Wicked Smaaht - Dialect Changes and Variation in New England English

James Stanford, Chair of the Linguistics Department at Dartmouth College, discusses regional New England dialects and their evolution over time. This talk took place at the Howe Library in Hanover, NH on February 13, 2024.
What is the current status of traditional New England dialect features and their current geographic distribution? Are dialect subregions of earlier eras still present today or have they changed? When and why might the Founder Effect (the tendency of dialectal and social boundaries of early settlements to persist for many generations) dissipate in a given region? To answer these questions, our ten-year Dartmouth research project collected linguistic data from speakers in all six New England states. This talk describes what we found and how it relates to other researchers’ work across New England.
James N. Stanford is Professor and Chair of the Dartmouth Linguistics Department. He uses quantitative research methods to study dialects and language variation across a wide range of language communities, including collabora-tive research with small, underrepresented Indigenous minority communities in China and around the world. He also studies dialect features of the large English majority language communities of New England. He is co-editor of the journal Language Variation and Change (Cambridge University Press, with William Labov and Rena Torres Cacoullos). His publications include the 2019 Oxford University Press monograph New England English: Large-Scale Acoustic Sociophonetics and Dialectology, and co-edited volumes such as Variation in Indigenous Minority Languages (2009, with Dennis Preston).