Date: 10-Aug-2006
From: Matthew Gordon <gordonmjmissouri.edu>
Subject: The Atlas of North American English
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-3513.html
AUTHORS: Labov, William; Ash, Sharon; Boberg, CharlesTITLE: The Atlas of North American EnglishSUBTITLE: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change. A Multimedia Reference ToolPUBLISHER: Mouton de GruyterYEAR: 2005
Matthew J. Gordon, English Department, University of Missouri - Columbia
Between 1992 and 1999 a team of researchers led by William Labov conducteda series of interviews over the telephone with some 800 people across theUnited States and Canada. The samples of speech recorded during theseinterviews constitute the database on which the Atlas of North AmericanEnglish (ANAE) is based. This work consists of (a) the print version of theAtlas, an oversized volume (11.5'' x 16'') which runs over 300 pages andcontains 129 four-color maps, (b) a CD-ROM packaged with the Atlas andcontaining data files and interactive maps with sound clips; and (c) awebsite available by subscription which also includes interactive maps andlonger sound clips as well as additional materials. This review is focusedon the bound, ''hard-copy'' of the Atlas.
ANAE contains twenty three chapters organized into six sections, labeledParts A-F. Part A ''Introduction and methods'' opens with an introductorychapter that outlines the goals and scope of the project. This discussionputs ANAE in the context of American dialectology, suggesting that thecurrent project builds on the tradition of scholars such as Hans Kurath andRaven McDavid though it departs significantly from that research especiallyin terms of methodology. Key aspects of the ANAE methodology whichdistinguish this project from traditional dialect geography include:
- the linguistic focus lies with active sounds changes especially thoseaffecting vowels;
- acoustic measurements are used for much of the analysis;
- the survey targeted urban people with two speakers sampled for mostsmall cities and four or more for larger metropolitan areas;
- the sample of speakers is intentionally skewed to include young womenfrom each location since previous research has found them in the vanguardof many sound changes.
SUMMARY
Chapter 2 sketches the phonological framework through which ANAE approachesNorth American vowels. The system employed divides vowels into the familiarshort and long classes and further divides the latter according todiphthong type (i.e. upgliding vs. ingliding) in a manner that isreminiscent of earlier structuralist approaches such as Trager and Smith(1957). Rather than using phonetically descriptive symbols (e.g. the IPAalphabet), phonemes are represented with symbols that reflect thephonological classification (e.g. /o/ is the vowel of LOT; /ow/ is thevowel of GOAT; /oh/ is the vowel of THOUGHT) - I use ANAE's symbols in thisreview, but I include guide words in all caps from the lexical setsformulated by Wells (1982). This classification provides a theoretical''initial position'' of the vowels, that is, a starting point from which thechanges documented by ANAE take off. Many of those changes involve either achain shift or a merger, and so Chapter 3 reviews general principlesgoverning these types of change. This material digests the more thoroughtreatment offered by Labov (1994). More methodological details about theproject are included in Chapters 4 ''Sampling and field methods'' and 5''Methods of acoustic analysis.''
Part B is concerned with ''Mergers and contrasts.'' Chapter 7 discusses oneof two consonantal features studied here: post-vocalic /r/. The ANAEresults suggest that vocalization of post-vocalic /r/ remains a stablesociolinguistic variable in eastern New England and New York City where itoccurs more commonly among working class speakers and in informal speechcontexts. In the South, by contrast, /r/-vocalization appears to bereceding at least among White speakers. The other consonantal featureexamined is the phonemic distinction between /w/ and /hw/ (e.g. wear vs.where) which is taken up in Chapter 8 on ''Nearly completed mergers.'' As thechapter title suggests, ANAE finds few people who maintain this contrast.The same status describes some of the vocalic features examined hereincluding the merger of the vowels in 'dew' and 'do' and those of 'hoarse'and 'horse.' There are of course several cases of mergers that appear to beactively spreading, and these are discussed in Chapter 9. ANAE examinesseveral conditioned mergers including the well known merger of short /i/and short /e/ before nasals (e.g. 'pin' vs. 'pen') and the mergers ofvarious tense and lax vowels before /l/ (e.g. 'pool' vs. 'pull'; 'feel' vs.'fill'; 'sale' vs. 'sell'). Much more significant to the dialect picturethat ANAE paints, however, is the unconditional merger of the LOT andTHOUGHT classes: the low back merger, which makes homophones of 'cot' and'caught,' 'Don' and 'dawn,' etc. ANAE's apparent-time analysis, comparingspeakers by age, indicates that this merger is an active change in manyregions though surprisingly their results suggest that the territory inwhich the merger predominates has not expanded in recent decades.
