GENERAL WEBSITES

See below a list of websites that present a broader view on American English dialects.

Wikipedia - American English regional differences

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_English_regional_differences

This website presents an overview of what is called General American and of English regional varieties - sometimes called accents here. These are divided into seven regions: Eastern New England; New York City and northern New Jersey; Mid-Atlantic Region (comprising Northeastern Pennsylvania, Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley, Baltimore in Maryland, Pittsburgh and Buffalo in New York); South (comprising New Orleans, Acadiana, Central and South Florida); Inland North; the Midland (comprisinf North Central American English, and St. Louis and vicinity); West (comprising California, Utah and Hawaii). It gives examples of what differentiates them, but they are usually general. The site is noteworthy because of the links it provides for most of the varieties presented. In these links there are usually more detailed information and interesting external links.

Do you speak American?

http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/americanvarieties/map/map.html

The website was made by the PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) together with a documentary, and it aims at a broad audience. It provides a list of 14 American dialects, many of which are categorized by region of occurrence (Californian, Midwest, New York City, Pacific Northwest, Pittsburghese, Smoky Mountains, Texan); others by their ethnical influences (African American English, Cajun, Chicano English, Lumbee); and by their linguistic features (Spanglish, A-prefixing, R-ful Sourthern*) * also categorized by region. Descriptions of all 14 dialects contain their most distinctive linguistic features as well as their historical origins. One of the site's highlights is the link "Radio America" that provides recorded samples of speakers from 50 American states.
In addition the website features articles on language prejudice and prestige, the notion of Standard American English and debates for and against declaring English the official language in the US.
There are also very interesting quizzes containing speech samples and regional expressions. By trying them out, you can test your ability to recognize the dialects of various regions in the US and also find out, for example, what Pennsylvanians mean when they say they have “Lucy Bowles”!

National Map

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/phono_atlas/NationalMap/NationalMap.html

Website designed by the University of Pennsylvania. It contains an overall view of the Telsur project which focuses on the analysis of the vowel phonological systems of urban dialects in the US and aims at creating a Phonological Atlas of North America. The results of the first phase of the project are based on the acoustic analysis of 240 Telsur interviews carried out so far, with further data from a broader analysis of the full sample of 640 speakers representing urban areas.
According to phonological criteria, the project defines 4 large dialectal regions (the North, the West, the South, and the Midland) and calls attention to a change that has taken place in the dialectal boundaries of the US since 1987. Various charts and maps are provided showing the distribution of defining linguistic features of each region. The initial evidences gathered by the project point to an intensification of the great regional phonological patterns rather than the development of specific urban dialects.
The website is heavily descriptive and technical, but no recorded samples are provided for the dialects in question.

Dialect Map of American English

http://www.geocities.com/yvain.geo/dialects.html

An introductory website, it gives basic definitions of dialect, idiolect, pidgin and creole. It presents a map dividing the US territory into 26 American English dialects. The dialects described are: New England Eastern, Boston Urban, New England Western, Hudson Valley, New York City, Bonac, Inland Northern, San Francisco Urban, Upper Midwestern, Chicago Urban, North Midland, Pennsylvania German-English, Rocky Mountain, Pacific Northwest, Pacific Southwest, Southwestern, Hawaii*, South Midland, Ozark, Southern Appalachian, Smokey Mountain English, Virginia Piedmont, Coastal Southern, Ocracoke, Gullah, Gulf Southern and Louisiana) * Hawaiian dialect is described but not featured on the map.
Although the website lists a considerable number of American dialects, the information provided for each of them is quite general and presents few examples of defining linguistic features. Also, there are no recorded samples of the dialects.

American Languages

http://csumc.wisc.edu/AmericanLanguages/

This website is a project of the University of Wisconsin in partnership with The Max Kade Institute, the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, The Dictionary of American Regional English and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
It contains speech samples of 8 American States (Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin) and their respective counties. Each sample is accompanied by a brief commentary on the biographical information of the speaker as well as a transcription of the recording. There are parts that are being constructed but the main goal is to have samples from every county in every state in the United States, collected from interviews conducted by fieldworkers for the Dictionary of American Regional English. In these, they have 844 examples of speakers from different locations, gender and age reading Arthur the Rat that can already be consulted in the Searchable Database available in the site.
The most interesting feature of this website is that it also contains speech samples of Germanic American dialects, such as the Amish Swiss German, Texas German, Pennsylvania Dutch, and many more, as well as essays on the history of such dialects and information on where they are spoken in the US.
There is also a link to Native American Languages, but it is still under construction.

