Journal of Sociolinguistics 20/4, 2016: 489497

The Atlas of North American English and its

impacts on approaches to dialect geography

Erik R. Thomas
North Carolina State University, U.S.A.

The Atlas of North American English (ANAE) is a survey of vocalic variation

in North American English and the culmination of Labovs years of work
on vowel shifting. It covers the entire continent and employs modern
acoustic analysis to reveal shifting patterns. As such, it represents a
significant step forward for dialectology. Importantly, its focus is more
current than historical. It has some weaknesses, such as poor coverage of
minorities and diphthongization and an outdated notation. However, its
perspective will drive future approaches to geographical variation and
vowel shifting. Sound changes, both for English and for other languages,
must now be viewed as components of integrated systems. Geographical
surveys should henceforth take the extent of these systems into account.
El Atlas of North American English (ANAE) es una investigaci
on de la
variaci
on voc
alica en el ingl
es de Norteam
erica y constituye la culminaci
on
de a~nos de trabajo realizado por Labov sobre los cambios voc
alicos. Incluye
todo el continente y usa un an
alisis moderno y ac
ustico para mostrar los
patrones de cambio. Como tal, representa un paso importante para la
dialectolog
a. Un aspecto importante de esta investigaci
on es que privilegia
una perspectiva actual frente a la hist
orica. Sin embargo, ostenta algunos
problemas como son el hecho de que se hayan contemplado de manera
deficiente los grupos
etnicos minoritarios y la diptongaci
on y que trabaje
con una notaci
on anticuada. Sin embargo, su perspectiva ser
a de ayuda
para enfoques futuros centrados en la variaci
on geogr

afica y los cambios
voc
alicos. Tanto para ingl
es como para otros idiomas, los cambios f
onicos
tienen que considerarse como componentes de sistemas integrados. Las
investigaciones geogr
aficas deber
an tener en cuenta a partir de este estudio
la extensi
on de estos sistemas. [Spanish]
Der Atlas of North American English (ANAE) ist eine Untersuchung der
Veranderungen der englischen Vokale in Nordamerika und ist der
H
ohepunkt Labovs jahrelanger Arbeit an Vokalverschiebungen. Der Atlas
umfasst den gesamten Kontinent und nutzt moderne akustische Analysen,
um Verschiebungssmuster zu enth ullen. Fur die Dialektologie ist dies ein
bedeutender Schritt vorw arts. Wichtig ist auch, dass der Schwerpunkt des
Atlases eher gegenw artig als historisch ist. Er hat einige Schwachen, zum
Beispiel geringe Ber ucksichtigung von Minderheiten und von
Diphthongmustern, und eine veraltete Schreibweise. Trotzdem wird sein
Blickwinkel zuk
unftige Analysestrategien f ur geographische Ver anderungen

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490 THOMAS

und Vokalverschiebungen vorantreiben. Sowohl im Englischen als auch in

anderen Sprachen sollten Lautver
anderungen als Bestandteile integrierter
Systeme betrachtet werden. Geographische Untersuchungen sollten das
Ausma dieser Systeme von nun an berucksichtigen. [German]

