This book "supplies a vocabulary of English words and idiomatic phrases 'arranged … according to the ideas which they express'. The thesaurus, continually expanded and updated, has always remained in print, but this reissued first edition shows the impressive breadth of Roget's own knowledge and interests."
AUTHORS: Labov, William; Ash, Sharon; Boberg, Charles TITLE: The Atlas of North American English SUBTITLE: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change. A Multimedia Reference Tool PUBLISHER: Mouton de Gruyter YEAR: 2005
Matthew J. Gordon, English Department, University of Missouri - Columbia
Between 1992 and 1999 a team of researchers led by William Labov conducted a series of interviews over the telephone with some 800 people across the United States and Canada. The samples of speech recorded during these interviews constitute the database on which the Atlas of North American English (ANAE) is based. This work consists of (a) the print version of the Atlas, an oversized volume (11.5'' x 16'') which runs over 300 pages and contains 129 four-color maps, (b) a CD-ROM packaged with the Atlas and containing data files and interactive maps with sound clips; and (c) a website available by subscription which also includes interactive maps and longer sound clips as well as additional materials. This review is focused on the bound, ''hard-copy'' of the Atlas.
ANAE contains twenty three chapters organized into six sections, labeled Parts A-F. Part A ''Introduction and methods'' opens with an introductory chapter that outlines the goals and scope of the project. This discussion puts ANAE in the context of American dialectology, suggesting that the current project builds on the tradition of scholars such as Hans Kurath and Raven McDavid though it departs significantly from that research especially in terms of methodology. Key aspects of the ANAE methodology which distinguish this project from traditional dialect geography include:
- the linguistic focus lies with active sounds changes especially those affecting vowels;
- acoustic measurements are used for much of the analysis;
- the survey targeted urban people with two speakers sampled for most small cities and four or more for larger metropolitan areas;
- the sample of speakers is intentionally skewed to include young women from each location since previous research has found them in the vanguard of many sound changes.
Chapter 2 sketches the phonological framework through which ANAE approaches North American vowels. The system employed divides vowels into the familiar short and long classes and further divides the latter according to diphthong type (i.e. upgliding vs. ingliding) in a manner that is reminiscent of earlier structuralist approaches such as Trager and Smith (1957). Rather than using phonetically descriptive symbols (e.g. the IPA alphabet), phonemes are represented with symbols that reflect the phonological classification (e.g. /o/ is the vowel of LOT; /ow/ is the vowel of GOAT; /oh/ is the vowel of THOUGHT) - I use ANAE's symbols in this review, but I include guide words in all caps from the lexical sets formulated by Wells (1982). This classification provides a theoretical ''initial position'' of the vowels, that is, a starting point from which the changes documented by ANAE take off. Many of those changes involve either a chain shift or a merger, and so Chapter 3 reviews general principles governing these types of change. This material digests the more thorough treatment offered by Labov (1994). More methodological details about the project 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 one of two consonantal features studied here: post-vocalic /r/. The ANAE results suggest that vocalization of post-vocalic /r/ remains a stable sociolinguistic variable in eastern New England and New York City where it occurs more commonly among working class speakers and in informal speech contexts. In the South, by contrast, /r/-vocalization appears to be receding at least among White speakers. The other consonantal feature examined 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 the chapter title suggests, ANAE finds few people who maintain this contrast. The same status describes some of the vocalic features examined here including 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 be actively spreading, and these are discussed in Chapter 9. ANAE examines several conditioned mergers including the well known merger of short /i/ and short /e/ before nasals (e.g. 'pin' vs. 'pen') and the mergers of various tense and lax vowels before /l/ (e.g. 'pool' vs. 'pull'; 'feel' vs. 'fill'; 'sale' vs. 'sell'). Much more significant to the dialect picture that ANAE paints, however, is the unconditional merger of the LOT and THOUGHT classes: the low back merger, which makes homophones of 'cot' and 'caught,' 'Don' and 'dawn,' etc. ANAE's apparent-time analysis, comparing speakers by age, indicates that this merger is an active change in many regions though surprisingly their results suggest that the territory in which the merger predominates has not expanded in recent decades.
Part C consists of a single chapter that contains a series of maps illustrating ''the geographical distribution of differences of vowel quality'' (77). Vowel quality is determined by instrumental measurements of the frequencies of the first and second formants (F1 and F2), and the raw measurements have been normalized to allow for cross-speaker comparison. For each of eighteen vowel classes, two maps are presented: one displaying differences in the mean F1 for each of 439 survey subjects and the other displaying differences in the mean F2 for those subjects. In each map the means have been divided into four ranges by applying an algorithm that identifies natural breaks in the data. The caption for each map highlights some of the apparent patterns but no isoglosses have been added in keeping with the authors' goal of presenting the results with ''the minimum of theoretical interpretation'' (77).
