See that menu bar at the top of the screen? There’s a whole bunch of stuff up there. Stuff about accents, dialects and related topics. I am constantly expanding and refining this content. As such, I am going to post little “updates” from time to time so everybody gets an idea of how the site is evolving.
This week, I’ve changed some things in the Dialect Areas section of the site. [Ed. Note: I have since broken this section down into separate sections which can be found at the top of the Dialect Blog toolbar.] (This is where I give broad overviews of large geographic areas like North America or the UK). Here’s what I’ve done:
1.) I changed the information in this section so these articles references the International Phonetic Alphabet. I had previously attempted to use only “layman’s phonetics” (“Tour is pronounced ‘too-urh!”). I still include these shortcuts for complete beginners. But linguistics sites that don’t use the IPA drive me crazy, so I decided to not be a hypocrite.
2.) I have described more features of individual dialects, and have cleaned up some fuzzy or unclear language.
3.) I have made these pages more attractive and readable in general.
In the coming weeks, I am going to add actual dialect samples to these pages, flesh them out a bit, and add lots of external links and reference materials. Stay tuned!
