Book Review: New England English: Large-Scale Acoustic Sociophonetics and Dialectology

The earliest of the great Linguistic Atlas Projects documenting regional varieties of twentieth century American English was the Linguistic atlas of New England (Kurath 1939; Kurath, Hanley, Bloch, Lowman & Hansen 1939-1943), published as three volumes of maps showing pronunciations elicited at hundreds of sites across the six New England states: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. The New England of the 1930s is thereby arguably the most dialectologically well-documented major region of American English. James Stanford’s new monograph, New England English: Large-scale acoustic sociophonetics and dialectology, is a worthy update to our knowledge about the dialectology of this complex and rapidly changing region.

Although Stanford is the sole author of this volume, the research reported in it consists of a series of studies of New England English conducted not only by Stanford but also by dozens of his students at Dartmouth College over the course of the 2010s, in collaboration with Stanford or in their own student-driven research projects. Stanford is laudably scrupulous about crediting his students for their work, and indeed he uses this book as an opportunity to publicize valuable unpublished student research that might otherwise have gone unrecognized (e.g., Landau 2014 on apparent-time change within a single New Hampshire family, and Sipple 2016 on the dialect features of Cape Cod).

The first chapter lays out not only the book’s empirical goals of documenting, mapping, and quantitatively analyzing the present-day sociolinguistic and dialectological patterns of the six-state New England region, but also its theoretical and methodological goals. Methodologically, the book aims to demonstrate the efficacy of novel tools such as online data collection and automated acoustic analysis for large-scale dialectological research; its theoretical agenda is to explore the social and geographical forces that cause dialect leveling—the abandonment of distinctive regional dialect features—across a wide region. The key concept introduced here is what Stanford calls “Hub social geometry,” taking a cue from the traditional nickname of Boston: he eventually argues that, given Boston’s geographical and cultural centrality to New England, dialect changes throughout New England are influenced by each area’s relationship to Boston and the ideological construction thereof. This chapter also explicates the many data sources the book reports on—367 field interviews in northern and eastern New England; thirty-eight legacy recordings of New England speakers from twentieth-century dialectology projects; 626 reading-passage recordings collected online from speakers throughout New England; and 634 surveys of self-reported dialect features collected online from residents of New England and other northeastern states.

The second chapter introduces the linguistic features on which the book’s analysis focuses. These include well-known distinctive New England features, such as non-rhoticity, fronted start and palm vowels, the horse-hoarse and marry-merry-Mary distinctions, and the “broad-a” pattern of using the palm vowel in words such as half and can’t, as well as more widespread features with well-documented New England distributions such as the cot-caught merger and raising of the price and mouth vowels. The third chapter is an overview of the history of New England English, including a brief section recognizing the displaced and marginalized indigenous populations of New England.

The fourth and fifth chapters report on a “bird’s-eye view” of New England dialectology, based on voice recordings and survey data collected online via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk interface. In keeping with the book’s methodological goals, Stanford not only describes this method in detail but also provides valuable reflections on how it could be improved for future studies. The phonetic results in chapter 4 largely corroborate results from other recent studies addressing the distribution of phonetic features in New England (e.g., Labov, Ash & Boberg 2006 ch. 16; Johnson 2010), showing that large-scale online crowdsourcing of linguistic data can allow robust regional patterns to be demonstrated in a relatively time-efficient manner. Statistical analyses find that certain regional features that are receding in apparent time, such as non-rhoticity and the marry-merry-Mary distinction, are more robust closer to Boston; Stanford takes this finding as evidence for the theory of “Hub social geometry.” The fifth chapter, reporting on written surveys of linguistic behavior, is the only chapter to pay significant attention to lexical variables; it includes data from beyond New England in order to distinguish lexical features that are unique to New England (such as grinder for a sub sandwich) from those shared by other parts of the broader Northeast region (such as jimmies for ice cream sprinkles).

Chapters 6 and 7 report the results of fieldwork from eastern Massachusetts, establishing the linguistic properties of the “Hub” region; chapter 6 provides an overview of the Boston-area data, while chapter 7 reports on subsets of this data, chiefly focusing on the comparison between working-class white and Black populations in adjoining neighborhoods in Boston. Overall, Stanford finds that marked Boston features such as non-rhoticity, fronted palm and start vowels, and the marry-merry-Mary distinction are declining in apparent time in eastern Massachusetts. However, among the white speakers of South Boston, the neighborhood most stereotypically associated with the Boston accent, many of these features actually show stability in apparent time. Within Boston, Black speakers have a much lower rate of all enregistered Boston features than white speakers do, as Black speakers avoid linguistic features that are indexed to white South Boston identity; even non-rhoticity, which is well-documented as a feature of African-American English across the country, is quite infrequent among these Black Boston speakers.