Part D offers an overview of North American dialects by laying out a set of features that defines the picture of regional differences. Chapter 11 sketches that overall picture by introducing the regional divisions that ANAE considers significant and the pronunciation features that define those divisions. This chapter concludes (148) with a summary map giving the labels and boundaries for all the dialects proposed, in this way providing a convenient overall view that is likely to be excerpted for generations of introductory textbooks to come. The ANAE picture reaffirms some of the regional boundaries established by earlier studies (e.g. Kurath and McDavid 1961) such as the divisions between eastern and western New England and between the North and the Midland. Nevertheless, other familiar divisions are not evident in ANAE's results such as the separation of the South from the South Midland. The other two chapters in this section offer more details about key vocalic variables of broad geographic relevance. Chapter 12 considers the fronting of back vowels, and Chapter 13 examines patterns involving 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 where each of the major regions is treated in a separate chapter. These chapters typically offer some historical perspective on the region at issue, and the features that define that region are explored in as much sociolinguistic detail as is possible given the limits of the ANAE sample. Chapter 14 examines the North where the focus is the complex pattern of vowel changes known as the Northern Cities Shift. Another putative chain shift, the Canadian Shift, is one of the features discussed in Chapter 15 which, of course, treats Canada. Chapter 16 takes on New England and quickly subdivides that region according to key features including the low back merger and the vocalization of /r/. New York City and the Mid-Atlantic states are the subject of Chapter 17 where the focus is on the variable treatment of short-a which has split into two phonemes in this region. The South is explored in Chapter 18 and once again a series of apparently coordinated vowel changes is the focus as the Southern Shift is investigated. The region with the greatest internal diversity is the Midland, the subject of Chapter 19. One of the features that unites this region is the fronting of /ow/ though the discussion here also highlights many localized features including the monophthongization of /aw/ heard in Pittsburgh. The final chapter in the section examines the West, a region characterized 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 the phonological focus of the rest of book to examine a few lexical and grammatical features including terms for 'carbonated beverage' (e.g. 'pop', 'soda', 'coke', etc.) and ''positive anymore'' (e.g. Cars sure are expensive anymore). The data on these features is quite limited since they were not a principal target of the study design. Still, their inclusion here expands the Atlas's perspective albeit slightly. Chapter 22 reconsiders the speech of the 44 African American subjects in the study. Because the sample was not systematically stratified by race or ethnicity, the authors do not have strong conclusions to offer regarding possible linguistic differences along these lines. Nevertheless, they are able to highlight evidence in their data of race-based patterns. The final chapter, 23, summarizes the main findings and briefly evaluates the project's significance.
This is a book that every scholar working on American dialects or sound change in general has been eagerly anticipating. The authors have for years provided previews of their findings in articles, conference presentations, and on the project's website. They and other researchers in this area have no doubt made this one of the most frequently cited ''forthcoming'' works in the history of the field. This scholarly audience is not likely to be disappointed with the finished product. The scope and quality of this study ensure its landmark status.
Clearly ANAE has the most to offer those researchers who work on phonological variation in American English. The approach to sampling taken by ANAE - covering the entire continent with a small number of speakers from each location and concentrating on urban centers - invites more in-depth follow-up studies. Armed with the framework provided by ANAE, researchers can examine urban speech in greater detail with a more sociolinguistically diverse sample or they can investigate the speech patterns of the rural areas that lie between the cities surveyed by ANAE. In this way, a full evaluation of the validity of the dialect boundaries posited by Labov and his colleagues must await this future research. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that the authors have taken certain steps to facilitate comparative studies. Consider, for example, the maps in Chapter 10 (Part C), which offer F1 and F2 comparisons for each vowel. These maps present the basic material that the ANAE authors draw their regional classifications from, but much of the information in these maps is for various reasons not taken up in the construction of the broader picture. If the authors were interested solely in arguing for a particular view of North American dialects, the inclusion of all of these 38 full-page maps would be a waste of space (and resources). Fortunately, their aim is not so narrow. The systematic profiling of height and frontness differences for each vowel seems to have been done here in the spirit of providing as complete a speech record as possible, the same spirit that guided earlier work 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 record that ANAE offers just as has happened with the record left by Kurath and McDavid and others who worked in the linguistic atlas tradition (see e.g. Thomas 2001). Further contributing to this likelihood is the fact mentioned above, that ANAE authors have made available, on the accompanying CD-ROM and through the website, much of their raw data, the measurements of F1 and F2 for each vowel from each of over 400 speakers together with demographic details about them.
