Work Cited
March 17, 2006
It's Not the Sights, It's the Sounds
By TIM SULTAN
I WANTED to kiss Lori Austin, the waitress behind the counter of August 25, a diner near Wales Center, N.Y. I had been pretending to look at the wall art — a sunset landscape painted on a circular saw — but was actually straining to listen in on the conversation three elderly women were having at a nearby table. I was not having any success. The more I listened, the more quietly they talked.
"Thee-at painting?" Ms. Austin suddenly said. "A man from around here made it. Can I get you some more coffee? How 'bout this cold snee-ap?"
Bless you, Lori Austin, I said to myself. You just gave me the two raised vowels before voiceless stops I'd driven 350 miles for.
Fueled by frequent stops at diners (this was my third pie and coffee, and it wasn't lunchtime yet), I was in the midst of a road trip through the American linguistic landscape. My guide was not Rand McNally but rather The Atlas of North American English, by William Labov, Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg, the first complete survey of American phonetics, published late last year by Mouton de Gruyter.
The atlas is a voluminous, expensive ($620) and unmistakably academic book. It comes with audio samples and 139 maps that do not tell a traveler the shortest route from Ashtabula to Kissimee but do show where on the highway the monophthongization before voiceless consonants will occur.
When I called Professor Labov at his linguistics lab at the University of Pennsylvania and proposed I take a phonetic road trip — a journey about listening, much as a blind person or linguist experiences travel — he was enthusiastic. "When I travel," he said, "I always ask myself, what do I expect to hear that tells me that I'm not just anyplace?"
According to Professor Labov, New York City is a natural departure point. The broadest variety of dialects is found on the Eastern Seaboard. "These are the sites of the earliest settlements, with the greatest
It's Not the Sights, It's the Sounds
By TIM SULTAN
I WANTED to kiss Lori Austin, the waitress behind the counter of August 25, a diner near Wales Center, N.Y. I had been pretending to look at the wall art — a sunset landscape painted on a circular saw — but was actually straining to listen in on the conversation three elderly women were having at a nearby table. I was not having any success. The more I listened, the more quietly they talked.
"Thee-at painting?" Ms. Austin suddenly said. "A man from around here made it. Can I get you some more coffee? How 'bout this cold snee-ap?"
Bless you, Lori Austin, I said to myself. You just gave me the two raised vowels before voiceless stops I'd driven 350 miles for.
Fueled by frequent stops at diners (this was my third pie and coffee, and it wasn't lunchtime yet), I was in the midst of a road trip through the American linguistic landscape. My guide was not Rand McNally but rather The Atlas of North American English, by William Labov, Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg, the first complete survey of American phonetics, published late last year by Mouton de Gruyter.
The atlas is a voluminous, expensive ($620) and unmistakably academic book. It comes with audio samples and 139 maps that do not tell a traveler the shortest route from Ashtabula to Kissimee but do show where on the highway the monophthongization before voiceless consonants will occur.
When I called Professor Labov at his linguistics lab at the University of Pennsylvania and proposed I take a phonetic road trip — a journey about listening, much as a blind person or linguist experiences travel — he was enthusiastic. "When I travel," he said, "I always ask myself, what do I expect to hear that tells me that I'm not just anyplace?"
According to Professor Labov, New York City is a natural departure point. The broadest variety of dialects is found on the Eastern Seaboard. "These are the sites of the earliest settlements, with the greatest