TALKING THE TAWK.(The Talk of the Town)(American dialects)

Professor William Labov is to American dialect what Lewis and Clark are to American geography. He's the pathfinder. Labov's new work, which is called "The Atlas of North American English," constitutes the first coast-to-coast charting of all the major dialects spoken in the continental United States and Canada. The dialects are represented on a hundred and thirty-nine color-coded maps, and software that accompanies the book lets you click on different regions of the country and eavesdrop on people talking. Or you can search for single words--"go," "do," for instance--and hear how widely their pronunciations vary from place to place.

One evening recently, Labov and his two co-authors, Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg, introduced the book at a reception in N.Y.U.'s D'Agostino Hall, as part of the Thirty-fourth NWAV (New Ways of Analyzing Variation) linguistic conference. The room was full of young NWAV linguists, whose field Labov more or less invented--he is often called the father of sociolinguistics--and who treated him with a mixture of awe and filial tenderness, making sure "Bill" had enough to eat and drink, and that the Web site he would be demonstrating was ready to roll.

Labov, who is seventy-seven, is the director of the linguistics lab at the University of Pennsylvania. He is small and wiry and fit-looking. At N.Y.U., he was asked a lot of questions about the local dialect, commonly known as Brooklynese. Its three most prominent features are the raised "a" in words like "past" (peahst), the "aw" sound in words like "coffee" (cawfee), and, of course, the dropped "r" in words like "water" (watta). Labov explained his contention that the city's dropped "r" has its origins in posh British speech: when F.D.R. dropped his "r"s ("The only thing we have to feah is feah itself") and Katharine Hepburn dropped hers ("My, she was yah"), it sounded upper class. But after the Second World War, Labov said, with the loss of Britain's imperial status "r"-less British speech ceased to be regarded as "prestige speech"--William F. Buckley was a consuvative, but George W. Bush is not--and the dropping of "r"s became exclusively working class.

"Before the war," Labov said, "the judges in the gangster pictures dropped their 'r's, but after the war only the hoodlums did it." Ralph Kramden, Archie Bunker, and Tony Soprano all speak Brooklynese, and the dialect immediately evokes their regular-guy milieu.

Apart from the adenoidal "oi" sound in words like "bird" (boid), which has largely disappeared from the area, Brooklynese has remained unchanged for the past fifty years. "The dialect spoken by all those firemen on TV after September 11 was pure, unmodified New York speech from the nineteen-fifties," Labov said. However, New York's dialect is intensely regional. There is a tiny portion of eastern New Jersey, along the edge of the Hudson, where you can hear Brooklynese, but by the time you're in Paterson you're well into what Labov calls the Jersey "nasal system." You can hear Brooklynese spoken in parts of New Orleans and Cincinnati, Labov added, the legacy of the New York ...