Introduction / Dennis R. Preston -- History of American English / Michael Montgomery -- Linguistic Atlases of the United States and Canada / William A. Kretzschmar, Jr. -- Regional lexicon : DARE and beyond / Joan Houston Hall -- National survey of North American dialects / Sharon Ash -- Conversation, text, and discourse / Barbara Johnstone -- Social variation in America / Penelope Eckert -- Ideologies, attitudes, and perceptions / Richard W. Bailey -- Slang, metaphor, and folk speech / Connie C. Eble -- Languages other than English in Canada and the United States / Robert Bayley and Ruth King -- Language change in variation and formal syntax / Ralph W. Fasold.