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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 searchable corpora 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 fieldworker 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.
The HEL website was built by Dan Mosser at Virginia Tech and has one of the most extensive online bibliographies of useful information on the development of English that I've seen. Numerous links to websites covering topics from Indo-European, Old English, and Middle English to present-day American English. Also includes links to syllabi so you can see how the development of modern English/history of the English language is being studied in courses around the U.S. Good stuff!
Links to History of the English Language Resources is maintained by Edwin Duncan at Towson University. In addition to an extensive assortment of links with information about all the stages of development of English, this page also includes links to sites about the English language in general, English words, English speech sounds, and IPA.
SIL International is the go-to source for information about the world's 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 be sure to browse around once you're there. A fun site to explore!
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, shifts, and mergers. The site includes demographic information for the 640 speakers surveyed and 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 elicited via the survey.
Try this "Yankee or Dixie?" quiz if you have questions about your linguistic identity!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. Linguistic fun for students or anyone else who is interested in language.
The Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia Library makes hundreds of e-texts available online for users worldwide, with a great African American collection, extensive Mark Twain materials (including full texts of Huckleberry Finn and other books), a substantial women writers collection, lots of Shakespeare and British poetry, a pretty darn good Middle English collection, the Michigan Early Modern English materials, and a lot more. I also like Project Gutenberg, with over 12,000 public-domain titles available for free, immediate download. There's also the Oxford Text Archive, with texts in over 25 languages (including Esperanto!). For those interested in the history of English, there's plenty of Old and Middle High Germanic, Anglo Saxon, and Old and Middle English material here.
And while we're on the subject of electronic texts, here's a page with links to some other electronic text archives from my English 5220 class on language and literature.
For less traditional literary offerings, try the innocuously named but otherwise fabulous Etext Archives. There you can find political writings representing a variety of viewpoints, religious texts (traditional and otherwise), original poetry and fiction, 'zines about politics, art, music, literature, technology, and religion, and so much more that I can't come close to doing it justice. This one's not for fuddy-duddies.