Regional Dialect Variation within the United States of America

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: Gut, University of Vienna, course: English Linguistics: Introductory Seminar, language: English, abstract: I chose to take a closer look at the different dialect regions within the United States of America because during the last semester at university I had been trying to adopt the American English accent into my own speech, and I wanted to learn where all the things the teachers had told l me to do had their origins. At first I wanted to deal with each and every of the ten dialect regions within the US, looking at all the phonemes which in some way characterized them. After I had done some research I learned that this way I would have had to spend a year on that paper, instead of the planned two months. So I decided to concentrate only on three Northern American dialect regions: Eastern New England, the South and the Central Midland. After writing the first part of my paper, including the study on the dialect spoken in the South, I found out that my topic was still too big. That was why I made the final decision to leave out the vowels in my study and to concentrate mainly on consonants, with the exception of the r-coloring. This turned out to be a research field easily big enough for my first paper of that kind.