Welcome to the home page of the

TELSUR PROJECT

at the Linguistics Laboratory,
University of Pennsylvania

 

    The Telsur Project is a survey of linguistic changes in progress in North American English, supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. It is the creator of the Atlas of North American English [ANAE], The Atlas will be published in December 2005 by Mouton/de Gruyter. It will be accompanied by a CD-ROM version developed by a team headed by Prof. Jürgen Handke at the University of Marburg, creators of The Mouton Interactive Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology ..

Chapter 11 of the Atlas of North American English provides an overview of the dialects defined by the Atlas on the basis of ongoing linguistic changes. This chapter.establishes the dialects of North America on the basis of the status of the low short vowels /æ/ and /o/ and their role in active chain shifts and mergers.. The full range of topics presented in the Atlas may be seen in the Table of Contents of the Atlas of North American English.
 
  This site will no longer maintain the preliminary maps that were presented during the preparation of the Atlas for publication. It will however present a series of studies based on the Atlas which deal with general questions of language change, transmission and diffusion.


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