A History of English Language

A history of the english language 378
by means of a carefully prepared questionnaire designed to bring out the most
characteristic dialectal features, known or suspected. 66 The answers are recorded in
phonetic notation and supplemented by phonograph records and tapes. A half century
after the publication of the Linguistic Atlas of New England, the volumes for the Upper
Midwest (Minnesota, lowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota) and for the Gulf
states (Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and East
Texas) have appeared, 67 and materials for most of the other regions have been collected
or are well advanced. Even in their unedited and unpublished form, they have been the
source for a number of regional studies (see footnote 27, page 376).
Any large project that requires several decades to record features of a language will
encounter the problem of changes in the language as well as changes in the methods of
studying human institutions. In the half century since the inception of the Linguistic
Atlas, both kinds of change have occurred at a rapid rate in the United States. While the
Atlas fieldworkers were recording rural linguistic items from older, settled speakers,
American society was becoming increasingly mobile and urban. In recent years linguists
have turned more of their attention to the complex patterns of speech in the cities of the
United States. William Labov’s work has been especially influential in its application of
techniques from sociology to the description of urban speech. In studying the social
varieties of English, Labov and others have attempted to observe the language in its
social setting, outside the artificial context of an interview. 68 The methodological
conclusions that these linguists have drawn from their trials, failures, and successes in
recording urban English are as important as their descriptions of particular pronunciations
or syntactic structures. Labov argues that the lack of verbal ability and logic that some
linguists find in nonstandard English is the result of asking the wrong questions in the
wrong situations and then analyzing the answers within the
66
See Alva L.Davis, Raven I.McDavid, Jr., and Virginia G.McDavid, eds., A Compilation of the
Work Sheets of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada and Associated Projects (2nd
ed., Chicago, 1969).
67
Harold B.Allen, The Linguistic Atlas of the Upper Midwest (3 vols., Minneapolis, 1973–1976);
and Lee Pederson, ed., Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (7 vols., Athens, GA, 1986–1992). The
materials for the rest of the Atlantic seaboard, collected during the 1930s and early 1940s by Guy
S.Lowman, were passed to Hans Kurath, then to Raven I.McDavid, Jr., and now to William
A.Kretzschmar, Jr., whose team has edited the Handbook of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and
South Atlantic States (Chicago, 1993). See also William A.Kretzschmar, Jr., and Edgar
W.Schneider, Introduction to Quantitative Analysis of Linguistic Survey Data: an Atlas by the
Numbers (Thousand Oaks, CA, 1996) and William A.Kretzschmar, Jr., “Quantitative and Areal
Analysis of Dialect Features,” Language Variation and Change, 8 (1996), 13–39. Many of the
Linguistic Atlas materials are now available on the Internet at http://us.uga.edu/.
68
See William Labov, Sociolinguistic Patterns (Philadelphia, 1972), chap. 8, and Language in the
Inner City (Philadelphia, 1972), chaps. 5–7.