A history of the English Language

The Linguistic Atlas of the Upper Midwest
(3 vols., Minneapolis, 1973–1976); 
and Lee Pederson, ed., 
Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States
(7 vols., Athens, GA, 1986–1992). The 
materials for the rest of the Atlantic seaboard, collected during the 1930s and early 1940s by Guy 
S.Lowman, were passed to Hans Kurath, then to Raven I.McDavid, Jr., and now to William 
A.Kretzschmar, Jr., whose team has edited the 
Handbook of the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and 
South Atlantic States
(Chicago, 1993). See also William A.Kretzschmar, Jr., and Edgar 
W.Schneider, 
Introduction to Quantitative Analysis of Linguistic Survey Data: an Atlas by the 
Numbers
(Thousand Oaks, CA, 1996) and William A.Kretzschmar, Jr., “Quantitative and Areal 
Analysis of Dialect Features,” 
Language Variation and Change,
8 (1996), 13–39. Many of the 
Linguistic Atlas materials are now available on the Internet at http://us.uga.edu/. 
68 
See William Labov, 
Sociolinguistic Patterns
(Philadelphia, 1972), chap. 8, and 
Language in the 
Inner City
(Philadelphia, 1972), chaps. 5–7. 
A history of the english language 378

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investigator’s linguistic system rather than the subject’s. If the practical implications that 
have been drawn from recent sociolinguistic studies are often contradictory, the 
contradictions are hardly surprising at our present stage of understanding.
69
It is 
unrealistic to expect the discipline of sociolinguistics, which has only recently acquired 
its name, to provide immediate solutions to problems that are rooted not only in the 
stratification of the language but finally in the society that the language reflects. 
At the same time that linguistic geography and sociolinguistics were contributing so 
much to our knowledge of the language of the United States in its regional and social 
aspects, the study of American English was making great advances in one other direction, 
that of its basic structure. In the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth the 
interests of linguistic scholars were mainly historical and comparative. Such studies, of 
course, still constitute a large and important field of scholarship. But with the increasing 
interest in the United States in the recording and interpretation of the languages of Native 
Americans, new procedures were found to be necessary to deal with structures totally 
different from those of the languages most familiar to us, the languages of Europe and 
western Asia. In the new approach Franz Boas and his pupil Edward Sapir were the 
pioneers, and their work was supplemented and continued by Leonard Bloomfield. The 
publication in 1933 of Bloomfield’s book 
Language,
the most important work on general 
linguistics in the first half of the twentieth century, marked a turning point in American 
linguistic scholarship. The methods that had proved their worth in the study of Native 
American languages began to be applied to the study of American English (and other 
modern languages). Starting with the premise that any language is a structured system of 
arbitrary signals (here conceived of as vocal sounds), structural linguistics sought to 
determine which elements (including stress, intonation, pauses, etc.) are significant and to 
describe the pattern in which they are organized. It began with phonemic analysis
70
and 
proceeded
69 
Cf. the contrasting conclusions drawn by Labov, “The Logic of Nonstandard English,” in 
Language in the Inner City,
chap. 5, and those by the influential British sociologist Basil Bernstein, 
“Elaborated and Restricted Codes: Their Social Origins and Some Consequences,” in