According to Vaux, regional dialect research has a wide variety of applications in commerce, entertainment and even in fighting crime. Vaux said he has been working with a food distribution company to “identify parallels between dialect boundaries and marketing boundaries.”
According to both Wolfram and Vaux, mapping dialects could assist in predicting where a person grew up. Such predictions could be useful for law enforcement or marketing. For example, Wolfram has used his professional experience to assist police investigations.
“I’ve worked with detectives who have recorded messages. The most recent one I listened to used the term ‘sneakers,’ [the use of] which is very different in different regions,” Wolfram said.
The survey web site is http://hcs.harvard.edu/~golder/dialect/.
—Staff writer Michael A. Mohammed can be reached at
mohammed@fas.harvard.edu.