Labovian road trip

Benjamin Zimmer bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU
Fri Mar 17 06:09:23 UTC 2006


http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/03/17/travel/escapes/17accent.html
It's Not the Sights, It's the Sounds
By TIM SULTAN
Published: March 17, 2006
[...]
Fueled by frequent stops at diners (this was my third pie and coffee,
and it wasn't lunchtime yet), I was in the midst of a road trip
through the American linguistic landscape. My guide was not Rand
McNally but rather The Atlas of North American English, by William
Labov, Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg, the first complete survey of
American phonetics, published late last year by Mouton de Gruyter.
The atlas is a voluminous, expensive ($620) and unmistakably academic
book. It comes with audio samples and 139 maps that do not tell a
traveler the shortest route from Ashtabula to Kissimee but do show
where on the highway the monophthongization before voiceless
consonants will occur.
When I called Professor Labov at his linguistics lab at the University
of Pennsylvania and proposed I take a phonetic road trip -- a journey
about listening, much as a blind person or linguist experiences travel
-- he was enthusiastic. "When I travel," he said, "I always ask
myself, what do I expect to hear that tells me that I'm not just
anyplace?"
[...]

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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