Dialect Map of American English
General Northern
Midland
General Southern

•Northern Dialects
• New England – New England, Eastern (1)
• Boston Urban (2)
•             - New England, Wetern (3)
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Hudson Valley (4)
New York City (5)
Bonac (6)
Inland Northern (7)
San Francisco Urban (8)
Upper Midwestern (9)
Chicago Urban (10)

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•Eastern New England
• is one of the most distinctive of all the American dialects. /r/ is often dropped, but an extra
/r/ is added to words that end with a vowel. /a/ is pronounced /ah/.
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•San Francisco Urban
•Unlike the rest of California, which in the early twentieth century saw an influx of people from
the South and other parts of the West, San Francisco continued to be settled by people from the
Northeast and Northern Midwest, and elements of their dialects (North Midland, Upper Midwestern,
Inland Northern) can be found. Mission dialect, spoken by Irish Catholics in a specific part of the
city is very much like the New York City dialect.
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•Western Dialects
• Rocky Mountain (13)
• Pacific Northwest (14)
• Alaska (not shown)
• Pacific Southwest (15)
• Southwestern (16)
• Hawaii (not shown)

•Alaska
•Developed out of the Northern, Midland, and Western dialects. Also influenced by the native
languages of the Alutes, Innuit, and Chinook Jargon.
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•Hawaii
•The original language of the Native Hawaiians - Polynesian family.
• English speakers arrived in 1778, + many other settlers from China, Portugal, Japan, Korea,
Spain, and the Philippines to influence the modern dialect.
•Hawaiian Creole – from pidgin English spoken on the sugar plantations with workers from Hawaii and
many other countries. It isn't widely spoken anymore.
•Nonstandard Hawaiian English developed from Hawaiian Creole and is spoken mostly by teenagers.
•Standard Hawaiian English is part of the Western dialect

•North Midland  (11)
• Pennsylvania German-English (12)
•South Midland (17)
• Ozark (18)
• Southern Appalachian (19)
• Smoky Mountain English (25)

•South Midland
•A /th/ at the end of words or syllables is sometimes pronounced [f], and the word are is often
left out of sentences as they are in Black English. An /a/ is usually placed at the beginning of a
verb that ends with -ing, and the /g/ is dropped;
• "They a-celebratin' his birfday by a-goin' to see 'Old Yeller' in the theatah"

•Southern
•Virginia Piedmont (20)
•Coastal Southern (21)
• South Florida
• Ocracoke (26)
• Gullah (22)
•Gulf Southern (23)
• Louisiana (24)

•General Southern
•Since it was largely an agricultural area, people tended to move around less than they did in the
north, and as a result, the subdialects are much less uniform than those of the General Northern
regions and have much more clearly defined boundaries. Other languages that had an important
influence on it are French (since the western region was originally French territory) and the
African languages spoken by the people brought over as slaves. People tend to speak slower here
than in the north creating the famous southern "drawl."

Where American accents came from a what do they sound like?
•
•https://www.businessinsider.com/animated-map-where-american-accents-come-from-2018-5
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Bibliography
•http://robertspage.com/dialects.html
•https://www.businessinsider.com/animated-map-where-american-accents-come-from-2018-5
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Thank you.
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•Natália Jagnešáková
•Autumn 2019