Joshua Katz, a PhD student in statistics at NC State, has put together a great set of visualizations based on data from Bert Vaux’s Harvard Dialect Survey, and using an algorithm that weights responses by location to produce multicoloured visualizations of variability in individual linguistic features in American English. If you’ve ever wondered at the diversity of American lexical and phonological variation – for instance, crawfish vs. crayfish vs. crawdad, or whether mayonnaise is pronounced with two syllables or three – you’ll want to check it out. The full set of maps seems not to be loading right now (possibly due to server / bandwidth issues, if its popularity on my Facebook and Twitter feeds is any guide) but the smaller set is still visible on the Business Insider site.
Glossographia 