|
|
|
Department of English Western Michigan University Kalamazoo, Michigan 49008-5331
|
|
|
Student Resource Page
Links and Contents (Note: If you're using Firefox, you may need to scroll down to access links to handouts, assignments, library, and research links)
Click here for the latest assignments and updates
Instructor's resources for students
Review sheets and study outlines: If you missed it in class, pick it up here. Pages will be added throughout the semester.
IPA worksheet/chart (pdf file)
Study outline #1 (pdf file)
Assignment sheets: Assignments will be available here beginning on the day they are scheduled to be assigned in class.
Working-group assignment 2 (pdf file)
IPA homework (pdf file)
Working-group assignment #1 (pdf file)
We'll keep add more as the semester goes on. Please share interesting sites that you find!
SIL International is the go-to source for information about world languages and for help learning IPA and the sounds of English. This link goes to their IPA help page, where you can click on phonetic symbols and here the sounds articulated. SIL also has numerous other linguistics resources, so feel free to browse around once you're there. A fun site to explore! (Note: All speech sounds are here, not just those used in English, so there will be some symbols you might not recognize. Since our class is about English, we'll only be concerned with English speech sounds and the symbols that represent them. But if you study other languages, you might be interested in the additional symbols here as well.)
Based at the University of Georgia under the direction of Bill Kretzschmar, the Linguistic Atlas Project is a long-term study of dialect geography, or how lexical, grammatical, and phonological features are distributed geographically and socially. Begun in the 1920s with the Linguistic Atlas of New England, the project represents one of the first major surveys of American English and today also includes surveys of the Upper Midwest, North Central States, Gulf States, and the Pacific Northwest, among others. Fieldwork for the Western States project is still underway. Much of the lexical data for the Middle and South Atlantic States project is now available on the web, with a searchable corpus of African American, Gullah, and white speaker data collected from the 1930s through 1970s. A substantial portion of phonological data for these speakers is accessible as well, as are fieldworkers notes and biographical information for the interviewees.
The Speech Accent Archive at George Mason University is a collection of sound files containing speech samples from over 300 native and non-native speakers of English. Each speaker is recorded reading the same English paragraph, so you can observe how variation functions in real speech. The archive includes the data of 14 native speakers of American English, including speakers from New York, Tennessee, Mississippi, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
A project at the University of Pennsylvania led by Bill Labov, the Atlas of North American English (also known as the Phonological Atlas of North America and the Telsurv project) surveys variation in urban areas of the United States and looks at a number of interesting phonological features and mergers. The site includes demographic information for the 640 speakers surveyed, maps the distributions of features and outlines what the authors conclude are the dialect areas of the U.S. Linked articles on the Telsurv project and on variation in the U.S. are also included, with links and bibliographies providing excellent research resources.
The Harvard Dialect Survey conducted online surveys of speakers to analyze the distribution and variation of lexical and phonological features in speakers of American English. Over 30,000 speakers responded to the online survey, and the site contains demographic information for the respondents, their responses to the 122 survey questions, and maps showing the distribution of features.
Phonetics: The Sounds of English and Spanish, a project at the University of Iowa, is a great resource for studying speech sounds. Includes multimedia files for help learning about places of articulation and libraries of speech sounds for both English and Spanish, this is a great site for students or anyone who is interested in language.
Try this "Yankee or Dixie?" quiz to find out where your lexical and phonological features locate you!