Ebook: Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change

"The Atlas of North American English" provides the first overall view of the pronunciation and vowel systems of the dialects of the U.S. and Canada. The Atlas re-defines the regional dialects of American English on the basis of sound changes active in the 1990s and draws new boundaries reflecting those changes. It is based on a telephone survey of 762 local speakers, representing all the urbanized areas of North America. It has been developed by Bill Labov, one of the leading sociolinguists of the world, together with his colleagues Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg. The Atlas consists of a printed volume accompanied by an interactive CD-ROM. Starting January 2006, the print and multimedia content will also be available online. It is a combined Edition: Book and Multimedia CD-ROM. The printed volume contains: 23 chapters that re-define the geographic boundaries of North American dialects and trace the influence of gender, age, education, and city size on the progress of sound change; findings that show a dramatic and increasing divergence of English in North America; 139 four colour maps that illustrate the regional distribution of phonological and phonetic variables across the North American continent; and 120 four colour vowel charts of individual speakers. The interactive multimedia CD-ROM supplements the printed articles and maps by providing: a data base with measurements of more than 100,000 vowels and mean values for 439 speakers; the Plotnik program for mapping each of the individual vowel systems; extended sound samples of all North American dialects; and interactive applications to enhance classroom presentations. The Online only version provides print and multimedia content. The online only version offers: simultaneous access to the print and multimedia content to all users in the university/library network; a wider selection of interactive data, maps, and audio samples that will be recurrently updated; students with concurrent access to research material for classroom assignments.