Linguistic Atlas Project

http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/dare/dare.html

It presents a group of research projects performed for the last 80 years around different parts of the United States. Such as the LAMSAS that collected 1162 records, from 1933-1974 in the Middle and South Atlantic States; the LAPNW that researched the Pacific North West from 1953 to 1963.; or the AFAM that collected data focusing in African-American and Gullah speakers. Some of the interviews are taped, others were transcribed.
The map allows us to visualize the coverage of each project.
Just a fraction of the data has been digitalized, though their goal is to make all of it available. For the ones that can be browsed it is possible to search for specific linguistic features, for instance the occurrence of " ain't I?" in the Gullah dialect; or the map of the pronunciation of the vowel in "just" in the Pacific North West. When completed it will be an interesting source for diachronic analysis.

IDEA - International Dialects of English Archive

http://web.ku.edu/idea/

This website is hosted by the Department of Theatre and Film at the University Of Kansas, and its main purpose is to provide an archive of accents for actors and other artists. The archive is organized by geographical division, from continents to states. Within the United States there are recorded samples of speakers of thirty-five American states. They also provide recordings of people from all over the world speaking English. Anyone who wishes to contribute with a sample of their own accent may do so by e-mailing it to the host’s address indicated on the site. The samples must contain a standard reading (especially designed to cover a wide range of phonemic contexts) followed by an unscripted speech about the speaker’s life. For each sample there is a transcription, some commentaries and biographical information of the speaker. Besides helping actors to reproduce an accent, there are archives of what they call "General American" for actors that want to speak the standard variety. Though it is not a linguistic site their archive is very interesting and diversified.

DARE - Dictionary of American Regional English

http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/dare/dare.html

Website of the Dictionary that serves as a reference for dialects in the United States and whose data is related to many studies in the area. Its recorded interviews are available on the site of the University of Pennsylvania, National Map, linked above. The dictionary also used written materials to illustrate how words have been used from the seventeenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. It provides pronunciation, etymology, social and regional distribution. Four of its volumes have been published and two others are being prepared. The only problem is that the Dictionary is not available for free consultation, it has to be purchased.

Varieties of English

http://www.ic.arizona.edu/%7Elsp/index.html

The website is part of The Language Samples Project (LSP) developed by the Anthropology Department of the University of Arizona, whose goal is to facilitate the teaching of sounds and sound structures of varieties of English. It gives the description of some phonological features of what they call: African-American English, American Indian English, Canadian English, Chicano English, Dialects of the Northeast U.S. and the Southern States English. The site does not provide the same amount of information for each dialect, having a lot of empty links and no samples.

Evolution - The American Dialect Homepage

http://www.evolpub.com/Americandialects/AmDialhome.html

Website hosted by Evolution Publishing. It has a link for a map of the Linguistic Geography of the Mainland United States that puts together maps made by different linguists. The latter is divided into New England Dialects, New York Dialects, the Great Lakes Dialects, the Upper Midwest Dialects, the Midland Dialects and the Western Dialects. It provides some general features of each variety but there are no audio samples. It also has a map for the Linguistic Geography of Pennsylvania, which divides the region into eight dialects: Hudson Valley, Anthracite Region, Central Pennsylvania, Upper Susquehanna, Lehigh Valley-Berks County, Lower Susquehanna, Delaware Valley and Upper Ohio Valley/Western Pennsylvania. This map also presents some general features of each dialectal region, but not enough to really describe distinctive dialects.
There is also a bibliography on the subject, an article on Ebonics and links to many websites, mostly made by non-linguists, but some of them do not exist anymore.

CAL - Center for Applied Linguistics

http://www.cal.org/topics/dialects/

The Center for Applied Linguistics provides two digests on the subject of dialects related to education. One regarding the teaching of dialects and the other on how to deal with students’ dialects within U.S. schools. Concerning the latter, the website staff provides a program that sheds light on how people are socially defined by the way they use language. In addition, the site also has a webpage with many other digests and links discussing African-American Vernacular English.

Perceptual Similarity of Regional Varieties of American English

http://mypage.iu.edu/~svlevi/papers/nwav34_poster.pdf

Website's authors: Cynthia G. Clopper, Northwestern University; Susannah V. Levi, Indiana University; David B. Pisoni, Indiana University. This webpage presents a research project on the mutual perception of speakers of different dialects of English in the United States. It is a poster in a pdf file, and it is aimed at an academic audience. It is interesting for one of its conclusions, that gender affects the perception of similarity or difference of the dialect spoken.

Language Evolution Or Dying Traditions? The State of American Dialects

http://www.languagemagazine.com/internetedition/mj00/wolfram.html

Article by Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes that discusses whether American Dialects are disappearing due to the effect of mass media and the mobility of the American population. They give the example of the current vowel shift, occurring in Northern cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Buffalo, to show that dialects are in the U.S are in a process of constant change. To explain the trend in American dialects they list as important factors: language contact produced by immigration; interregional movement within the U.S.; changes in the social structure and in cultural values. The surprising conclusion is that even if some dialects are receding, new ones are appearing.