KEYWORDS: Labov, sound change, vowel shifts, dialect geography,

regional variation, dialectology

The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change, or
ANAE (Labov, Ash and Boberg 2006), stands out as the greatest recent
accomplishment of dialect geography in North America. In fact, with 762
subjects, it ranks among such projects as the Swedish project SweDia (Eriksson
2004), the Hungarian National Sociolinguistic Survey (Kontra 1995), and
various online surveys such as the Harvard Dialect Survey (Vaux and Golder
2003) and the Cambridge Online Survey of World Englishes (Vaux 2016) as
one of the largest dialect geography projects in the world over the past
generation. Moreover, it distinguishes itself from older dialect geography work
in taking advantage of recent technological advances of disparate types: it
employs acoustic analysis of variables, it uses a modernized sampling
procedure, and it utilizes computer mapping techniques. It focuses mainly on
current trends instead of historical patterns. Not surprisingly, with the new
methods and the new focus, it has uncovered numerous geographical patterns
that older projects overlooked.
ANAE was designed as a survey that would cover every continental U.S.
state and every Canadian province. It focuses on cities. In each selected urban
center of at least 50,000 inhabitants, telephone numbers were dialed
randomly and then respondents were screened according to whether they
were natives of the particular metropolis. In some cities, only one or two
respondents were obtained, but in many cities, half a dozen or more were
interviewed. Eligible respondents were then mailed a list of words containing,
collectively, all the vowels of English, often in phonetic contexts of interest, and
were called back later and asked to read the words aloud into their telephones.
A few questions about lexical and grammatical variables were also included.
All the interviews were audio recorded. Afterwards, the vowels elicited in the
interviews were analyzed acoustically by means of linear predictive coding.
The project grew out of Labovs previous work, dating back to the late 1960s,
involving acoustic analysis of sound changes in progress. In earlier studies (e.g.
Labov 1991, 1994), Labov had identified a Northern Cities Shift, a Southern
Shift, and other patterns of vowel rotations, but his teams work had focused
on just a few communities, mostly large cities, and the remainder of North
America was terra incognita. ANAE aimed to fill in the vast gaps.
Large-scale geographic projects such as ANAE serve a number of important
purposes. They provide snapshots of the language at a particular time that,

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ATLAS OF NORTH AMERICAN ENGLISH 491

ultimately, will serve as historical records themselves something that is

especially important because of the present-day flux in North American vowel
configurations. They provide data to answer questions about how linguistic
changes spread over large regions. As ANAE shows, one of these questions, a
crucial one in historical linguistics, is the degree to which apparently
interrelated changes such as chain shifts maintain their cohesiveness as they
spread. In addition, they provide a baseline for subsequent studies of individual
communities, informing researchers about which variables and research
questions would be most pertinent in local studies. Already, a number of
studies (e.g. Dinkin 2011) have built on ANAEs foundation in this way.

ANAE AND DIALECT GEOGRAPHY

ANAE also served to revive dialect geography, which had declined significantly
in the United States and Canada since the heyday of dialectology. Major older
projects fell into two groups. Those with Linguistic Atlas in their title each
covered only sections of the United States and Canada. They suffered from a
variety of problems, ranging from lack of funding to weak direction for some
projects to a methodology with limited ability to adapt to changing technology
or scholarly aims. Only three the Linguistic Atlas of New England, the Linguistic
Atlas of the Upper Midwest, and the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS)
were ever fully published according to the original plan. Although data from
the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States have received some
renewed attention (see, e.g., Nerbonne and Kleiweg 2003; Nerbonne 2015),
several other unpublished linguistic atlases languish in archives or on
microfilm, their data appearing primarily in older publications on particular
variables. The haphazard progression of linguistic atlas projects led to parts of
North America never being surveyed for linguistic atlases. The other major
division consisted of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), which
has been followed to completion. Unfortunately, DARE omitted Canada. Its
focus, moreover, is on lexicon, though about half of its subjects were also
audio-recorded for phonetic and phonological analysis. These audio recordings
provide an invaluable resource, but no complete, systematic analysis of them
has been conducted. The primary value today of all these projects is as
historical records of yesterdays dialects, not as records of current speech. As
such, they can certainly provide evidence for long-term trends in communities
and regions, even if they have little to say about current variation; yet even in
that capacity they are underutilized.
An additional factor that ANAE used to its advantage was the drastic advances
in technology and other methodologies since the linguistic atlases and the DARE
survey were conducted. Survey methodology involving random sampling has
become routine in quantitative sociology and it was incorporated into ANAE in
the form of the random telephone survey procedure. Audio recording was
employed systematically in a few of the last linguistic atlas projects (notably
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492 THOMAS

