in the United States, and less and less so in the twentieth century , when easy communication, mechanized farming, public education, the growth of cities, widespread migration, and most recently the tremendous success of radio and television, have disrupted even the more traditional communities, blurring former lines of dialectal division and creating a relative uniformity in speech. Even if most people still stay in one place and keep up their former ways of life, change, or pressure for change, is everywhere. And change in ways of life brings with it accelerated change in language. In the old-world sense there is little "dialect" spoken in the United States. Yet it is possible to see more "uniformity" than actually exists. In both city and countryside, distinctive regional and social differences in pronunciation, vocabulary, and syntax persist, as DARE shows" (xvi) Based on face-to-face interviews in all fifty states (1965-1970) and analysis of written materials (diaries, letters, novels, histories, biographies, newspapers, government documents) (xv for more precise) Documents words, pronunciations, and phrases that vary from one region to another Includes variant forms, etymologies, statements about regional and social distributions Maps included in text to show in which of 1,002 communities investigated various words were used Questionnaire: 40,000 words from DS and PADS analyzed and sorted by semantic category; dry run in Wisconsin led to formulation of questions for DARE Questionnaire begins with neutral subjects of time, weather, and topography, then goes on to household categories (tools, foods, furniture, etc.), and finally to abstract ones (honesty, emotions, relationships among people, etc.) Communities (any group of people living fairly close to each other and sharing the same commercial facilities, social organizations, and the like (DARE xiii) chosen in each state proportional to the population and took settlement history into account: included urban, large cities, small cities, villages, rural areas. Methodology Biographical information taken on each respondent including name, address, social factors (sex, race, age, and education), amount of travel, chief occupation, associations, family background, description of speech, and informant's attitude s toward language. . In addition, a brief description of the community was taken. 1847 questions asked in simple language to encourage spontaneity of response; careful phrasing so words that could be response not used in questions Secondary and other responses not sought still recorded Effort to avoid suggesting responses Notations made for suggested, conversational, not here (NH), no response (NR) 20 minute tape recording of each of major informants while speaking freely and formally speaking during reading of child's book (later analyzed for pronunciation and lexical features) One person did not have to answer all questions

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Informants Chosen to balance community type, sex, race, age, and education (? Check against census figures) - but with a deliberate weighting toward older people to include more fold language (xiv) 2777 informants: 1368 men and 1408 women ranging from 18 to 90 years of age 66% were over 60 years old. Most were high school (41%) graduates or had at least two years of college (31%) White 92.7%; Blacks 6.7%; American Indian .3%; Orientals .3% Maps Populational, not areal. Say nothing about square miles of territory but show the number and distribution of the informants' communities, this number having been prorated to density of populations, state by state. (essentially scatter plots) States appear as nearly as possible in their proper spatial relation to one another, and in something like their proper shape, but each is enlarged or diminished according to the prorated number of communities in it. Give samples for ease of understanding (communities, comparison with conventional map, regional word distributions) Entries: Give sample to show quickly Regional Labels Evidence may be shown two ways           1. selection of quotations, which also illustrate history and usage           2. findings of the fieldwork as represented in maps accompanying certain entries. 37 basic labels to indicate regionality Conclusions: Very few pronunciation characteristics are unique to an area or social group. Rather, a group's unique pronunciation can usually be defined only be a set of features, any single feature in the set being shared with one or more other areas that may or may not be contiguous The earlier settled East Coast and South have more distinct regional and social differences than do the more recently settled Midwest, Southwest, and Pacific Coast Urban areas are more linguistically complex and are often distinct from the surrounding rural areas (even in the West) Found similarities in boundaries with LANE, some differences (result of larger mesh, later date ?) "Though the members of a group of speakers may sound much the same to an outsider, no area, large or small, achieves complete uniformity of pronunciation: there are likely to be subareal differences (neighborhoods, suburbs, communities) and social differences as well The social groupings most likely to be reflected in pronunciation differences are age, sex, social class (as seen in education, income, occupation, and community type) and ethnic background….(DARE xlv)

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Phonological Atlas of North America: Labov et al. (UPenn) Charting present state of the phonological systems of urban dialects, and the advance of sound changes in progress Computerized analysis of sound changes affecting the English of North America.: phonetic transcriptions of minimal pairs to elicit information on the progress of ongoing mergers. Telsur analysis done on dialects as surveyed by telephone All speakers native to the community studied Reworks Carver's delineation of dialect boundaries (based on DARE data). Carver said there were no clear, discrete delineation of dialect divisions but found boundaries by regional vocabulary. These areas match those found by Labov, who found areas with a high degree of internal homogeneity which reflect the sound changes that have been transforming the dialects for the past century. Three major sound shifts involving vowels Northern Cities Shift and opposing Southern Shift held within bounds by Midland dialect area Low back merger in West Importance of cities as present and future sources of linguistic variation

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