The past 400 years have seen an increasing standardization of written and broadcast English.
Major factors that illustrate or affect this standardization include: print, communications technology including the telegraph, telephone, shorthand, radio, TV; recorded sound and sound film, and computer networks, with such illustrative features as voice recognition, machine translation and machine correction. The main standard is British "Received Pronunciation" or "BBC English"; a competing standard is Standard American "TV English."
This standardization has been offset to some extent by the spread of English across the world, and the development of different dialects in different parts of the English-speaking community. One of the best places to examine this dynamic is in the United States, using data from the
Phonological Atlas of North America. We'll start with some discussion of how this atlas is being assembled, and then look at specific dialect regions and move on to maps for specific features and then to sound systems.Here's an extra example from Hans Kurath and Raven I. McDavid, Jr.'s Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961):
