Linguistic atlas of the Gulf states, vol. 7: The social pattern. Ed. by Lee Pedersen and Susan Leas McDaniel. Athens, GA: The Uniersity of Georgia Press, 1992. Pp. xix, 528. Cloth 70. 00.

Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Emory University, the Linguistics atlas of the Gulf is a comprehensive study of speech variations in an eight-state region (Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and eastern Texas). The project encompasses more than five thousand hours of taped interviews with more than eleven hundred individuals in urban and rural areas. The interviews record respondents' expressions and descriptions of the places, people, and objects in their particular locale. This volume completes the Linguistic atlas of the Gulf In the social patterns, maps and tables outline a sociolinguistic patterns of usage that extends dialect description in several ways: by reflecting the nature of the LAGS survey in its aims, methods and biases; by illustrating the impact of Gulf States dialects; and by clarifying the distribution of linguistic features according to social factors and suggesting possibilities for future study. The book concentrates on the social incidence of 150 items according to the sex, racial caste, age, and formal education of LAGS primary informants. For each item, three sets of information are presented: a data summary, a pattern map, and a binary analysis, which, in the format of a dendrogram, charts social incidence across the Gulf States. These charts are followed by an appendix that lists the 1,437 items considered for inclusion in the social pattern with percentage differentials for each of the four social factors. Finally, a comprehensive index lists all items charted in the 14,000 maps of LAGS volumes 4-7.