The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change (abbreviatedANAE; formerly, the Phonological Atlas of North America) is a 2006 book that presents an overview of the pronunciation patterns (accents) in all the majordialect regions of theEnglish language as spoken in urban areas of the United States and Canada. It is the result of a large-scale survey by linguistsWilliam Labov, Sharon Ash, andCharles Boberg. Speech data was collected, mainly from 1992 to 1999, by means of telephone interviews with individuals in metropolitan areas in all regions of the U.S. and Canada. Using acoustic analysis of speech from these interviews,ANAE traces sound changes in progress inNorth American English, and definesboundaries between dialect regions based on the differentsound changes taking place in them.

The Atlas of North American English received theLeonard Bloomfield Book Award at the 2008 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America.^[1]

TheAtlas defines several major dialect regions on the basis of distinctive phonological patterns and sound changes taking place in them—oftenchain shifts among the vowel phonemes. Major regions include:

• The Inland North, characterized by theNorthern Cities Vowel Shift
• Canada, characterized by theCanadian Vowel Shift
• Severaldialects in New England, characterized by different combinations of thecot–caught merger andnon-rhoticity
• New York City, characterized by non-rhoticity and a complex pattern of/æ/ tensing
• The Mid-Atlantic region, includingPhiladelphia andBaltimore, characterized by complex /æ/ tensing, rhoticity, and the fronting of the back vowels/aw/,/ow/, and/uw/
• The South, characterized by the monophthongization of/ay/ and the resultingSouthern Vowel Shift
• The Midland, characterized by the fronting of back vowels without monophthongization of/ay/
• The West, characterized by thecot–caught merger, the absence of the distinctive features of adjacent regions, and a high degree of internal heterogeneity

On the basis of changes such as the Northern Cities Vowel Shift and the Canadian Shift, theAtlas concludes that regions are becoming more dissimilar to each other, and thus the dialect diversity of North America is increasing.

ANAE employs a "binary" phonemic notation system designed to be maximally abstract and economical so that it can be used to describechain shifts with ease. Thechecked vowels are represented by single letters, and each of the diphthongs and historically long vowels is represented by a nuclear vowel followed by a glide,/y/,/w/ or/h/./y/ represents any kind of front upglide[j,i,ɪ,e,ɛ],/w/ represents any kind of back upglide[w,u,ʊ,o,ɤ], and/h/ represents an inglide or long monophthong.^[2] The following tables provide a comparison betweenANAE's notation andWikipedia's diaphonemic transcription system.

• North American English regional phonology
• Dialectology

• Labov, William; Ash, Sharon; Boberg, Charles (2006).The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change. Berlin and New York:Mouton de Gruyter.ISBN 3-11-016746-8.

• Linguistic atlases
• North American English
• Phonology
• Leonard Bloomfield Book Award books
• Books about the English language

• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata
• Use American English from March 2019
• All Wikipedia articles written in American English
• Use mdy dates from March 2019
• Pages with plain IPA