Atlas of North American English

The phonological 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 redefines the regional dialects of American English and draws new boundaries reflecting the speech of the mid 1990s. The findings show a dramatic and increasing divergence of English dialects as vowels in different regions are rotated in opposite directions by the Northern Cities Shift, the Southern Shift,the Canadian Shift, and other sweeping changes that are affecting the North American continent as a whole. The 26 chapters trace the influence of geographic and social factors by the multivariate analysis of population size, gender, age, occupation, and ethnicity. An accompanying CD-ROM provides the full data base with 144,000 measurements, maps of individual vowel systems, and extended sound samples of all dialects. System Requirements: Windows PC: Pentium PC, Windows 9x or NT, at least 16MB RAM, CD-ROM Drive, 16 Bit Soundcard, SVGA (600 x 800 resolution).Apple MAC: OS 6 or higher, 16 Bit Soundcard, at least 16MB RAM. Key Features: a multimedia reference tool overthrows previously heldhypothesesin North American dialectology sound samples on CD-ROM easily accessible through clearly designedinteractive maps