When I was a kid living on a farm in Northeast Iowa, we traveled to see our uncle and aunt and cousins in Warren County, just south of Des Moines. My ears always noticed the southern Iowa dialect spoken by my relatives. Today, they still talk funny even though we come from the same stock. Over the years, I have noticed that it is not necessary to go all that far to recognize the locals do NOT talk the same way they do back home, a few counties away. When I worked as the assistant state editor and then state editor for the Waterloo (Iowa) Courier, I was responsible for news coverage in a 15-county area in northeast Iowa. For 12 years, I crisscrossed the area doing interviews with people in large cities, county seat communities and many small farm communities. While they may have spoken English, the sound of the language common to areas changed distinctly, and it was due, in part, to the dominant ethnic groups that had settled the areas. Second generation Germans dominated where I grew up and there still are vestiges of that in the common language spoken there. I especially remember regional pockets where Czech, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch and Slavic ancestry colored the common language.We moved to Arizona in 1984, and I was struck by hodge-podge of accents in the Valley voices — more Southern drawls than I expected, but a lot of Midwest twang. Yet I also came to recognize a true Mountain West sound, something almost distinct Arizona and Western. Because our population tends to be people from everywhere, we might be pressed to identify the most typical Valley sound in the language.So the other day, an idea occurred to me: What if we took the 3,034 U.S. counties and found the best linguists and language experts, then assigned at least one to each county. They would spend time listening, detecting, surveying and ascertaining what voice, with inflection and intonation, best represents the dominant sound or language of each county. (If the county was large and there are clearly different ways of speaking in parts of the county, then more than one representative voice would be chosen in that county). In every county in the U.S., depending on how it mapped out through the valleys, hollows, islands and sprawling boroughs, people would be identified to be the voice of that precise locale.Then we would choose a piece of American writing — Preamble to the Constitution or Lincolns Gettysburg Address or something that is an American refrain like a Walt Whitman poem. In the 3,034 counties (and more per county as distinct variations are found), the linguist volunteers would tape-record those readings on the same kind of equipment for standardization. Maybe we would do two sets: one of a male voice, one of a female voice in each location. Recordings and their maps would be consolidated in one place where a matrix of the American landscape would be produced and the recordings plotted on the map. Finally, with a huge American map, a stylus (like a computer mouse) could be placed on a Tennessee county in the Smokey Mountains or a Minnesota prairie town or a San Francisco wharf or a Vermont village. Seamlessly the read statement would continue to change in accents and language as the stylus moved from county to county or region to region. As long as the stylist stayed on one town, Roanoke, Va., or Spokane, Wash., the Preamble would be read by the voice of that area. But it could instantly change as it was slid across Louisiana or West Virginia or Texas. In the end, we could instantly hear the subtleties of language across America, just as happens visually with moving a scanner around a womans belly in a ultrasound. Or happens in some TV commercials as many voices divide the words of a statement. Given how satellites have every square inch of the planet plotted and GPS can pinpoint us, so we could plot the American language variations on a grand map.Television, film, radio and recordings, as they reach all pockets of America, would seem to create one homogenious character of the American language. But dialects, vernacular and local tongues survive, nonetheless, and keep alive the tapestry of the sounds of the American voice. And someone with the resources ought to map it all.

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