The eighth and ninth chapters explore fieldwork from northern New England: Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. A variety of studies in these regions reveal very similar patterns: the traditional Eastern New England dialect features are receding in apparent time in New Hampshire and Maine, even more quickly than in eastern Massachusetts. The same patterns are found in widely separated communities that have no particular relationship to each other. In Vermont, even in the oldest generations these features are almost entirely absent; Stanford infers from this that the dialect boundary between Eastern and Western New England, which was within Vermont at the time of Kurath (1939), has moved east to the New Hampshire/Vermont state line.

The tenth chapter is a brief summary of the empirical results of chapters 4–9, and the eleventh and final chapter addresses the book’s theoretical agenda. In chapter 11, Stanford proposes that supra-regional leveling of traditional dialect features is taking place at least in part because of population changes in northeastern New England, as in-migration beginning in the 1970s led to greater contact between locals and outsiders and less local orientation among younger people growing up there. “Hub social geometry” plays a role in explaining the parallel changes taking place in multiple regions; although different communities in northern New England may have no relationship to each other, they have the same relationship to and ideological construction of Boston and its dialect.

Stanford follows the example of Kurath, Hanley, Bloch, Lowman, and Hansen (1939-1943) in going beyond merely reporting overall dialectological and sociolinguistic findings. Kurath, Hanley, Bloch, Lowman, and Hansen (1939-1943) provided detailed phonetic transcriptions for every token of every word mapped; similarly, Stanford has made the majority of the data reported on in this book, including both audio recordings and extracted formant measurements, available to fellow scholars as the online Dartmouth New England English Database. This publicly available data promises to be an invaluable resource for future researchers of New England sociolinguistics and dialectology.

The book contains a few analytical points I could nitpick. For instance, the conclusion that the price vowel is “raising in all environments (i.e., not just . . . before voiceless consonants)” (174) appears to be drawn from an analysis that does not distinguish between voiced and voiceless environments; the findings presented therefore cannot rule out the possibility that the voiceless environment is the only one in which raising takes place. The analyses of rhoticity in terms of speech style seem to compare only wordlist style and reading style, apparently omitting spontaneous interview speech. And it strikes me as a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy to interpret the correlation between dialect features and distance from Boston as evidence for the theory of Hub social geometry, given that distance from Boston is the only geographical feature analyzed in those models, and so no alternative regional dynamics, if present, could be discovered. However, such minor issues do not stand in the way of this volume’s major contributions to contemporary dialectology and sociophonetics. It is unfortunate that Stanford and his students’ fieldwork only covers Eastern and Northern New England; data from Rhode Island, Connecticut, and western Massachusetts appears only in the online surveys. Given the major dialect differences between subregions of New England found by Kurath (1939) and Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006), it is a bit of a disappointment that this book, ostensibly about the dialectology of New England in general, is unable to offer in-depth accounts of ongoing linguistic change in Southern and Western New England as it does for the Boston area and Northeastern New England. However, even as an account of the present-day linguistic development of Eastern New England alone, this volume would still be valuable; and the bird’s-eye view that it provides of Southern and Western New England can be considered a welcome bonus.

Overall, as studies in many regions of the United States have documented the leveling of regional dialect features (e.g., Dodsworth & Kohn 2012; Becker 2014; Wagner, Mason, Nesbitt, Pevan & Savage 2016), Stanford’s book is a timely contribution to this growing research area, constituting a large-scale study of the patterns and causes of dialect change in a complex region, conducted with diverse methodological approaches in a variety of types of communities to give an overall picture of the linguistic state of affairs in New England. The book provides detailed, quantitative accounts of the status of nearly all vowels that are of major interest in Eastern New England, assembling a thorough picture of how the region has developed since the Kurath era. It is a must-read for anyone interested in dialects of New England, and a highly valuable contribution both to the methodology of large-scale regional dialectology and to the literature on the causes and patterns of regional dialect leveling.