Dialectologists working in the mid twentieth century established a tripartite division of US regional dialects into North, Midland and South. This work documented the retention of traditional usages and focused on lexical variation. Despite the grounding of these dialect divisions in centuries-old settlement and migration patterns, they remain relevant to regional variation in American English today. This is especially true for the boundary separating the Midland from the North. This chapter examines the history of this remarkably stable boundary in American dialectology. The discussion reviews the evidence produced by early linguistic atlas researchers to establish the dialect boundary along the Atlantic Coast and to trace its extension westward. The current status of the Midland–North divide is explored in the light of sociolinguistic research suggesting that dialect differences on either side have been reinforced over the twentieth century.

With legendary regionalisms like ‘r-dropping’, fronted palm vowels, ‘broad-a BATH vowels, and other features, New England has played a key role in the historical development of English in North America. Historically, the six small states of New England (Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont) have had an outsized influence on American English. Their modern sociolinguistic and geographic boundaries still reflect colonial-era settlement patterns from centuries past. Many prior studies on New England English have focused on phonological patterns and changes, but scholars have also examined regional grammatical patterns, lexical variation and change, and also the continuing influence of local Native American words on English. In fact, modern linguists have access to ninety years of detailed fieldwork reports on regional New England dialect features, dating as far back as the 1930s and continuing to the present era. Using this wealth of intergenerational data, the present chapter takes a historical perspective that traces the roots and development of New England English into the present time.

Although most of the defining research on African American English (AAE) was conducted in the urban North (Labov 1968; Wolfram 1968; Fasold 1972), AAE has been a rural Southern variety for most of its history. In the early 1900s, most African Americans lived in the rural South, and although the Great Migration caused a dramatic demographic shift to the urban North (Bailey and Maynor 1987; Farrington, this volume), numerous African Americans remain in the rural South today. This chapter explores the history of rural AAE both as the variety from which urban AAE developed and one that more recently has undergone linguistic innovation over the course of the twentieth century (Cukor-Avila and Bailey 2015; Bailey et al. 2022). It does so by examining linguistic features in the context of historical, sociocultural and demographic events that fostered its emergence, shaped its development and created contexts for its continued vitality.

In its unfamiliar role of minority language, Quebec English (QcE) is subject to discourse that characterises it as threatened and distinctive, purportedly due to intense contact and convergence with French. The popular and academic basis for these claims comes almost entirely from catalogues of ‘gallicisms’: incorporations from French held to be incomprehensible outside of the province. Based on variationist analysis of spontaneous speech, this chapter offers an empirical assessment of the impact of French on QcE, as instantiated in borrowing, code-switching and convergence. It shows not only that French-origin lexis is vanishingly rare in spoken usage, but that the morphosyntax likewise fails to bolster claims of influence from French at the grammatical level. These results suggest that the features qualified as peculiar to QcE are no different in nature from the regionalisms present in all varieties of English, and highlight the gulf between language ideology, sociolinguistic stereotypes and language use.

Neither New York City English (NYCE) nor Baltimore English (BE) have garnered much historical research, so there is little understanding of the origin and development of English in either region. In this chapter, we show that the settlement histories of NYC and Baltimore show that neither city fits Trudgill’s (2004) model of tabula rasa new dialect formation but suggest more complicated patterns of settlement and therefore English feature origins. For subsequent evolution, we discuss the impact of incoming migrants on the evolution of the dialects until the present day. As elsewhere in the United States, race and racialisation play prominent roles in separating out different co-territorial varieties and in stigmatisation and prestige. Besides historical analysis, we investigate these questions through archival materials, literary representations and lay observations. These sources, alongside later dialectological and variationist accounts, allow us to trace the origins of many features of the varieties. For instance, we find evidence that (i) r-lessness had emerged in NYCE by the end of the eighteenth century, (ii) a-prefixing occurred in NYCE until at least 1860, (iii) the wine–whine merger had begun in NYCE and BE by about 1840 and (iv) most features stereotypical of White working-class BE were in place by 1950.

Western Canada is emerging as a site of rich linguistic variation. Lexical differences are long acknowledged (e.g. bunny hug, jam buster), but distinctions in other grammatical sectors are less frequently reported. More recent work uncovering phonetic differences in key vowel sets, however, suggests that the West Coast (British Columbia) and the Prairies (Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba) are not monolithic. We review the predictions of settler colonialism in the context of westward expansion and the rhetoric of widespread dialectological homogeneity in the literature on Canadian English. Recent research reveals that synchronic variation is primarily ethnic (local) rather than strictly regional. We conclude by highlighting the pervasive effects of settler colonialism in dialectological outcomes, while also highlighting the gains to be made by exploring diversity within local varieties.

This chapter provides a bird’s-eye overview of the presence of English and English-related varieties in Jamaica from the capture of the island by the English in 1655 to the modern language situation. It argues that the genesis of Jamaican Creole (JC) must be located in the final decades of the seventeenth century, and that enslaved people from Surinam may have influenced the formation of JC. It discusses the relationship between JC and Maroon ‘Deep Language’ and considers the evidence for the impact of substrate languages. The Jamaican creole continuum can be seen as the continuation of early variation, and the diglossic relationship between Jamaican English (JE) and JC betrays the persistence of standard language attitudes which have their origins in the colonial period. Finally, developments such as the emergence of Rasta Talk and the shift to an American model for the ‘speaky-spokey’ register betray the perception of English among many JC speakers as a language which does not belong to them, despite the fact that it exists in the distinctly Jamaican form which has emerged over nearly four centuries.

Americans of Mexican or Central American heritage have developed a cluster of dialects that follow recognisable patterns of immigrant groups. These dialects exhibit diversity depending on the region of the United States where they are spoken, the relative concentrations of their speakers, the degree of historical discrimination, the presence of African American influence and other factors. They all share a background of Spanish interference features, but they have all undergone a process of winnowing those features and adopting others as they develop. Phonetic influences have been easier to document than morphosyntactic influences.

The Caribbean is a vast geopolitical region that stretches for a span of 2,754,000 square kilometers and includes approximately 7,000 island land masses. Linguistically speaking, the Caribbean hosts an extraordinarily wide variety of languages and dialects. The sheer magnitude of inhabited islands and the accompanying geographical and social variation within each island locale sets the Anglophone Caribbean apart for other insular areas of the English-speaking world such as Ireland or the South Atlantic. English is the third most widely spoken language in the Caribbean, following Spanish and French. It is the official language of twelve Caribbean as well as of the seven British Overseas Territories in the region. This chapter provides an overview of the sociolinguistic histories and features of the English varieties of the Caribbean region and demonstrates that there are significant traits that serve to define the region. Additionally, it demonstrates that there are differences between the speech of the European-identifying and African-identifying populations of the Caribbean.

This chapter presents an overview of dialectology that sheds light on the diachronic development of American English varieties. Key projects in US dialect study are considered in light of their historic roots, perspectives and goals; data collection methods; target populations; sampling methods; and linguistic features of focus. Also examined are various types of dialect maps, as well as the use of historic sources that have proven to be useful in tracing the history of dialect forms. The contribution of social dialectological studies is discussed as well, since in-depth surveys across social space have been shown to add to the understanding of how dialect forms develop and diffuse across time and geographic space. The chapter concludes with a discussion of developments in twenty-first-century American dialectology. Throughout, the chapter illustrates how different methods and data sources can be fruitfully brought together to solve the difficult problem of retracing historic pathways for inherently ephemeral spoken language forms.