Hello everyone,

     Bert Vaux, a professor of linguistics has been doing his own research on American English dialects which some of you may have already heard about or read about in the newspaper. He has compiled some maps on the dialectal differences in the use of English words in the USA. Some of which are shown on the following maps, including the "You guys - You all dichotomy towards the bottom of the web page. He is not the last word of course but still, his findings are interesting. Check them out:

         http://www.uwm.edu/People/vaux/

         Sincerely,
   
    Brian Costello

Interesting findings indeed, Brian. There’s some cool stuff here, for sure.

But the Prof seems to view the South as a single isoglottal or lexical unit. I have issues with that. Admittedly, he treats N’Awlins as a special case, but there’s a hell of a difference between Tyler, Texas and El Paso, Texas (to name but a few). His findings concerning such minutae as subs or TP-ing are fascinating, but they’re hardly central to a dialect map of the US.

In short, it’s all good. Just not quite all good enough.

- PW
JMHO

Bert Vaux’s article is a popular look at US dialect. Serious work on dialect and accent usually is based on the phonological pallette. In English this usually means the pronunciation of vowels. This kind of feature is far better measure of accent/dialect than lexical divergence, it is also more stable.

PW is right, kind of. Everyone speaks differently, but we have to draw a line somewhere. Dialect boundaries are seldom neat affairs, and we’ve discussed before about whether West Texas is more Southern or Western. In the English of England, the pronunciation of the ‘u’ in ‘put’ is usually taken as the defining feature of Northern English against Southern English. Other features then add increasing distinction on top of this. People in Birmingham and Newcastle speak with clearly different accents, but there are sufficient features in common to label both accents as Northern English. In the same way, Southern US English has a great deal of variety, but a core number of features hold this diversity together as one type of American English.

It is interesting that Vaux uses the Midlands label as well as the Western label. It seems that there is popular resistance to these in the US, where the North/South division is seen as primary. More often, modern studies include Canadian English alongside US English, as there is a clear gradience between these dialects apart from the rest of World English.

- Garzo.

      Hello Everyone,

      The Bert Vaux page seems to be working again. It’s worth checking out by anyone intereste in American dialects. To access it, click on this web page:

      http://www.uwm.edu/People/vaux/

      Then go into American dialects (Let’s go USA 2004).

      If you have any comments like Garzo and Palewriter did, I’d love to hear them.

      Some people say that radio and television are rapidly erasing dialect differences in America. (How many different accents did you really hear at the Democratic convention?). However, there is one respectable linguist William Labov, who disagrees. He says that English is slowly changing in subtle ways  in all major U.S. cities, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago etc.;
that we are becoming more different instead of more similar; and that already, regional pronunciation differences are causing confusion among speakers in other regions.

   —- Brian