Welcome to the American Dialect homepage, an effort to bridge the gap between the scholarly and literary worlds of dialectology. Some of my thoughts on how I became interested in this topic, and what the future will bring for regional speech, are included in the introduction.

A new map has been added to this site, the Linguistic Geography of the Mainland United States, outlining the major dialect regions of the country. I've also included my own map of the Linguistic Geography of Pennsylvania, a synthesis of various conflicting studies beginning with the LAMSAS data and incorporating more recently collected data.

In the age of two-day news stories, perhaps you've forgotten all about the Oakland "Ebonics" resolution. Well, you can refresh your memory and get a critical take on it you didn't hear anywhere else in an article written expressly for this site: Junk Science and the "Ebonics" Resolution: Is academia looking the other way? Some myths about the resolution were propagated by its defenders, especially by the Linguistic Society of America which was curiously silent on some of the flagrantly unscientific statements contained in that document.

Looking for books about dialects of English? We have a number of resources that will be of interest. An extensive list of books is included in the English dialect section of our bookstore. Use our site to browse the titles and then you may order online through either Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble. The links page features a number of authors' and publishers' pages, for both scholarly and non-scholarly dialect publications: be sure to check there as well. In response to requests, you will also find here a short bibliography of dialectology, which should serve as a good introduction to the field for anyone seeking more information.

I apologize for not keeping the links as up-to-date as I should, but they spring up and die off too quickly to monitor effectively. Many links collected some years ago are now defunct--and only a few could be successfully tracked down again. I am, however, keeping a list of the defunct sites, so if you're in the mood for some detective work you can hunt them down with search engines if they still exist. Also, due to other pressures on my time and a somewhat reduced interest (read "nationalism") I have had to largely leave off maintaining the world English dialect links, and decided to concentrate on the North American varieties. These links will however, stay up, as I could not bear to part with those precious Antarctican word lists!

Claudio Salvucci, salvucci@arxpub.com

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