Algorithmic Exploration Of American English Dialects

In this paper, we use a novel algorithmic approach to explore dialectal variation in American English speech. Without the need for human annotations, we are able to use a corpus transcribed in text form only. Our results show that, in general, American English dialects can be divided into two larger groups: dialects of the South (Texas to North Carolina except for peninsular Florida), and the rest of the country. Our results confirm some well-known results from dialectology, such as the pin-pen merger, but show that some other ones, such as the cot-caught merger, may be losing their isogloss boundaries. Moreover, we demonstrate that our algorithm can extend to dialectal features in other languages.