Part C consists of a single chapter that contains a series of mapsillustrating ''the geographical distribution of differences of vowelquality'' (77). Vowel quality is determined by instrumental measurements ofthe frequencies of the first and second formants (F1 and F2), and the rawmeasurements have been normalized to allow for cross-speaker comparison.For each of eighteen vowel classes, two maps are presented: one displayingdifferences in the mean F1 for each of 439 survey subjects and the otherdisplaying differences in the mean F2 for those subjects. In each map themeans have been divided into four ranges by applying an algorithm thatidentifies natural breaks in the data. The caption for each map highlightssome of the apparent patterns but no isoglosses have been added in keepingwith the authors' goal of presenting the results with ''the minimum oftheoretical interpretation'' (77).
Part D offers an overview of North American dialects by laying out a set offeatures that defines the picture of regional differences. Chapter 11sketches that overall picture by introducing the regional divisions thatANAE considers significant and the pronunciation features that define thosedivisions. This chapter concludes (148) with a summary map giving thelabels and boundaries for all the dialects proposed, in this way providinga convenient overall view that is likely to be excerpted for generations ofintroductory textbooks to come. The ANAE picture reaffirms some of theregional boundaries established by earlier studies (e.g. Kurath and McDavid1961) such as the divisions between eastern and western New England andbetween the North and the Midland. Nevertheless, other familiar divisionsare not evident in ANAE's results such as the separation of the South fromthe South Midland. The other two chapters in this section offer moredetails about key vocalic variables of broad geographic relevance. Chapter12 considers the fronting of back vowels, and Chapter 13 examines patternsinvolving the treatment of short-a (i.e. the vowel of TRAP) and short-o(i.e. the vowel of LOT).
The dialect picture sketched in Chapter 11 is elaborated in Part E whereeach of the major regions is treated in a separate chapter. These chapterstypically offer some historical perspective on the region at issue, and thefeatures that define that region are explored in as much sociolinguisticdetail as is possible given the limits of the ANAE sample. Chapter 14examines the North where the focus is the complex pattern of vowel changesknown as the Northern Cities Shift. Another putative chain shift, theCanadian Shift, is one of the features discussed in Chapter 15 which, ofcourse, treats Canada. Chapter 16 takes on New England and quicklysubdivides that region according to key features including the low backmerger and the vocalization of /r/. New York City and the Mid-Atlanticstates are the subject of Chapter 17 where the focus is on the variabletreatment of short-a which has split into two phonemes in this region. TheSouth is explored in Chapter 18 and once again a series of apparentlycoordinated vowel changes is the focus as the Southern Shift isinvestigated. The region with the greatest internal diversity is theMidland, the subject of Chapter 19. One of the features that unites thisregion is the fronting of /ow/ though the discussion here also highlightsmany localized features including the monophthongization of /aw/ heard inPittsburgh. The final chapter in the section examines the West, a regioncharacterized by fronting of /uw/ and the low back merger.
Part F contains three thematically unrelated chapters under the heading''Other views of regional differences.'' Chapter 21 departs from thephonological focus of the rest of book to examine a few lexical andgrammatical features including terms for 'carbonated beverage' (e.g. 'pop','soda', 'coke', etc.) and ''positive anymore'' (e.g. Cars sure are expensiveanymore). The data on these features is quite limited since they were not aprincipal target of the study design. Still, their inclusion here expandsthe Atlas's perspective albeit slightly. Chapter 22 reconsiders the speechof the 44 African American subjects in the study. Because the sample wasnot systematically stratified by race or ethnicity, the authors do not havestrong conclusions to offer regarding possible linguistic differences alongthese lines. Nevertheless, they are able to highlight evidence in theirdata of race-based patterns. The final chapter, 23, summarizes the mainfindings and briefly evaluates the project's significance.
