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Click on the blue number next to ‘t’ in the character list. What does the map show? Can you think of a linguistic explanation for the map? |
The map above is the one you should see after clicking on the number of occurrences of ‘t’ in the character list. As you can see, there is an area in the south-east of Pennsylvania where ‘t’ is used much more frequently than in the rest of Pennsylvania (the darker the color on the map, the more frequent the symbol).
Under the map a number of samples of transcriptions including a ‘t’ are shown. Because ‘t’ is a very frequent symbol, all of the occurrences of ‘t’ cannot be shown in this list, but a random sample is made. If you were lucky, some of the transcriptions in the random sample that was generated for you showed words that are pronounced with ‘t’ in the blue area on the map, but without ‘t’ in other parts of Pennsylvania. The first sample in the sample list above, the pronunciation of the item ‘New Jersey’ in Carbon, is one example of this.
The following exercises in this tutorial will show some more elaborate ways of detecting geographic distribution patterns of dialectal features.