It’s Not the Sights, It’s the Sounds
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.
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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?”