Reddit reviews Speaking American: How Y’all, Youse , and You Guys Talk: A Visual Guide

This is the best coffee table book I own. It's fun to get the family together, ask how they say things, and then read about how regional it is.

They have a whole section for Boston stuff.

Have you looked at this recent book by Josh Katz? You should be able to get some ideas from it. The easiest thing for a survey is lexical choices, like pail/bucket.

https://www.amazon.com/Speaking-American-Youse-Visual-Guide/dp/0544703391/

Blogspam to Amazon affiliate link, bypassing /u/AutoModerator rules.

Here's the actual link: https://www.amazon.com/Speaking-American-Youse-Visual-Guide/dp/0544703391

I don't have an answer for all three of your questions, but here's a partial answer to one.

> What factors made the various American accents sound the way they do

So in North American English, a lot of the differences between accents are in the vowel sounds. Think of how a stereotypical white New Yorker might say the o in "coffee", how a Canadian might say about, or whether people have the cot-caught merger. There are some differences in how consonants are pronounced as well, such as how often you might say walking or walkin' or saying this as dis. There are some grammatical differences, such as using might could in the South, needs washed in the Midwest, or invariable be in African American English. And there are word choice differences, as in pop vs. soda, put up vs. put away, or roly-poly vs. potato bug.

If you have access to a university library, you might want to look up the Atlas of North American English by Labov, Ash, and Boberg. As a more coffee-table book that more intended for a general audience, try Josh Katz's book Speaking American

“Lol, k-buddy.”

What a schmuck.

https://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_84.html

Speaking American: How Y’all, Youse , and You Guys Talk: A Visual Guide https://www.amazon.com/dp/0544703391/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_MjDCCbR9VX4XD

The above link is the actual survey results from which NYT pulled their information. As you can see, the two terms are used interchangeably in much of the United States. The original, peer-reviewed, quantitative survey was conducted by the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee.

The second link is the results of the 350,000 Americans who took the NYT survey as compiled into a visual guide. On the description section of the page you will actually see the map for roundabout vs traffic circle. Traffic circle is only almost exclusively Dallas, OKC, Louisiana, and the East Coast north of South Carolina. The rest of the country seems to use the term roundabout. Now, it only takes a very simple high school education in reasoning and a working middle school knowledge of geography and using maps to see that it is pretty clearly a regional difference to the tune of about 350,000 real data points deep.

But, as we all know, whatever one edition of one dictionary says is probably a better source for the growth and evolution of language than a research study involving living speakers of the language, so you should definitely just keep blindly citing the Oxford English Dictionary like it makes you intelligent. That’s why any time someone says they have “imposter syndrome,” I politely point out that word is not proper English since it’s not part of the 2017 Oxford English Dictionary, and that’s my preferred version on which to base all usage of language.

Tl;dr - you are a pedantic, condescending tool (and unfortunately not even a smart one) who thinks the stand up shots subreddit is the best place to flex your lack of intelligence, “buddy.”

Speaking American a book about American dialects.