on-line dialect survey (B. Vaux)

[Dale Coye]

The NY Times has a short piece this morning in the "Circuits" section on Bert
Vaux's online dialect survey.  He's at Harvard. Maybe this is general
knowledge among you, but I somehow missed it.  122 questions with maps asking
how respondents pronounce various words.  It's at
www.hcs.harvardedu/~golder/dialect/.   Some interesting stuff, but some
obvious problems-- he asks about the pronunciation of "aunt"  but I didn't
see any query about informant's race. Also he doesn't ask informants if they
merge cot-caught before asking them to match up one of those two vowels with
their "aunt" pronunciation.  Also answer c and d are indentical....  Here's
the question

1. aunt
     a. [] as in "ah" (9.94%)
     b. [] as in "ant" (75.16%)
     c. [] as in "caught" (2.24%)
     d. I have the same vowel in "ah", "caught", and "aunt" (2.24%)
     e. I pronounce it the same as "ain't" (0.64%)
     f. I use [/] when referring to the general concept of an aunt, but []
when referring to a specific person by name. (7.21%)
     g. I use [] when referring to the general concept of an aunt, but [/]
when referring to a specific person by name. (1.76%)
     h. other (0.80%)
    (624 respondents)



Dale Coye
New Jersey