Ancient Web: Rick Aschmann Turned American Accents into a Clickable Map

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Most people recognize a regional accent when they hear it. Rick Aschmann decided to draw the boundaries between those accents, then kept moving the lines when the evidence changed.

Explore the North American English Dialects map.

This enormous independent reference page divides North American English into major pronunciation regions and narrower subdialects. Its underlying questions concern sound patterns, not whether somebody says 'soda' or 'pop.' Among the features mapped are the cot–caught merger, pin–pen merger, Canadian raising, and whether speakers pronounce the letter 'r' after vowels.

The page uses a clickable map linked to lists of audio and video examples for particular towns. Its author asks readers to contribute recordings of people raised in a single locality, ideally voices that represent local pronunciation rather than people whose accents have shifted with years of travel.

A linguistic atlas with handwritten corrections

Aschmann describes the project as a hobby alongside his professional work in Indigenous languages. It draws substantially on William Labov, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg's Atlas of North American English, while adding his own judgments and observations from recorded speech. He openly identifies areas where his boundaries differ from the published research.

The page's very long change log is part of its historical interest. Notes from 2010 discuss making maps clickable. Later entries document boundary adjustments, disputed samples, new insets, and even the spacing of a hatch pattern that made one merger region hard to read. A 2017 note records a reader's suggestion for simplifying crowded map symbols.

Aschmann says more than 900 linked speech samples were available by September 2014. That is a historical self-reported count, not a current inventory of working recordings. The page also reports that a separate web-based survey received 3,903 responses by December 2012.

Some hypotheses and detailed local classifications are necessarily debatable. What makes the site valuable is not that every border is final, but that a human author left the arguments, references, corrections, and uncertainties in public view.

The 2018 printable map preserves one dated state of that continuing work.

Explore the live reference and its large printable map.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.