Languages are constantly in flux. Regional varieties tend to develop when communities are separated by physical or sociopolitical barriers. In contrast, with the current weakening of national and social boundaries due to international communication systems, international travel, and multinational corporations, we should expect to observe a levelling of linguistic features across provincial and national borders in a relatively short period of time. Dialect Topography provides a methodology for the study of rapid language change.
Dialect Topography (Chambers 1994) is a data collection method designed specifically to study sound change as a dynamic process by means of a sociolinguistic macro-survey of Canadian communities. To date, over 4000 residents of six regions of Canada , namely Southern Ontario (DTP director Jack Chambers), the Ottawa Valley (regional director André Lapierre, University of Ottawa), Montréal (regional director Charles Boberg, McGill University), Québec City (regional director Troy Heisler, Université Laval), Eastern Townships (regional director Pamela Grant, and New Brunswick (regional director Wendy Burnett), have completed a standardized questionnaire asking for linguistic information on 76 items dealing with pronunciation, general vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and usage. Eleven additional questions on personal data allow the linguistic variants to be correlated with independent variables such as age, sex, social class, occupational mobility, and degree of regionality.
All
aspects of the project, including analyses of the data collected to this
point, are available to researchers on the DTP website at http://dialect.topography.chass.utoronto.ca/