William A. Kretzschmar, Jr., Paulina Bounds, Stephen Coates and Tony Snodgrass University of Georgia
 

The Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS; Pederson 1986-92, UGA Press) is one of the monumental achievements of twentieth-century linguistics, and yet access to its hundreds of interviews with speakers from Florida to Tennessee to Texas has so far been limited to written transcriptions (whether in print or digital form). However, we can now offer access to audio recordings of the interviews. This presentation will demonstrate the Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS), a collection of 64 full interviews selected by Lee Pederson to cover the range of speech in the Gulf States, including the quality of the sound files and the kind of information included to help users listen to them.  DASS includes four speakers from each of the sixteen regional divisions of LAGS, one from each of the Atlas speaker types (I, folk; II, common; III, cultivated) plus one African American speaker, ranging in age from 15 to 90. DASS includes digital audio files in two kinds, WAV format (long, uncompressed files, useful for acoustic phonetic or other technical processing) and MP3 (small, compressed files good for listening).  Personally identifying or sensitive information in the files was "beeped out" to assure ethical treatment of speakers, and a functional index was created by identifying the topic of conversation at c. five minute intervals. DASS is available in 2009 to users on a portable USB drive for the cost of reproduction (about 275 Gb, c. $300 with shipping), including information about the collection of speakers and the creation of the digital files. Eventually, the MP3 files for all existing Linguistic Atlas interviews will be available online from UGA. Until then, DASS is the best way to hear LAGS speakers, and it will remain an inexpensive way for users and libraries to have their own collection of Southern speakers for immediate use.

Reference

Pederson, Lee. 1986-92. Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States. 7 vols. Athens: University of Georgia Press.