A history of the English Language

Essai de bibliographie de 
géographie linguistique générale
(Nimègue, 1933). Later information may be found in the issues of 
Orbis: Bulletin internationale de documentation linguistique
(Louvain, 1952–). For a survey of 
earlier work and a general treatment of the province of linguistic geography, see Albert Dauzat, 
La 
Géographie linguistique
(Paris, 1922), and the exhaustive work of Sever Pop, 
La Dialectologie: 
Aperçu historique et méthodes d’enquêtes linguistiques
(2 vols., Louvain, 1950). William 
A.Kretzschmar, Jr., traces the relation of the older European work to current studies in 
“Dialectology and Sociolinguistics: Same Coin, Different Currency, 
Language Sciences,
17 (1995), 
271–82. 
65 
Linguistic Atlas of New England
, ed. Hans Kurath et al. (3 vols., in 6 parts, Providence, 1939–
1943), with a 
Handbook of the Linguistic Geography of New England,
by Kurath et al. (Providence, 
1939), discussing the dialect areas distinguished, the selection of communities and informants, the 
settlement of New England, the work sheets, and various procedural matters. 
The english language in america 377

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by means of a carefully prepared questionnaire designed to bring out the most 
characteristic dialectal features, known or suspected.
66
The answers are recorded in 
phonetic notation and supplemented by phonograph records and tapes. A half century 
after the publication of the 
Linguistic Atlas of New England,
the volumes for the Upper 
Midwest (Minnesota, lowa, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota) and for the Gulf 
states (Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and East 
Texas) have appeared,
67
and materials for most of the other regions have been collected 
or are well advanced. Even in their unedited and unpublished form, they have been the 
source for a number of regional studies (see footnote 27, page 376). 
Any large project that requires several decades to record features of a language will 
encounter the problem of changes in the language as well as changes in the methods of 
studying human institutions. In the half century since the inception of the 
Linguistic 
Atlas,
both kinds of change have occurred at a rapid rate in the United States. While the 
Atlas fieldworkers were recording rural linguistic items from older, settled speakers, 
American society was becoming increasingly mobile and urban. In recent years linguists 
have turned more of their attention to the complex patterns of speech in the cities of the 
United States. William Labov’s work has been especially influential in its application of 
techniques from sociology to the description of urban speech. In studying the social 
varieties of English, Labov and others have attempted to observe the language in its 
social setting, outside the artificial context of an interview.
68
The methodological 
conclusions that these linguists have drawn from their trials, failures, and successes in 
recording urban English are as important as their descriptions of particular pronunciations 
or syntactic structures. Labov argues that the lack of verbal ability and logic that some 
linguists find in nonstandard English is the result of asking the wrong questions in the 
wrong situations and then analyzing the answers within the
66 
See Alva L.Davis, Raven I.McDavid, Jr., and Virginia G.McDavid, eds., 
A Compilation of the 
Work Sheets of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada and Associated Projects
(2nd 
ed., Chicago, 1969). 
67 
Harold B.Allen,