Part A. Introduction and methods

1. Introduction
    1.1. The goals and significance of dialect geography
        1.1.1. The separation of linguistics and dialect geography
        1.1.2. The renewal of the connection
    1.2. A brief history of American dialect geography
    1.3. The design of the Atlas of North American English
        1.3.1. Telsur
        1.3.2. Technical developments
        1.3.3. Stages of research and sources of support
    1.4. Data to be presented and questions to be answered

2. The English vowel system.
3. Principles of chain shifting and mergers
4. .Methods
    4.1. Sampling method.
5. Acoustic Analysis.
6. The construction of isoglosses.

Part B. Mergers and contrasts

7. The restoration of post-vocalic /r/
8. Nearly completed mergers
9. North American mergers in progress
    9.1. Mergers.
    9.2. Mergers before /l/.

Part C. English vowels

10. The vowels of North America
    10.1. Individual maps for 16 English vowels

Part D Continental processes

11. The dialects of North America>
    11.0. Introduction
        11.0.1. Criteria for identifying dialect regions
    11.1. Defining the major dialect areas based on the development of /ay/ and /aw/
    11.2. Midland Dialects
        11.2.1. The Mid-Atlantic Region
        11.2.2. Pittsburgh and Western Pennsylvania
        11.2.3. Cincinnati
        11.2.4. St. Louis
    11.3. Interior structure of the North
        11.3.1. The Inland North
        11.3.2. Discontinuities in the Inland North
12. The general fronting of the back upgliding vowels.
13. Short a configurations

Part E Regional patterns

14.The North and the Northern Cities Shift.
    14.1. The Northern Cities Shift and the Inland North.
    14.2. The origins of the Northern Cities Shift in Western New England.
15. . Canada.
    15.1. The Canadian Shift.
    15.2. The Atlantic Provinces.
16. The Northeastern U.S.
    16.1. Eastern New England
    16.2. Providence
    16.3. Southern New England
17. The Mid-Atlantic States.
    17.1. New York City
    17.2. Phiiladelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore.
18.The South
    18.1. Introduction
    18.2. Relics of older Southern phonology
    18.3. Major phonological features of the South.
    18.4. The monophthongization of /ay/
    18.5. History of monophthongization of /ay/
    18.6. The second stage of the Southern Shift
    18.7. The social distribution of the Southern Shift.
    18.8. Monophthongization  before voiceless segments
    18.9. Internal conditioning of the Southern Shift.
    18.10. The Southern /aw/ shift
    18.11. Southern Shift vowel systems
    18.12. Front-back parallelism in the South.
    18.13. An overview of the South.
19. The West
    19.1. The formation of a Western dialect
20. The Midland
    20.1. The Midland territory as a whole
    20.2. Pittsburgh.
    20.3. Cincinnati.
    20.4. St Louis.

Part F Lexical and grammatical maps

21. Lexical maps.
22. Grammatical Maps