Running head: RESOURCE DEMONSTRATION 1

Resource Demonstration

Xiayu Guo

Colorado State University

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Introduction

The purpose of this demonstration is to help students identify dialects, phonetics and

phonology and in North America. I want to learn about regional dialects in different parts of

North America. In the demonstration, there are three main parts: Methods of Data Collection,

The Dialects of North America and Regional Dialects in the USA. The website link is

http://www.atlas.mouton-content.com. This website shows the North American phonetics,

phonology and sound change. There are 4 sections: Preliminaries, Introductory Concepts, The

Atlas and Analyses. I only focus on The Atlas because this section is about phonetics and

phonology but other three sections are about introduction of this website and system requirement

for the computer. The Atlas section includes 4 subtitles: The Dialects of North America,

Methods, Regional Dialects and Sound Changes in Progress.

Methods of Data Collection

The website collects data about phonetics and dialects:

1. Sampling NA Cities

The sampling is related to the Urbanized Areas. The urbanized area consists of a central city. In

the Atlas sample, if a speaker is a native of places in the urbanized area of a central city, he/she

can be representative of the central city’s speech community.

2. The Telephone Survey

The telephone survey is faster and more efficient than traditional methods of dialect geography.

The Atlas collects data from telephone survey by locating informants and recording speech.

3. Questionnaires

The questionnaire lasted from 35-40 minutes and it was adapted to the particular linguistic

variables and sound changes. The interview techniques to obtain different types of data are
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demographic information, spontaneous speech, the semantic differential, eliciting words,

minimal pairs and continuation.

4. Analysis

This includes auditory analysis and acoustic analysis. The data on mergers and splits come

mainly from participants’ productions and perceptions of word pairs by means of auditory

analysis. Acoustic analysis was used to clarify cases of merger or split where auditory analysis is

not decisive.

5. Mapping the Results

The Dialects of North America

Figure 1. A map of dialects of North America

 The western part: fronting of /uw/ and low back merger of /o/ and /oh/.

 The north central part: low back merger.

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 The north part: fronting of /ow/, low back merger of /o/ and /oh/

 The midland part: fronting of /ow/, no glide deletion of /ay/, low back merger.

 The south part: glide deletion of /ay/ before voiced consonants and finally, southern shift

and back upglide shift.

Regional Dialects in the USA

 New England: strong /r/ pronunciation, low back merger isogloss, the fronting of /ahr/.

 NYC and Mid-Atlantic States: short “a” is tensed before voiced stops, nasals and

voiceless fricatives, and the vocalization of /r/ is the dominant speech. NYC shows

conservative pattern in the fronting of /ow/ than the Mid-Atlantic area.

 The North: Northern U.S., and/or U.S. regions bordering the Great Lakes; it can also

include parts of Canada. It affects short vowels: /æ/ is raised and fronted to [i]; /ɑ/ is

fronted to [æ]; /ɔ/ is lowered and fronted to [ɑ]; /ε/ is lowered and centered to [ʌ]; /ʌ/ is

backed to [ɔ].

 The South: Southern U.S. /aɪ/ is monophthongized to [a]; /e/ is lowered and centralized to

[aɪ]; /o/ is fronted; /ɪ/, /ε/, /æ/ are raised and fronted; /u/ is fronted.

Conclusion

This website is useful for dialect and phonological research. The dialect map helps

learners to distinguish different dialects easily. Moreover, in the subtitle “Word Comparison”,

there are audio samples. When learners click colorful dots, they can hear the pronunciation. The

sample words are Dan, man and bad. For each dot, learners can find speakers’ information (age,

gender and community). Additionally, this website is helpful for English teaching especially for

the training of listening skill. When I taught listening class, students often do not understand

what the speaker said, but when they checked the script, they knew the meaning of this
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word/sentence. I believe it is because of the dialect. Non-native speakers do not understand

American dialects if they never learn or notice those dialects. I am going to use this website in

listening class to cultivate students’ perception of different dialects.