English Vowels: Their Surface Phonology and Phonetic Implementation in Vernacular Dialects

http://www.tomveatch.com/Veatch1991/titlepage.html

A dissertation submitted by Thomas Clark Veatch to The Department of Linguistics at The University of Pennsylvania. In the first part the author establishes a phonological framework for English vowels and a phonetic theory for understanding the articulatory significance of acoustic measurements. The second part investigates differences and similarities in these phonetic and phonological aspects in several dialects: Chicago White English, Los Angeles Chicano English, Anniston (Alabama) English, and (Kingston) Jamaican (mesolectal) Creole. It is a long and technical study.

American Accent Undergoing Great Vowel Shift

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5220090

This webpage has an audio file, produced by NPR - National Public Radio, on February 16, 2006. Robert Siegel interviews William Labov, who talks about how dialects are getting more distinctive nowadays despite the influence of the media. As an example, he mentions a vowel shift happening in inland northern cities (Chicago, Buffalo, etc.). In addition, Labov also gives examples of "mergers", sounds that used to be different and are now pronounced the same. He argues that some local dialects with few speakers are disappearing as they are more likely to merge with the regional dialect instead of adopting the standard English.

SPECIFIC DIALECTS OF AMERICAN ENGLISH

See below a list of websites concerning specific dialets of American English.

LUMBEE ENGLISH: Dialect Identity in a Tri-Ethnic Context: The Case of Lumbee American Indian English

http://www.ncsu.edu/ncsu/chass/english/linguistics/bios/wolfram/tri-ethnic.pdf

Article in pdf by Walt Wolfram from North Carolina State University and Clare Dannenberg from Virginia Polytechnical University and State University that examines the development of Lumbee American English. This dialect was developed in the contact of three major ethnic groups, European Americans, African Americans, and Native-American Indians. The article presents the history of this dialectal group, its linguistic features and the important role that its collective cultural identity had in the development and maintenance of this dialect, which derived from a Native-American language and shifted to an American English variety.

NEW YORK: The New York City Accent: History and Change

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1046865

Website's authors: NPR - National Public Radio. Robert Siegel.
Audio file of an interview with William Labov, made in March 12, 1999. He presents some of his records of New Yorkers' speech, discussing changes in the prestige speech, influences and boundaries of this variety, specially concerning the pronunciation of the post-vowel "r". This is a captivating file as it provides a wide range of speech examples as well as valuable comments made by one of the major linguists in the field. However, you must have an updated audio program to listen to the 12:20 minute interview.

AFRICAN-AMERICAN VERNACULAR ENGLISH

Below is a list of websites on AAVE.

Wikipedia - African American Vernacular English

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_English

This website presents many differential features of AAVE, in the phonological, syntactic, lexical levels. It gives an account of the low social prestige and of the controversy regarding its use in the education of children that speak it. It also introduces briefly the two hypotheses for the origin of AAVE: the dialect hypothesis that connects AAVE to the other Southern Dialects and the creole hypothesis that asserts AAVE came from a Creole developed with the slave trade. It is a good introduction.

African American English: A Webpage for Linguists and other Folks

http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~patrickp/AAVE.html

This is Peter L. Patrick's webpage on the subject of African American English. It adopts a sociolinguistic point of view, giving a general presentation on the topic for non-linguists, commenting the different names this dialect had over the years and providing a FAQ about it. It also has many links and an extensive bibliography for a specialized audience. Its highlight is the bibliography on Attitudes to African American English, with 50 articles, half of which commented by Patrick.

Writings on the "Ebonics" issue

http://www.stanford.edu/~rickford/ebonics/

Webpage that gathers some articles written by John R. Rickford, professor of Linguistics at Stanford University. Most of them are related to the debate generated after the Oakland School Board's resolution of December 1996, regarding the use of Ebonics in school teaching.

CAL - Center for Applied Linguistics - AAVE

http://www.cal.org/topics/dialects/aae.html

The site assembles some digests and articles by linguists about AAVE. It is also responding to the controversy that followed Oakland School's resolution.

Comments on Ebonics

http://fsweb.berry.edu/academic/hass/ejohnson/ebonics.htm

Website designed by Ellen Johnson from Berry College that brings together comments made about AAVE since 1997. Interesting for the diversity of material, some copied from the media.

Coexistent Systems in African-American English

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~wlabov/Papers/CSAA.html

Article by William Labov published in S. Mufwene , J. Rickford, J. Baugh and G. Bailey (ed.), The Structure of African-American English, London: Routledge.1998. Pp. 110-153. The author presents an analysis of the African-American English Dialect not as one monolithic system, but in relation to other co-territorial dialects of English in order to show its development. He does this through the study of tense and aspect particles. This is a very technical text.