EVALUATION:
This is a book that every scholar working on American dialects or soundchange in general has been eagerly anticipating. The authors have for yearsprovided previews of their findings in articles, conference presentations,and on the project's website. They and other researchers in this area haveno doubt made this one of the most frequently cited ''forthcoming'' works inthe history of the field. This scholarly audience is not likely to bedisappointed with the finished product. The scope and quality of this studyensure its landmark status.
Clearly ANAE has the most to offer those researchers who work onphonological variation in American English. The approach to sampling takenby ANAE - covering the entire continent with a small number of speakersfrom each location and concentrating on urban centers - invites morein-depth follow-up studies. Armed with the framework provided by ANAE,researchers can examine urban speech in greater detail with a moresociolinguistically diverse sample or they can investigate the speechpatterns of the rural areas that lie between the cities surveyed by ANAE.In this way, a full evaluation of the validity of the dialect boundariesposited by Labov and his colleagues must await this future research.Nevertheless, it is worth noting that the authors have taken certain stepsto facilitate comparative studies. Consider, for example, the maps inChapter 10 (Part C), which offer F1 and F2 comparisons for each vowel.These maps present the basic material that the ANAE authors draw theirregional classifications from, but much of the information in these maps isfor various reasons not taken up in the construction of the broaderpicture. If the authors were interested solely in arguing for a particularview of North American dialects, the inclusion of all of these 38 full-pagemaps would be a waste of space (and resources). Fortunately, their aim isnot so narrow. The systematic profiling of height and frontness differencesfor each vowel seems to have been done here in the spirit of providing ascomplete a speech record as possible, the same spirit that guided earlierwork in dialect geography and can be seen, for example, in the vowel''synopses'' of individual informants included by Kurath and McDavid (1961).It is likely that follow-up research will take advantage of the full recordthat ANAE offers just as has happened with the record left by Kurath andMcDavid and others who worked in the linguistic atlas tradition (see e.g.Thomas 2001). Further contributing to this likelihood is the fact mentionedabove, that ANAE authors have made available, on the accompanying CD-ROMand through the website, much of their raw data, the measurements of F1 andF2 for each vowel from each of over 400 speakers together with demographicdetails about them.
ANAE does, of course, argue for a particular view of North Americandialects, and central to any judgment on that view is an assessment of thelinguistic features that define the various regions. Despite the briefdetour taken in Chapter 21, ANAE is a study of pronunciation, and theregional picture is based exclusively on phonological variables. One mightcriticize this focus as overly narrow though much of the previous work onAmerican dialects (e.g. Carver 1987) was based on a comparably narrow setof linguistic features. Indeed the phonological patterns studied here arecertainly of greater structural significance than the lexical variables onwhich many previous studies concentrated. A kind of structuralist reasoningis in fact critical to much of ANAE's argumentation. Vowels are seen asorganized by subsystems rather than as individual elements. Thus, observedsound changes are commonly viewed in terms of relations among subsystems ofvowels rather than as isolated developments. To explain the resistance ofmuch of the South to the low back merger, for example, the authors notethat one element in this merger, /oh/ (the vowel of THOUGHT), is commonlyproduced as a back upgliding diphthong. This development is not simply aphonetic change but a switch in the vowel's subclassification, a switchthat the author's argue is made possible by the position of a relatedelement: the /aw/ diphthong of MOUTH. The nucleus of this vowel istypically fronted in the South which creates an opening in the back ofvowel space for the diphthongized /oh/ to fill. The fronting of /aw/ inturn is treated as part of a more general pattern affecting the other backupgliding diphthongs, /ow/ and /uw/. The value of viewing sound changethrough a structuralist prism stems from the inference of such generalpatterns, many of which have been developed and defended in earlier work(e.g. Labov 1994). Ideally the patterns are useful not only for explainingobserved changes but also for predicting future developments. So, forexample, if /oh/ retains its membership in the class of back upglidingdiphthongs in the South, it should eventually be subject to fronting. Thedata from ANAE and other studies, however, suggest a different path asamong young Southerners /oh/ seems to be losing its diphthongal characterand merging with /o/ (the vowel of LOT). Understanding why Southern speechis taking this direction of change over other structural alternativesrequires greater consideration of historical and sociolinguistic trendsthan is possible with the ANAE data.
