''The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change'' (abbreviated ANAE; formerly, the ''Phonological Atlas of North America'') is an overview of the pronunciation patterns ( accents) in all the major regional

dialect The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena: One usage refers to a variety of a language that is ...

s of the

English language English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the ...

spoken in urban areas of the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

and

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by to ...

. It is the result of a large-scale survey by linguists

William Labov William Labov ( ; born December 4, 1927) is an American linguist widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of ...

Sharon Ash Sharon ( he, שָׁרוֹן ''Šārôn'' "plain") is a given name as well as an Israeli surname. In English-speaking areas, Sharon is now predominantly a feminine given name. However, historically it was also used as a masculine given name. In I ...

, and

Charles Boberg Charles Boberg is an academic specializing in sociolinguistics, particularly North American English. He is an associate professor of linguistics at McGill University in Montreal. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania under William Labov, a ...

. 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 North American English (NAmE, NAE) is the most generalized variety of the English language as spoken in the United States and Canada. Because of their related histories and cultures, plus the similarities between the pronunciations (accents), ...

, and defines boundaries between dialect regions based on the different

sound change A sound change, in historical linguistics, is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic chan ...

s 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.

Findings

The Atlas defines several major dialect regions on the basis of distinctive phonological patterns and sound changes taking place in them—often

chain shift In historical linguistics, a chain shift is a set of sound changes in which the change in pronunciation of one speech sound (typically, a phoneme) is linked to, and presumably causes, a change in pronunciation of other sounds as well. The soun ...

s among the vowel phonemes. Major regions include: * The North, characterized by the Northern Cities Vowel Shift *

, characterized by the Canadian Vowel Shift * Several dialects in New England, characterized by different combinations of the cot-caught merger and

non-rhoticity Rhoticity in English is the pronunciation of the historical rhotic consonant by English speakers. The presence or absence of rhoticity is one of the most prominent distinctions by which varieties of English can be classified. In rhotic varieti ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

, characterized by non-rhoticity and a complex pattern of æ-tensing * The Mid-Atlantic region, including

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Since ...

and

Baltimore Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic, and the 30th most populous city in the United States with a population of 585,708 in 2020. Baltimore was ...

, characterized by complex æ-tensing, rhoticity, and the fronting of the back vowels , , * The South, characterized by monophthongization of and resulting

Southern Vowel Shift Southern American English or Southern U.S. English is a regional dialect or collection of dialects of American English spoken throughout the Southern United States, though concentrated increasingly in more rural areas, and spoken primarily by Wh ...

* The Midland, characterized by the fronting of back vowels without the monophthongization of * The West, characterized by ''cot''-''caught'' merger and the absence of the distinctive features of the adjacent regions 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.

Notation

''ANAE'' employs a "binary" phonemic notation system designed to be maximally abstract and economical so that it can be used to describe

s 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 ''ANAEs notation and Wikipedia's diaphonemic transcription system.

Notes

References

Bibliography

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Atlas of North American English, The Linguistic atlases North American English Phonology Leonard Bloomfield Book Award books

Findings

Notation

See also

Notes

References

Bibliography