One of the projects that I will be writing about in this blog is the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies, which began as a component of the Linguistic Atlas of the Western States (LAWS). LAWS began under the direction of the late Lee Pederson in the 1980s as a means to discover more about the speech of a large area of the country that had been relatively ignored in previous research and to unify Linguistic Atlas databases that had been compiled, mainly in the eastern states, earlier in the century. LAWS fieldwork began in Wyoming in 1988 using worksheets devised by Pederson that, like earlier Linguist Atlas worksheets, focused on folk vocabulary, such as terms for family members and household items, while also targeting items more strongly associated with the American West, such as ranching terminology and names of western flora and fauna. As of this writing, the most recent LAWS interviewing was conducted by the current author in 2004. The location (by community) of the 70 informants who were interviewed for the project from 1988 to 2004 are marked on the map below:

Fig. 1: LAMR informants by community interviewed in (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)

LAMR can be freely downloaded as a collection of machine readable texts from the Illocution Inc site here, and more on the methods of the collection can be obtained via these articles, among others:

Other Resources

Antieau, Lamont, and Clayton Darwin. (2013). “Fatback and gunnysacks: lexical variation in the Southeastern U.S. and the Middle Rockies.” Southern Journal of Linguistics 37(2): 39-56.

Antieau, Lamont. (2012a). “Ascending kinship terminology in Middle Rocky Mountain English.” English World-Wide 33(2): 185-204.

Antieau, Lamont. (2012b). “Talk about the weather: Some comparative expressions in the Middle Rockies.” American Speech 87(4): 432-446.

Pederson, Lee, and Michael Madsen. (1989). “Linguistic geography in Wyoming.” Journal of English Linguistics 22:17-24.