Dialects in the United States

1. Dialects in the United States Alex Fisher Team Chapter 6 AP Human Geography-per 6

2. Definition • Dialect- A variant of a language along regional or ethnic lines.

3. Linguistic Geography of the U.S. Their eight distinct dialects in the United States separated by regions. Western, Upper Midwestern, Great Lakes, Midland, Mountain Southern, Coastal Southern, New York, and New England.

4. Western Region Western phonology has only recently begun to diverge, primarily with the merger of “AU” into the short “O” class: e.g. cot for both “caught” and “cot”, and the fronting of the long “U” class, e.g. “ih-oo” in words such as “two”

5. Upper Midwestern Region This area is mainly by a conservative vowel scheme, where the long vowels have remained purely monopthongal, exemplified in the widely known long “O” in the name Minnesota.

6. Great Lakes Region Among all the dialect regions, the Great Lakes region is perhaps the most homogenous. “Ann” as “Ian”, “bit” as “bet”, “bat” as “but”, “lunch” as “launch”, “talk” as “tuck”, “locks” as “lax”

7. Midland Region Midland dialects retain “R” in all positions, and long “I” is not flattened as uniformly as in the South. More southerly Midland cities have a typically Southern fronted nucleus in “ow”, e.g. “aout”(out). More northerly Midland cities tend not to.

8. New York Dialects New York City has a rather anomalous linguistic situation. Like New England, the dialect is “R”-dropping. The Hudson Valley dialet of Albany, though “R”-preserving.

9. New England Region These dialects are non-rhotic, dropping “r’s” before consonants and at the end of words. Where “O” and “AU” shift into an intermediate vowel so that “cot” and “caught” are merged.

10. U.S. Dialects Regional Differences So even though the language spoken in the United States is English, through out many regions are different dialects of how some one from a certain region may say things in a different way.