A History of English Language

The english language in america
355
for a long time it was customary to distinguish three main dialects in American English—
the New England dialect, the Southern dialect, and General American, meaning the
dialect of all the rest of the country. Such a division, in a broad way, is not unjustified
because each of the dialect types is marked by features that distinguish it clearly from the
others. But it is not sufficiently exact. Not all of New England shares in the features—
such as the so-called “broad a” and the loss of [r] finally and before consonants—that are
thought of as most characteristic. Parts of the South were settled from Pennsylvania and
are not typically southern in speech. And finally, General American itself shows regional
differences which, although not so obvious to the lay person, can be recognized by the
linguist and charted.
Our ability to distinguish more accurately the various speech areas that exist in this
country is due to the fact that we now have a large mass of accurate data gathered by field
workers for the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada (see page 399) and a
growing number of detailed studies of regional pronunciation and other features. These
have contributed greatly to a clearer understanding of some of the speech areas of the
country. 27
In 1949 Professor Hans Kurath published a study of the first importance, A Word
Geography of the Eastern United States. On the basis of lexical evidence, mainly in the
Atlantic Coast states as far south as South Carolina, he distinguished eighteen speech
areas, which he grouped into three main groups: Northern, Midland, and Southern.
Positing a Midland dialect had the effect of taking parts of what had been considered
General American and
26
See J.S.Kenyon, “Flat a and Broad a,” American Speech, 5 (1930), 323–26.
27
The following studies may be mentioned by way of illustration: Hans Kurath and Raven I.
McDavid, Jr., The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States (Ann Arbor, 1961); E.Bagby
Atwood, Survey of Verb Forms in the Eastern United States (Ann Arbor, 1953), and the same
author’s Regional Vocabulary of Texas (Austin, 1962); and Craig M.Carver, American Regional
Dialects: A Word Geography (Ann Arbor, 1987). An account of the more important dialect areas
will be found in the chapter contributed by McDavid to W.Nelson Francis, The Structure of
American English (New York, 1958). An excellent overview that includes social dialects is by Walt
Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes, American English: Dialects and Variation (Oxford, 1998).
The newest description of American dialect areas is by William Labov in the Atlas of North
American English: www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas. For the publication of regional atlases and
dictionaries, see § 255.