Many readers will be interested more in the regional divisions proposed byANAE than by the structural forces at play in the vowel system. On thisscore, we might question some of the particular phonological patterns thatare identified by ANAE as characteristic of certain regions. It is easy toaccept, for example, the North as a dialect region defined by the NorthernCities Shift since this pattern involves several structurally relatedfeatures all of which occur in heavy concentration in this area and almostexclusively there. The evidence for some of the other regional divisions isless convincing. For example, the West is defined primarily as an area inwhich the low back merger predominates and in which /uw/ is fronted but/ow/ is not. Both the low back merger and fronted /uw/ are heard in otherregions including some neighboring the West, but the authors argue that aparticular configuration involving these changes and the absence of otherchanges found in adjacent regions justifies the designation of the West asa separate region. Still, they are upfront about tenuousness of thisdefinition of the region (303). More importantly they incorporate intotheir analysis a metric of the strength of the proposed dialect boundariesby including calculations of how uniformly the linguistic features aredistributed within a region and how often they occur outside that region.These figures indicate that not all of the proposed isoglosses should begiven equal weight. Unfortunately the maps displaying these isoglosses donot reflect such differences.
As these comments suggest, this book has a tremendous amount of analyticaldetail to offer interested readers. Still, the authors and editors seem tosuspect that few people are likely to read the book from cover to cover,and they have taken steps in the design to make ANAE quite easy to browse.For example, directly beneath each map is a paragraph-long caption thathighlights key patterns in the data. In this way, they spare the readerfrom having to hunt down the relevant discussion in the text, thoughreaders who wish to locate that discussion are aided by the placement ofsymbols in the margins of the text designating the section where aparticular map is treated. While such steps improve the usability of ANAE,it would be a mistake to think this book is accessible to general readersor anyone lacking training in phonetics. For example, one of the isoglossesthat defines the North in ANAE is the ''ED measure'' which identifiesspeakers for whom the mean F2 of /e/ (the vowel of DRESS) minus the mean F2of /o/ (the vowel of LOT) is less that 375 Hz. To appreciate this criterionone has to know the relative positions of the vowels in articulatory space,the relevance of F2 as a measure of frontedness, and the movement of thesevowels in the Northern Cities Shift, in which /e/ is typically backed and/o/ is fronted. Finally, accessibility of a different kind is an issue forspecialists and non-specialists alike due to the book's price. At $749,ANAE is probably out of economic reach to most individual buyers. However,readers who have access to the online edition through their institutionscan download the entire book as a PDF file from the project's website.
In sum, ANAE is a welcome addition to scholarship in American dialectologyas well as in the sociolinguistic study of language change. The picture itpaints of North American dialects in part confirms regional divisionsestablished by previous research and also uncovers new patterns resultingfrom emerging trends. To be sure, the methodology of this project - theconcentration on urban speech, the focus on vowel pronunciation, thereliance on acoustic measurements, etc. - produces a limited view of NorthAmerican speech. Still this study remains unprecedented in its broad scope,and the authors succeed in laying out a useful framework for examiningphonological variation on this continent. ANAE is a landmark study thatwill shape research trends for years to come.
REFERENCES:
Carver, Craig M. 1987. American Regional Dialects: A Word Geography. AnnArbor: University of Michigan Press.
Kurath, Hans and Raven I. McDavid, Jr. 1961. The Pronunciation of Englishin the Atlantic States. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Labov, William. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 1: InternalFactors. Oxford: Blackwell.
Thomas, Erik R. 2001. An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Variation in New WorldEnglish. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Trager, George L. and Henry Lee Smith. 1957. An Outline of EnglishStructure. Washington: American Council of Learned Societies.
Wells, J.C. 1982. Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
Matthew J. Gordon (Ph.D. University of Michigan, 1997) teaches Englishlinguistics at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the author ofSmall-Town Values, Big-City Vowels: A Study of the Northern Cities Shift inMichigan (Duke UP 2001), and co-author with Lesley Milroy ofSociolinguistics: Method and Interpretation (Blackwell 2003).
|