LAGS) and the DARE survey, though with the analog reel-to-reel or cassette
tape devices that were available at the time. ANAE followed suit and introduced
more modern recording equipment. For most interviews, ANAE used digital
recording devices, which produce recordings that, unlike analog recordings,
can be copied exactly and do not degrade over time. Audio recording and the
digital format facilitate the most important innovation in ANAE, acoustic
analysis of the recordings. Linguistic atlas projects, including LAGS, had always
relied on impressionistic auditory transcriptions for phonetic data. Acoustic
analysis, however, eliminates most of the subjectivity inherent in auditory
transcription. In fact, it is the reason that Labovs team at the University of
Pennsylvania, and now ANAE, were able to capture trends that had escaped
earlier researchers because, while auditory transcribers tend to be primed for
older, well-known phonetic variants better than for incipient, poorly known
ones, acoustic analysis is equally sensitive to both sorts of variants. ANAE also
makes use of modern computerized graphical techniques for geographical maps
and for plots of subjects vowel configurations. Moreover, it introduces
techniques for studying phonological mergers that have been developed in
recent decades, such as examining both speakers production and speakers
own judgments (what ANAE somewhat misleadingly calls perception).
Because of the erstwhile ossified state of American dialect geography, the
inaccessibility of much of its data, the fact that its data represent speech of the
nineteenth century instead of today, and the vast innovations in equipment
and methods, ANAE has been a much-needed addition to the North American
linguistic scene. ANAE is organized in a way quite unlike previous dialect
geographies and related publications (e.g. Kurath and McDavid 1961)
covering phonetic variation. Various chapters and maps in ANAE stress the
interrelatedness of different vocalic changes: i.e. chain shifts and parallel shifts.
This innovation represents a significant step forward in the treatment of dialect
geography. From reading older publications, one might never guess that
variants of different vowels had any relationship to each other unless the
authors specifically stated that they did. In ANAE, however, these
interrelationships are the primary focus. For instance, the antagonistic
relationship between the /o/-/oh/ (BOT-BOUGHT)1 merger and certain regional
shifts in one or the other of those vowels is made clear. Considerable ink is
devoted to the Northern Cities Shift, the chain shift found on the American side
of the Great Lakes, and how its components are interdependent. Maps also
show how fronting of /ow/ (BOAT) and // (BUT) are related to each other and
how the Southern Shift proceeded in three stages: glide deletion of /ay/ (BIDE),
lowering of /ey/ (BAIT), and lowering of /iy/ (BEET). Maps for all of these
interrelationships are reinforced by numerous formant plots of the vowels of
individual speakers. Special sections are devoted to the patterns of cities with
unique vowel configurations, such as New York City and Pittsburgh, and how
their vowels interact. Acoustic analysis was vital for discovering and
substantiating many of these shifts; auditory transcriptions would
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ATLAS OF NORTH AMERICAN ENGLISH 493

undoubtedly have overlooked some of them. For example, the Pittsburgh

chain shift, in which // lowers while /o/ and /oh/ merge to a rounded vowel,
would have been difficult to document conclusively without acoustic evidence.
The fact that ANAE was completed and published within a short amount of
time will certainly magnify its impact on the field. The bane of dialect geography
has traditionally been the long lag time between collection of the interviews and
complete publication of the data, and these delays compromised the usefulness
of many projects. The orientation of much older work toward older speakers,
rural locations, and obsolete variables exacerbated the slow publication, and as
a result, most of the older projects could look only backward, not forward. In
fact, this historical orientation has discouraged many young scholars from
exploring dialect atlas projects, which, in turn, has retarded the whole field of
dialect geography in North America. ANAE, however, was published promptly
enough that its findings could be put to use while they still describe current
dialectal variation. Here, we have a dialect atlas focused on the present and
future, not on the past. As such, it makes the links between geographical
variation and single-community sociolinguistic studies far easier to discern.

