Flashes of Panic

There was a lot of ‘net buzz a few years ago about the dialect survey and the resulting maps.

Lately I’ve been reading Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue, which came before he started in on travel writing, but probably after (or maybe concurrently with) his Dictionary of Troublesome Words.

Bryson postulates that the varied accents (and dialects!) of the British Isles can be attributed to the languages of the populations which settled the corresponding regions: Norse, Angles, Saxons, Danes, etc. He further explains that much of the dialect variation of the American east coast matches the origins of the English populations who settled there. (And not just English; if you think the German population of Pennsylvania isn’t still torquing the grammar of those who live there, you’ve never spent much time in Pennsylvania.)

I wonder if you could combine both concepts and overlay a map of settlement patterns (German, French, Norwegian, Italian, etc. etc.) on the dialect maps. If you shifted through a number of settlement maps through a few hundred years, I wonder which ones would most closely match the existing patterns of speech?

Now Playing: If I Wrote You from End Of The Summer by Dar Williams