Speech in the Western States

This volume investigates perhaps the most understudied American dialect region, the American West. To remedy this dearth of descriptive work on Western US dialects, this publication brings together research from scholars across the West that focuses on phonetic changes in vowel systems in California, Oregon, and Washington. While noting several shared "Western" features, contributors force us to reconsider the dialect uniformity often assumed for these states, pointing to key differences between California and the states of the Pacific Northwest. The research presented here begins to fill gaps in our understanding of what the Coastal dialects of the continental Western United States sound like and how they fit into the larger picture of US dialect diversity; it also lays the groundwork for further research on the speech patterns of the Western United States. A follow-up volume will move the lens of inquiry to vowel patterns in the Interior West.

Contributors. Anna Aden, Kara Becker, Katelyn Best, Amanda Cardoso, Annette D'Onofrio, Penelope Eckert, Betsy E. Evans, Charlie Farrington, Valerie Fridland, Lauren Hall-Lew, Haley Jacobson, Yova Kementchedjhieva, Tyler Kendall, Jason McLarty, Rob Podesva, Teresa Pratt, Ruaridh Purse, Janneke Van Hofwegen, Dan Villarreal, Alicia Beckford Wassink