Customer Reviews

Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change

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In the 1960s, William Labov went to New England to discover what had happened to English there since it had been surveyed in the 1930s. What he found opened his eyes to the speed at which linguistic change takes place, and the trip set him on a course that culminates in this Atlas, a survey of English in cities across the U. S. and Canada.

Beautifully produced in a boxed set (the other "volume" contains a CD-Rom), this is an expensive book but filled with beautiful color maps and displays, also in color, of the shifting vowels of English. The clearly-written narrative explains the mechanisms of sound change in progress and the regions of distinctive varieties.

Everyone interested in the pronunciation of English in America must consult this masterpiece.

Richard W. Bailey
Fred Newton Scott Professor of English
The University of Michigan

This is fascinating to see the regional dialects mapped for the United States. My husband studied linguistics, so we take an interest still even though he is retired. I've lived in Baltimore, after growing up in the midwest. I was amazed at the differences in speech. Baltimore residents say am-BU-lance, for example. Even after being away from the mid-atlantic for 15 years now, I still recognize a Virginia accent by the way they say "house." It's actually very similar to one area of Canada.