WEAKNESSES IN ANAE
No large-scale project lacks faults, and ANAE has its deficiencies. One that
stands out is the weak coverage of minorities. ANAE admittedly made no
attempt to examine Latino Englishes. This omission is unfortunate because
Latinos predominate in some regions, such as southern Texas and large parts
of such urban centers as Miami and Los Angeles, and have developed their
own dialects in such areas. Asian Americans and Native Americans were
completely off ANAEs radar. ANAE took more notice of African Americans,
but they, too, are underrepresented, with only 44 subjects. While some cities
such as Atlanta and New Orleans have adequate samplings of African
Americans, other important African American centers such as Washington,
D.C., Houston, Memphis, and Baltimore have none. ANAEs reasoning is that
minorities in general, and African Americans in particular, hardly participate
in regional vowel shifts, an assertion that Labov has made repeatedly in past
publications (e.g. Labov 1991, 1994). However, that is not completely true, as
the papers in Yaeger-Dror and Thomas (2010) demonstrate and as ANAE
acknowledges in a footnote (Labov, Ash and Boberg 2006: 24). Furthermore,
the vowel configurations of minorities may themselves show informative and
unique developments that are not evident in European American varieties. The
sparse minority representation in ANAE and the assumptions behind this
under-sampling may leave readers with the impression that minorities are
largely divorced from the vocalic innovations that pervade white dialects (e.g.
for African Americans), that their speech represents merely short-term
transitional interference features from a substrate language (e.g. Latinos and
some Native Americans), or that they assimilate completely to white dialects
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and show no special patterns of their own (e.g. Asian Americans). On the
contrary, white North American dialects may currently be entering a phase of
leveling and the future of dialectal diversity may lie in large part with minority
dialects. As a result, the underrepresentation of minorities in ANAE may leave
an unfortunate legacy if it discourages future researchers from examining
vocalic diversity among minorities.
Another possible deficiency is the paucity of rural subjects. ANAEs
justification for focusing on urban centers is that most sound changes are
initiated in urban centers (Labov, Ash and Boberg 2006: 21). However, not all
sound changes are urban in origin/propagation (Bailey et al. 1993) and rural
areas can contain instructive patterns absent in cities, as Labov himself (e.g.
Labov 1994) has noted for North Carolinas Outer Banks. Nevertheless, inclusion
of rural areas, even of a light but continent-wide sampling of them, might have
made the project less manageable, delaying publication indefinitely.
The treatment of diphthongs is a decidedly weak aspect of ANAE. ANAE
devotes considerable discussion to glide deletion of /ay/ (BITE/BIDE) in the South
and of /aw/ (BOUT) in Pittsburgh. However, there are no plots or maps showing
acoustic measurements of these glides, which would substantiate the degree of
glide weakening. This lack of attention and the label glide deletion itself
perpetuate the notion that the process is a matter of presence or absence of a glide
when it actually involves a gradient of weakening. Acoustic data on glides are
shown only once in the entire tome, in plots of trajectories of the /uw/, /ow/, and
/aw/ glides for one Alabama subject. As noted by, e.g., Thomas (2003) and
Jacewicz, Fox and Salmons (2011a, 2011b, inter alia), diphthongal dynamics are
important dialectal variables in their own right and deserve more attention.
Moreover, failure to examine diphthongal dynamics closely may lead to
erroneous conclusions such as ANAEs report of an /g/-/eyg/ merger in
certain regions, which Bauer and Parker (2008) contest with more detailed data.
A further aspect of ANAE that I find problematic is the binary notation used
for vowel classes. The binary system is abstract, assigning a small number of
labels to all vowels and glides. Thus, the BIT vowel is labeled as /i/ and the BEET
vowel as /iy/, even when their respective qualities do not overlap. This system
harkens back to the bygone age of Bloomfieldian Structuralism, having been
developed in large part by Trager and Bloch (1941) and Trager and Smith
(1951). It predominated in American linguistics in the mid-twentieth century
and still has some currency in phonology but is rarely used in phonetics. ANAE
gives several justifications for using this highly abstract system instead of a
unary notation such as that used by dialect geographers, which employs
distinct symbols for each vowel class (e.g. /i/ for the BEET vowel and // for the
BIT vowel). First, ANAE contends that the unary notation represents only a
synchronic state, whereas the binary system represents diachronic
development better. For example, ANAE asserts that /o/ represents the origin
of the BOT class from Middle English short /o/ better than // does. However,
ANAE also uses // and //, which obscure their connection with Middle
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English short-a and short-u, respectively, and it is unclear why unary systems
have to be taken as merely synchronic. Second, ANAE argues that the unary
system uses too many special symbols such as // and //. This reasoning
assumes that minimalism is always preferable, a highly assailable view.
ANAEs third, and primary, reason for using the binary notation is that it
reflects the structural properties behind the vowel shifting principles listed in
ANAE and Labovs previous work. This argument rests on the notion of
subsystems of vowels showing their own chain shifts that bypass vowels in
other subsystems, several of which ANAE illuminates in various chapters.
However, these subsystems are more permeable and less well-defined than
ANAE suggests. The /iy/ vowel, for example, shows a true upglide only in a few
Southern varieties, its meager formant dynamics usually explicable as
transitions from and to adjacent segments. /ey/ (BAIT), conversely, shows an
upglide in all but a few North American varieties. As a result, the two seldom
work in tandem during shifts in the region ANAE covers. The monophthongal
realization of /iy/, on the other hand, may be responsible (via vowel dispersion)
for the fact that /iy/ and /i/ (the BIT vowel) typically show a greater F2
difference than the nuclei of /ey/ and /e/ (BET) exhibit. Thus, /iy/ and /i/
influence each other more often than /iy/ and /ey/ do, compromising the
utility of the binary notation. Similarly, why should /ow/ and //, from
different subsystems, shift in tandem so frequently? Other drawbacks also
emerge. In ANAEs binary system, all fronting upglides are labeled /-y/ and all
backing upglides /-w/, though as I showed in Thomas (2003), glides may have
height distinctions. Furthermore, short vowels, represented as monophthongal
in the binary system, are not intrinsically monophthongal at all because they
typically show inglides/downglides when their duration is sufficiently long
(see, e.g., Jacewicz, Fox and Salmons 2011a, 2011b). The overriding problem
is that ANAE injects abstraction where it does not belong i.e. beyond just
defining historical classes but further, into a wide-ranging systematization of
diverse dialects and historical change.

