Preserving a National Treasure: Spoken American English
Student employees of the Linguistic Atlas Project learn valuable research skills while supporting their education. Image courtesy of the Linguistic Atlas Project.
Bill Kretzschmar, editor of the Linguistic Atlas Project (LAP), describes himself as the “guardian of a national treasure”: decades worth of research on spoken American English in all its regionalisms and variety, much of it in audio form. As early as 1929, researchers began harvesting words by traveling the country and listening as Americans spoke about their lives, describing their homes, beliefs, families, and regions in exhaustive detail. Cumulatively, their work makes up a massive archive—a first-hand account of rural and urban American life, one that puts to rest the notion that there is any single way of speaking American English. Because many interviewees were older Americans, their oral histories record memories dating as far back as the Civil War.”
“[The Linguistic Atlas Project] gives individuals the chance to see language in a much broader view than they ever could by themselves.”
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But in the early 2000s, this work was at risk: audiotape degrades over time and the recordings were in danger of being permanently lost. The NEH provided the funding to digitize this invaluable record, saving it and making it freely available to researchers and the public. To complete the project, Kretzschmar hired 50 undergraduate and graduate students to process and label thousands of files, providing them with valuable research training while supporting their studies—many of them have gone on to use the Atlas as the basis for their own research projects. Like Kretzschmar’s students, users can now map how words are pronounced in different parts of the nation and listen to Americans of different ages, races, genders, and regions describe their lives and culture, either by downloading the data directly or by using the LICHEN interface provided by the project. The end result, according to Kretzschmar, is a website that “gives individuals the chance to see language in a much broader view than they ever could by themselves.”
The LAP makes it possible to explore regional differences in culture as well as terminology and pronunciation. In this sample, listen to two people discuss ways of using cornmeal.
