The Atlas of North American English

This is something for all the language nerds out there. It's called the Atlas of North American English, and the coolest feature on it is a map of the United States and Canada that highlights different dialects of English. To view it, click on the link above, then click on "The Dialects of North America," then click "Mapping Features." On this map, North America (excluding Mexico, since it doesn't apply nearly as much, although it still could be interesting), is divided into regions based on the primary dialect spoken in that region. You can click on these regions and then listen to recordings of people from those regions speaking to actually hear these dialectic differences. It's a great way to waste time on the internet (although, admittedly, not everyone will enjoy it).

But there's one major issue I have with this map. Can anyone guess what it is after looking at the map? I'll give you a huge hint: I'm from California.

For some reason, the linguists who designed this map, two of whom are from Pennsylvania, gave New York City its own dialect but only assigned one dialect to THE ENTIRE WESTERN HALF OF THE UNITED STATES. I can tell you that people from Northern California speak differently than people from Southern California. Shit, people from some parts of LA speak differently than people from other parts of LA. Entire studies have been done on the dialects of California and it's a fact that AT LEAST four different dialects exist within California (anyone from there can tell you there are way more). But apparently that's bullshit; I didn't realize that everyone from the western half of the United States speaks exactly the same.

Not to make too big a deal out of it, even though I already am, but this map has a huge bias in favor of the east coast, which is annoying but not all that surprising. Probably the three best linguistics departments in the country (MIT, Harvard, and UMass) are in Massachusetts (which, as a linguistics student, I can say I'm proud to go to school in). But an affect of this is obviously that more attention is going to be paid to east coast dialects in the most prominent studies. And of course the reverse happens as well; the study I cited above was done at UC Santa Barbara, in California. It seems that people only pay attention to the dialects near them, which again makes sense if you think about it; they're the easiest ones to find native speakers for.

Also, I'm over-exaggerating a bit. If you actually listen to the recordings you'll hear tons of different dialects within every region. Still, that map is just a little lazy.