Traditionally, dialectologists
have listed three dialect groups in the
United States: Northern, Midland, and Southern--although some scholars
prefer a two-way classification of simply Northern and Southern, and
one may also find significant difference on the boundaries of each
area. The map shown above represents a synthesis of various independent
field studies this century. These are in chronological order: the
Linguistic Atlas fieldwork begun under the direction of Hans Kurath in
the 1930's; the informal but extensive personal observations of Charles
Thomas in the 1940's; the DARE fieldwork of the 1960's under Frederic
Cassidy; and the Phonological Atlas fieldwork of William Labov during
the 1990's.
Although it may seem that a great amount of data has been collected
over a short time span, the shifts in American dialects this century
have been rapid enough to outpace the data collection. What appears to
be a well-entrenched dialect marker today such as the Northern Cities
Shift, may barely appear in earlier studies--affecting both
classification and mapping. Nevertheless, some basic observations on
current American linguistic geography can be made.
The New England Dialects
These dialects are non-rhotic, dropping r's before consonants and at
the end of words. This area is further subdivided into Eastern New
England, including Boston and much of Maine, where
O and
AU
shift into an intermediate vowel so that
cot and
caught
are merged. Transitional between Eastern New England and New York,
Western New England is less well defined. Providence retains
R-dropping,
but does not merge
O and
AU.
The New York Dialects
New York City has a rather anomalous linguistic situation, in that its
local dialect was not reproduced further westward and therefore cannot
be fit into any larger regional grouping such as New England or the
Midland.(1) Like New England, the dialect is
R-dropping--other
features are more generally common to the Northeastern seaboard. The
Hudson Valley dialect
of Albany, though
R-preserving, is nevertheless close enough to
New
York City's to be grouped with it: both of them shared a Dutch
linguistic
substratum which is now only vestigial.
The Great Lakes Dialects
Among all the dialect regions, the Great Lakes region is perhaps the
most homogenous, since the major cities in this area (Syracuse,
Rochester,
Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee) are simultaneously
undergoing
a chain shift known as the Northern Cities Shift, with a rotation of
the
short vowels so that "they may be heard as members of another phoneme
by
listeners from another dialect area with consequent confusion of
meanings:
Ann as
Ian,
bit as
bet,
bet
as
bat
or
but ,
lunch as
launch,
talk as
tuck
,
locks as
lax" (Labov 1991). This area is fully
R
-preserving, even though the earliest settlers of this area were
primarily
New Englanders. At present New England influence is evident only in the
lexicon.
The Upper Midwest Dialects
This area is characterized mainly by a conservative vowel scheme, where
the long vowels (often attributed to Scandinavian influence) have
remained purely monophthongal, exemplified in the widely known long
O
in the name Minnesota. Along the northern border are found Canadianisms
such as the centralized long I in
fuyr (fire) and the
centralized
ow "uh-oo" in :
ouwt (out).
The Midland Dialects
Midland dialects retain
R in all positions, and long
I
is not flattened (monophthongized) as uniformly as in the South, but
the
Midland is otherwise not very easy to describe as a whole, since "each
of
the Midland cities -- Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Cincinnati,
Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City -- has its own local character."
(Labov 1997). More southerly Midland cities have a typically Southern
fronted nucleus in
ow, e.g.
aout (out); more northerly
Midland cities tend not
to. Labov (1997) on this basis divides the area horizontally into a
North
Midland and South Midland.(2) Previous researchers have also seen
east-west
distinctions, separating the Pennsylvania dialect(s) from those of the
Lower
Midwest. (Kurath 1949, Thomas 1958, Carver 1989).
The Western Dialects
Western phonology has only recently begun to diverge, primarily with
the merger of
AU into the short
O class: e.g.
cot
for
both
caught and
cot, and the fronting of the long
U
class, e.g. "ih-oo" in words such as
two. Otherwise it appears
that
the Western dialects were formed primarily from a Midland base, since
both
groups are similarly conservative in their phonology--in fact it was
certainly Midland and Western dialects which were so often lumped
together under the catch-all phrase "General American".(3) Westward
migration has also carried typically Northern features into the Pacific
Northwest, and Southern features into the Southwest: both phonology
(Labov 1997) and lexicon (Carver 1989) have been affected.
Endnotes
(1) Many scholars have defined New York City as "Northern" by virtue
of its geographical location: but naming a "Northern" group of dialects
is misleading if it implies the kind of shared phonology which we see
in
the Southern dialects. I share the view that a general term "Northern"
makes the most sense if used the way most Americans would understand
it: i.e. any
dialect that does not have the full monophthongization of long I and is
therefore not Southern.
(2) The South Midland described in Kurath 1949 and Kurath and McDavid
1961 is wholly different from Labov's, referring to the area here
termed Mountain Southern. Kurath's "North Midland" is called here, as
in Labov, simply Midland.
(3) See particularly Thomas 1958, which merges the Midland with a large
part of the West, while cordoning off the Northwest and Southwest Coast
with, as he admits, "ill-defined" boundaries. Modern linguists have
been sharply critical of the now disused term "General American" but it
does seem that in the early 20th century a huge area of the country
used a quite similar phonology.
Bibliography
Carver, Craig M. 1989. American Regional Dialects: A Word Geography.
Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press.
Cassidy, Frederic G., ed. 1985-. The Dictionary of American Regional
English. Cambridge:Belknap Press.
Kurath, Hans. 1949. A Word Geography of the Eastern United States. Ann
Arbor:University of Michigan Press.
Kurath, Hans and Raven I. McDavid. 1961. The Pronunciation of English
in the Atlantic States. Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press.
Labov, William. 1991. The Three Dialects of English. In Penny Eckert,
ed. New Ways of Analyzing Sound Change. New York:Academic Press, pp.
1-44.
Labov, William, Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg. 1997. A National Map of
the The Regional Dialects of American English.
Thomas, Charles K. 1958. The Phonetics of American English. New York.
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