Overview

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.

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9780190625658

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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. * Naomi Nagy, Professor of Linguistics, University of Toronto * This book is a significant and admirable achievement in American English dialectology: undoubtedly the most important study of New England English since Kurath's Linguistic Atlas of New England in the 1930s. It will appeal to a broad audience, from expert dialectologists, through college students in linguistics classes, to language-loving amateurs among the general public. * Charles Boberg, Associate Professor of Linguistics, McGill University * James Stanford provides an extensive account of dialect variation in New England, a region that is critical historically to the understanding of American English. Technological advances since the time of Kurath's foundational work enabled Stanford to collect and statistically analyze data in ways that were previously unknown. The result is a comprehensive, readable, and important book for dialectologists of English. * Julie Roberts, Executive Director, American Dialect Society, and Professor of Linguistics, University of Vermont * Jim Stanford and his Dartmouth team have put New England in the spotlight for studies of language change and variation. This book provides a stunning array of new field methods and techniques of data analysis. It should be required reading for students of language and society for years to come. * William Labov, Professor of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania *

Author Information

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).

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