Linguistic Atlas of New England
| Author | Hans Kurath |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Published | AMS Press Inc. 1939 |
| ISBN |
The Linguistic Atlas of New England (LANE), edited by Hans Kurath, is a linguistic map describing the dialects of New England. LANE consists of 734 maps over three volumes, and is the first major study of the dialects in the northeastern United States. Seven New England states were studied: Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New York. In New York, only Long Island was covered. Some data from Southern New Brunswick, Canada, was also included. Pronunciations elicited from informants in each town were printed directly onto maps of the area. One map was included for each of the 734 items that were studied.
LANE was the first component of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States (LAUS). LAUS was first proposed in 1928 by a committee of the Modern Language Association, and collaborative meetings with the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) began in 1929 to discuss the feasibility of the proposed linguistic atlas of the United States and Canada. In 1930, the LSA Council requested a trial run in a limited area, so that a method could be established and budget estimates could be taken for further work in other regions. In 1931, the LSA Council granted approval for the study of New England speech.
Over the following years, preparations for LANE were made. The staff of the project was appointed, including Hans Kurath as director and Miles L. Haney as associate director. Additional staff members were hired with the help of fellowships from Brown University and the University of Vermont. Yale University provided headquarters for the project. Staff were trained over six weeks in the summer of 1931 before beginning fieldwork. Linguists who had experience mapping the dialects of Switzerland and Italy, Jakob Jud and Paul Schauermeier, assisted in the training process.
The first component of the research took into account the historical background of New England's settlement and population.This provided a basis for which communities would be selected for study in LANE. After this initial historical investigation by Marcus L. Hansen (University of Illinois), data collection commenced. This phase spanned 25 months, and finished in September 1933.
416 informants were interviewed across 213 New England communities. Though there were 431 towns and cities investigated altogether, neighboring towns were sometimes grouped together. Historical backgrounds for each town and details about each informant are given in the accompanying Handbook. Two informants of different social strata were selected from each county whenever possible. Kurath specified that one of the informants must be elderly, old-fashioned, and uneducated and the other must be middle-class and have some education. Field workers characterized informants, based on education levels and age, into Type I (little formal education), Type II (moderate formal education), or Type III (high education level), and Type A (old-fashioned) or Type B (younger, more modern).
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