Over 50% of US Englsih words on a page are subject to accents

[Gordon, Matthew J.]

I'm curious about your sources for how "phonemes could be spoken differently by accent." You note some well known features like r-lessness and th-stopping, but you also have "keds for kids" which may be characteristic of some areas but usually in connection with other shifting vowels. How did you arrive at the accent features you considered?

Matt Gordon
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From: American Dialect Society [ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] on behalf of Tom Zurinskas [truespel at HOTMAIL.COM]
Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2012 3:38 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Over 50% of US Englsih words on a page are subject to accents

I looked at the top 5k words of English and their frequency counts.  These words make up about 90% of a text page.  Then I looked at ways in USA English that phonemes could be spoken differently by accent in terms of phoneme swaps and drops.  The results show that over 50% of the words are subject to phoneme swaps or drops.  See http://screenr.com/BVH7.

Various individual accents would have subsets of these affects, but these data can't be used for subsets because multiple instances of affects in words are not counted.  Let me know of any other data corresponding to this.


Tom Zurinskas, Conn 20 yrs, Tenn 3, NJ 33, now Fl 9.
See how English spelling links to sounds at http://justpaste.it/ayk




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