ANAE does, of course, argue for a particular view of North American dialects, and central to any judgment on that view is an assessment of the linguistic features that define the various regions. Despite the brief detour taken in Chapter 21, ANAE is a study of pronunciation, and the regional picture is based exclusively on phonological variables. One might criticize this focus as overly narrow though much of the previous work on American dialects (e.g. Carver 1987) was based on a comparably narrow set of linguistic features. Indeed the phonological patterns studied here are certainly of greater structural significance than the lexical variables on which many previous studies concentrated. A kind of structuralist reasoning is in fact critical to much of ANAE's argumentation. Vowels are seen as organized by subsystems rather than as individual elements. Thus, observed sound changes are commonly viewed in terms of relations among subsystems of vowels rather than as isolated developments. To explain the resistance of much of the South to the low back merger, for example, the authors note that one element in this merger, /oh/ (the vowel of THOUGHT), is commonly produced as a back upgliding diphthong. This development is not simply a phonetic change but a switch in the vowel's subclassification, a switch that the author's argue is made possible by the position of a related element: the /aw/ diphthong of MOUTH. The nucleus of this vowel is typically fronted in the South which creates an opening in the back of vowel space for the diphthongized /oh/ to fill. The fronting of /aw/ in turn is treated as part of a more general pattern affecting the other back upgliding diphthongs, /ow/ and /uw/. The value of viewing sound change through a structuralist prism stems from the inference of such general patterns, many of which have been developed and defended in earlier work (e.g. Labov 1994). Ideally the patterns are useful not only for explaining observed changes but also for predicting future developments. So, for example, if /oh/ retains its membership in the class of back upgliding diphthongs in the South, it should eventually be subject to fronting. The data from ANAE and other studies, however, suggest a different path as among young Southerners /oh/ seems to be losing its diphthongal character and merging with /o/ (the vowel of LOT). Understanding why Southern speech is taking this direction of change over other structural alternatives requires greater consideration of historical and sociolinguistic trends than is possible with the ANAE data.
Many readers will be interested more in the regional divisions proposed by ANAE than by the structural forces at play in the vowel system. On this score, we might question some of the particular phonological patterns that are identified by ANAE as characteristic of certain regions. It is easy to accept, for example, the North as a dialect region defined by the Northern Cities Shift since this pattern involves several structurally related features all of which occur in heavy concentration in this area and almost exclusively there. The evidence for some of the other regional divisions is less convincing. For example, the West is defined primarily as an area in which 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 other regions including some neighboring the West, but the authors argue that a particular configuration involving these changes and the absence of other changes found in adjacent regions justifies the designation of the West as a separate region. Still, they are upfront about tenuousness of this definition of the region (303). More importantly they incorporate into their analysis a metric of the strength of the proposed dialect boundaries by including calculations of how uniformly the linguistic features are distributed within a region and how often they occur outside that region. These figures indicate that not all of the proposed isoglosses should be given equal weight. Unfortunately the maps displaying these isoglosses do not reflect such differences.
As these comments suggest, this book has a tremendous amount of analytical detail to offer interested readers. Still, the authors and editors seem to suspect 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 that highlights key patterns in the data. In this way, they spare the reader from having to hunt down the relevant discussion in the text, though readers who wish to locate that discussion are aided by the placement of symbols in the margins of the text designating the section where a particular map is treated. While such steps improve the usability of ANAE, it would be a mistake to think this book is accessible to general readers or anyone lacking training in phonetics. For example, one of the isoglosses that defines the North in ANAE is the ''ED measure'' which identifies speakers for whom the mean F2 of /e/ (the vowel of DRESS) minus the mean F2 of /o/ (the vowel of LOT) is less that 375 Hz. To appreciate this criterion one 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 these vowels in the Northern Cities Shift, in which /e/ is typically backed and /o/ is fronted. Finally, accessibility of a different kind is an issue for specialists 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 institutions can download the entire book as a PDF file from the project's website.
In sum, ANAE is a welcome addition to scholarship in American dialectology as well as in the sociolinguistic study of language change. The picture it paints of North American dialects in part confirms regional divisions established by previous research and also uncovers new patterns resulting from emerging trends. To be sure, the methodology of this project - the concentration on urban speech, the focus on vowel pronunciation, the reliance on acoustic measurements, etc. - produces a limited view of North American speech. Still this study remains unprecedented in its broad scope, and the authors succeed in laying out a useful framework for examining phonological variation on this continent. ANAE is a landmark study that will shape research trends for years to come.
Carver, Craig M. 1987. American Regional Dialects: A Word Geography. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Kurath, Hans and Raven I. McDavid, Jr. 1961. The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Labov, William. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 1: Internal Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.
Thomas, Erik R. 2001. An Acoustic Analysis of Vowel Variation in New World English. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Trager, George L. and Henry Lee Smith. 1957. An Outline of English Structure. Washington: American Council of Learned Societies.
Wells, J.C. 1982. Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
ABOUT THE REVIEWER:
Matthew J. Gordon (Ph.D. University of Michigan, 1997) teaches English linguistics at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the author of Small-Town Values, Big-City Vowels: A Study of the Northern Cities Shift in Michigan (Duke UP 2001), and co-author with Lesley Milroy of Sociolinguistics: Method and Interpretation (Blackwell 2003).