North American English Dialects, Based on Pronunciation Patterns

What the map does

A detailed, interactive map of North American English dialects—built and maintained as a hobby—offers listeners a way to hear how place and pronunciation mingle. Click a state or province and you can listen to audio or video samples tied to that location; click the map to zoom between the U.S. and Canada. The site lays out eight major dialect regions that radiate westward from the eastern seaboard and then drills down into numerous subdialects, with color-coded lines and a Dialect Description Chart to help you tease apart the patterns.

Data, debates and updates

The site links to larger projects such as the Atlas of North American English and even notes a web survey that collected 3,903 responses by December 2012; preliminary results were posted by researchers at Yale. It has been reported that some of the page’s traffic spikes when the map is reposted on popular blogs, producing surges of email to the author. The creator, Rick Aschmann, has publicly annotated the map with frequent cosmetic and technical tweaks—everything from shrinking city dots to clarifying Canadian raising around French-speaking areas—and he even flagged that some survey samples allegedly do not represent the local dialect, a reminder that crowdsourced phonetics can be messy.

A one-person labor of love — and a public resource

This isn’t a university project masquerading as art. Aschmann calls it a hobby: “Some people collect stamps. Others collect coins. I collect dialects.” The page, last updated in 2018, reads like the work of someone who loves the subject and the people who wrote in—grumpy complaints and appreciative notes alike. In an age of interactive maps and crowdsourced science, this site sits at the sweet spot between amateur enthusiasm and useful reference: a handy portal for curious listeners, linguists checking their hunches, or anyone wondering, “So what does my accent look like on a map?”

Sources: aschmann.net, Hacker News