The three major dialect regions of the United States identified in Map 1 – the Inland North, the South, and the West – correspond to the three vowel patterns first presented in “The Three Dialects of English” (Labov 1991). They are the major expanding patterns that are actively forming the linguistic landscape of the country., As developed in this paper, the phonological center of these opposing patterns are the Northern Cities Shift in the Inland North, the Southern Shift in the South, and the Low Back Merger in the West. Since that time, a fourth phonological pattern, the Canadian Shift, has been reported in Clark, Elms and Youssef 1995. Discussion of this pattern will be presented when the Canadian interviews are analyzed.
Map 1 also identifies a number of distinct and important dialect areas in the Eastern United States, which were clearly set out in the work of the Linguistic Atlas (Kurath and McDavid 1961): Eastern New England; New York City; and the Mid-Atlantic coastal area encompassing Philadelphia,
Wilmington and Baltimore. No phonological basis for a division between the Upper South, the Lower South, and the Gulf States is presented here, though a separate dialect area is recognized around Charleston and Savannah.
The great contribution of Kurath to American dialectology, the identification of the Midland region, is well represented in Map 1, but somewhat transformed. A major part of the South Midland–the Appalachian cities of Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee–is here rejoined to the South. The Midland region then includes the major cities of Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Akron, Columbus, Dayton, Indianapolis, Peoria, Evansville, the Quad Cities, St. Louis, Des Moines, Kansas City, Wichita, Lincoln and Omaha. It can be differentiated from the other regions by general phonological criteria, and it is itself divided into a lower and upper half by a characteristic sound change, the fronting of checked /ow/. But in contrast with the Inland North and the South, no single set of sound changes is identified with the Midland region. On the contrary, the various Midland cities show localized patterns, which are shifting and diverging from each other in many ways. The importance of the Midland region in this report rests not upon the description of a single “Midland” phonology, but rather the fact that the northern and southern boundaries of the Midland turn out to be the discrete and influential boundaries that determine the shape of American dialect geography. The North/North Midland line falls almost exactly where it was first placed on the basis of lexical evidence in Kurath 1949, and further developed by Shuy 1962 and Carver 1987 on the basis of additional lexical markers. Although much of this vocabulary is obsolete or evanescent, and the phonological correlates laid out in Kurath and McDavid 1961 have largely disappeared, the North/North Midland line remains as an almost impermeable boundary to the southern expansion of the Northern Cities Shift.
Much of the controversy surrounding the concept of the Midland conept has rested on evidence for the traditional view that the line between North and South is really the most important division in American English, corresponding to the fact that this is the only distinction that can be reliably identified by the American public (Preston 19??). Bailey 1968 argued that the line running along the Ohio River was more important than the Midland boundaries, on the basis of phonological patterns of syllabification. Carver’s national map of dialect divisions, based on the data of the Dictionary of American Regional English, makes the North/South division pre-eminent, and reduces the North/North Midland line to a secondary division between Upper and Lower North. Our own delineation of the boundary of the South coincides closely with that of Carver 1987 from Maryland to the Mississippi River, as shown in Map 2. From that point on, our boundary diverges, and extends further north and further west, to include Arkansas, Southern Missouri, and the four speakers in Texas we have studied.
A remarkable finding of Map 1 is that the major phonological boundaries of the U.S. as determined by new and vigorous sound changes which arose in the 20th century coincide with the major lexical boundaries based on vocabulary wjocj was largely set in the early settlement periods. Map 2 shows that
the coincidence of the North/North Midland boundary with that of Carver 1987 is also quite close. The major differences are the northward expansion of the Pittsburgh area in Map 1 to include Erie, and the more precise definition of the eastern and western boundaries of the Inland North. The implications of this coincidence for the general theory of sound change remain to be explored in future publications.
The West has long been considered to be a residual category, without any clear character of its own. Its mixed and diffuse character has been attributed to the result of settlement routes in which the influence of Northern, Southern and Midland patterns were intermingled. Although the Telsur project finds some evidence to support this view, Map 1 shows that the West is also the center of its own new and developing phonological system.