IMPACT ON DIALECTOLOGY AND SOUND CHANGE RESEARCH

Criticisms aside, though, ANAE represents a paradigm shift in the way both
geographical variation and vowel shifting are examined. For geographical
variation, ANAE makes it clear that individual vowels should not be viewed in
isolation. Shifts of particular vowels are quite often related to each other as
chain shifts, parallel shifts, or mutual repellence. Dialect geographers studying
not only English but any language now have to think of vowel shifts in an
integrated manner. Labov had always conceived of vowel shifting patterns as
spreading geographically over substantial regions, but now ANAE has provided
the means to discern how far they can spread, what factors (such as other,
incompatible vowel configurations) limit the spread of a shift, and how the
coherence of a set of related shifts disintegrates near the limits of its influence.
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496 THOMAS

It also broadens the scope of research on vowel shifting patterns by covering

regions such as the Midland for which there was previously no comprehensive
description.
All of these goals relate to some of Labovs long-argued assertions. One is
that new developments continue to produce dialectal divergence even as older
features that once differentiated dialects fade away, and ANAE provides ample
evidence to that end. Another assertion was that vowel shifting follows
definable principles, specifically those that are outlined in ANAE and previous
publications (e.g. Labov 1994, 2001), and ANAE yields much support for these
principles, even though it is not hamstrung by this goal and faithfully reports
findings whether they conform clearly to the principles or not. The result is an
irrevocable change in how North American English is viewed. Future
scholarship on the vowels of any English-speaking community in North
America cannot be taken seriously without implicit or explicit reference to the
changes in perspective that ANAE has brought about. Future questions will
involve how these concepts can be applied to issues that ANAE treats weakly,
such as how the dynamics of different diphthongs are related to each other, the
shifting patterns of minority dialects, and the extent to which chain shifts
maintain their coherence in rural areas. More broadly, application of ANAEs
approach awaits other English-speaking areas, particularly the New Englishes
of Asia and Africa; to other languages; and to non-vocalic variation.

NOTE
1. The keywords used in this paper are those of Yaeger-Dror and Thomas (2010),
which were designed for North American English and are easier to remember
than those of Wells (1982).

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Address correspondence to:

Erik R. Thomas
Department of English
North Carolina State University
Box 8105 Raleigh
North Carolina 27695-8105
U.S.A.
erthomas@ncsu.edu

2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd