This provocative book regroups the areas of North America into divisions according to economic and social resources and needs.

For nearly 400 years, New England has held an important place in the development of American English, and "New England accents" are very well known in popular imagination. This book is the first large-scale academic project since the 1930s to focus specifically on New England English as a whole. It presents new variationist sociolinguistic research covering all six New England states, with detailed geographic, acoustic phonetic, and statistical analyses of recently collected data from over 1,600 New Englanders. The book systematically documents major traditional New England dialect features and their current usage in terms of location, age, gender, ethnicity, social class, and other factors.