science

The Atlas of North American English

The Atlas of North American English is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand The Atlas of North American English rather than just read about it. In short: The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change (abbreviated ANAE; formerly, the Phonological Atlas of North America) is a 2006 book that presents an overview of the pronunciation patterns (accents) in all the major dialect regions of the English language as spoken in urban areas of the United States and Canada. It is the result of a large-scale survey by linguists William Labov, Sharon As…

Key takeaways

The Atlas of North American English belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect The Atlas of North American English to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of The Atlas of North American English from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change (abbreviated ANAE; formerly, the Phonological Atlas of North America) is a 2006 book that presents an overview of the pronunciation patterns (accents) in all the major dialect regions of the English language as spoken in urban areas of 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 from 1992 to 1999, 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.

Findings 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:

The Inland North, characterized by the Northern Cities Vowel Shift Canada, characterized by the Canadian Vowel Shift Several dialects in New England, characterized by different combinations of the cot–caught merger and non-rhoticity New York City, characterized by non-rhoticity and a complex pattern of /æ/ tensing The Mid-Atlantic region, including Philadelphia and Baltimore, characterized by complex /æ/ tensing, rhoticity, and the fronting of the back vowels /aw/, /ow/, and /uw/ The South, characterized by the monophthongization of /ay/ and the resulting Southern Vowel Shift The Midland, characterized by the fronting of back vowels without monophthongization of /ay/ The West, characterized by the cot–caught merger, the absence of the distinctive features of adjacent regions, and a high degree of internal heterogeneity 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 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, /y/, /w/ or /h/. /y/ represents any kind of front upglide [j, i, ɪ, e, ɛ], /w/ represents any kind of back upglide [w, u, ʊ, o, ɤ], and /h/ represents an inglide or long monophthong. The following tables provide a comparison between ANAE's notation and Wikipedia's diaphonemic transcription system.

See also North American English regional phonology Dialectology

References

Bibliography Labov, William; Ash, Sharon; Boberg, Charles (2006). The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 3-11-016746-8.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with The Atlas of North American English

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what The Atlas of North American English claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to The Atlas of North American English before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about The Atlas of North American English ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of The Atlas of North American English

In research: The Atlas of North American English appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses The Atlas of North American English in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: The Atlas of North American English is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Books about the English language, Leonard Bloomfield Book Award books, Linguistic atlases, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for The Atlas of North American English outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study The Atlas of North American English in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what The Atlas of North American English means in your own words.
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Frequently asked questions

What is The Atlas of North American English in simple terms?

Why does The Atlas of North American English matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study The Atlas of North American English?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on The Atlas of North American English.