Mapping Dialect: GIS Applications in Studying Dialect of Western Pennsylvania

Historically, most surveys of American dialect have focused on large‐scale regions of the country: the Linguistic Atlas of New England, the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States, and the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States, for example. However, even in a region as small and relatively homogeneous as western Pennsylvania, there is measurable diversity of language. This paper describes a dialect survey, in progress for the last 10 years that focuses precisely on dialect variation within western Pennsylvania. In recent years, the researchers have tapped the potential of GIS techniques to help make these distributions visible and assess the underlying speech patterns of the region. This paper is an attempt in this direction. It demonstrates the methods and techniques used to manipulate the collected data and the process of creating visual cartographic representations of the results.