As has been pointed out on several occasions, varieties of American English spoken in the Pacific Northwest are largely derived from eastern sources. A good deal of information is already available on the geographical distribution of vocabulary throughout the United States, so that dialectologists now have a fairly clear idea of lexical continuity in the vast areas of western settlement. For this reason it has become standard procedure to identify dialectal types within these areas in accordance with the criteria presented by Hans Kurath in his Word geography of the eastern United States (Ann Arbor, 1949). A monumental work by Kurath and McDavid on the pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States has now been published, and new comparisons of dialect distribution east and west are therefore in order.