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For nearly 400 years, New England has held an important place in the development of American English, and "New England accents" are very well known in popular imagination. This book is the first large-scale academic project since the 1930s to focus specifically on New England English as a whole. It presents new variationist sociolinguistic research covering all six New England states, with detailed geographic, acoustic phonetic, and statistical analyses of recentlycollected data from over 1,600 New Englanders. The book systematically documents major traditional New England dialect features and their current usage in terms of location, age, gender, ethnicity, social class, and other factors.
List of contents
- Preface
- Part I: Setting the Stage
- Chapter 1: Introduction
- Chapter 2: The Linguistic Variables
- Chapter 3: Early Founders and the Founder Effect
- Part II: Bird's Eye View: The Mechanical Turk Online Project
- Chapter 4: Results from the Mechanical Turk Online Audio Recordings
- Chapter 5: Results from the Mechanical Turk Online Written Questionnaires
- Part III: Exploring the Hub: Fieldwork Results from Eastern Massachusetts
- Chapter 6: Fieldwork results from eastern Massachusetts
- Chapter 7: Focus on subgroups within the Hub
- Part IV: Exploring Northern New England: Fieldwork Results
- Chapter 8: Fieldwork results from northeastern New England
- Chapter 9: Focus on subgroups of northern New England
- Part V: Summary and Discussion
- Chapter 10: Summary of empirical results
- Chapter 11: Outward orientation, leveling, and Hub social geometry
- Appendix A: Primary Field Interview Materials
- Appendix B: Field Interview Materials for the New Hampshire/Vermont Border Study
- Appendix C: The Mechanical Turk Self-Reporting Questionnaire
- Appendix D: The Mechanical Turk Audio Survey
- Appendix E: Information about the publicly available database: Dartmouth New England English Database (DNEED)
- References
About the author
James N. Stanford is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Dartmouth College. He studies dialects and language variation using quantitative sociolinguistic methods and acoustic sociophonetics, and is co-editor of Language Regard: Methods, Variation and Change (2018) and Variation in Indigenous Minority Languages (2009).
Summary
For nearly 400 years, New England has held an important place in the development of American English, and "New England accents" are very well known in the popular imagination. While other projects have studied various dialect regions of New England, this is the first large-scale academic project since the 1930s to focus specifically on New England English as a whole. In New England English, James N. Stanford presents new variationist sociolinguistic research covering all six New England states, with detailed geographic, acoustic phonetic, and statistical analyses of recently collected data from over 1,600 New Englanders. Stanford and his team of Dartmouth students built this dataset over 8 years of face-to-face fieldwork and online audio recordings and questionnaires.
Using acoustic phonetics, computational processing, and dialect maps, the book systematically documents major traditional New England dialect features and their current usage in terms of geography, age, gender, ethnicity, social class, and other factors. This dataset is interpreted in terms of William Labov's outward orientation of the language faculty, dialect levelling, convergence and divergence, and "Hub social geometry." The result is a wide-ranging empirical analysis and theoretical overview of this influential English dialect region.
Additional text
This book tells us everything we could want to know about New England English -- past, present and future -- and it has important theoretical impact. The clear presentation of methods are great training materials to follow his tantalizing suggestions for future study. It is a fine model of the work that can be accomplished through the integration of undergraduate teaching and research, providing new evidence that this regional dialect remains vibrant.
