Tuesday, July 06, 2010

Snapshot of US/Canadian English

I'm a little alarmed to see that I haven't posted yet on this project, on differences between Canadian and US English.

This is a very interesting project by Claire Bowern and Alan Munn. One of the big innovations is that they
are making recordings over the internet. (You need a mic on your computer to do it — as they point out, if you can use Skype, you can do this.)

Especially Wisconsin readers would be good to have, I imagine, given the popular perception that Wisconsinites sound 'Canadian'. Mr. V says, do it!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks Joe! Just a note that my collaborators on this project are Quentin Atkinson and Russell Gray from Auckland (Alan was helping me debug the map data). We're also interested in internal US/Canadian diversity -- that is, what happens when you take the geographical area as the unit of analysis but also include all the "confounding variables" that sociolinguists tend to avoid. Do we still get the same sort of picture?