LAMSAS
The Linguistic Atlas Project (LAP) was founded in 1929 at the behest of the American Dialect Society and remains the most thorough and expansive study of American English undertaken to date. The LAP consists of several sub-projects, divided by geographical region. Each project represents the collection of linguistic data (vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation) in the form of dialect interviews, face-to-face interviews in which people were asked a series of targeted questions, such as "What do you call the piece of furniture that has drawers for you to keep your clothes in?" ('Bureau', 'dresser', and 'chest of drawers' were common answers in the 1930s and 1940s). The 800+ targeted questions cover a range of topics, from the house and farm/ranch, to weather, flora and fauna, to food and cooking, and to community relationships. Fieldworkers wrote down the answers in International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), a set of symbols that linguists use to capture pronunciation. The first director ...
[...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]