All of these processes have resulted in a diverse range of varieties of English, which have attracted the attention of observers and scholars for centuries. Early accounts tended to be anecdotal records or short literary representations by native users or outside observers (except for sketchy dictionaries and grammars produced by missionaries, notably for Sranan, which is therefore historically uniquely well researched). Serious and systematic scholarly investigation of these varieties began with the launching of dialect geography in North America in the late 1920s. As a consequence, regional varieties of American English (as well as some degree of social variation), based upon data from the 1930s to the 1970s, are thoroughly documented by a series of regional atlas projects, most importantly the Linguistic Atlas of New England (Kurath 1939–43), the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States, directed first by Kurath, then by Raven McDavid, and now by William Kretzschmar and the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (Pederson et al. 1986-92), along with several others. These projects were analyzed in several studies, three of which, covering the levels of vocabulary, morphology and pronunciation, respectively, count as classics, having established the conventional division of American English into three main regions – North, Midland, and South (Kurath 1949; Atwood 1953; Kurath and McDavid 1961). Carver (1987) later challenged this division and proposed to consider the northern Midlands and southern Midlands as divisions of extended North and South regions, respectively – a recategorization which is less dramatic than it might look at first sight. Since the 1990s the second major project of investigating the regional dialects of all of the US, Labov’s Telsur survey, has been under way; it looks into phonological differences and analyses ongoing sound changes (Labov, Ash and Boberg fc.). This project has grown out of the second major discipline that has investigated variation within and varieties of American English, sociolinguistics, founded by Labov in the 1960s (Labov 1966, 1972). Employing conversational interviews and quantitative techniques of analysis, sociolinguists have investigated patterns of variation and change in many different cities and communities (Chambers 2003), including, most importantly, African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and, in recent years, dialect enclaves. The 1960s also saw the growth of creole studies as a distinct paradigm of linguistic investigation, with many of its early classics being concerned with the English-based creoles of Jamaica (Bailey 1966) and Guyana (Bickerton 1975; Rickford 1987). In addition to many important book-length studies of individual varieties (listed in the general bibliography and referred to in the individual articles), many collective volumes, reflecting a variety of research activities, have been published, including Williamson and Burke (1971), Allen and Underwood (1971), Allen and Linn (1997), Preston (1993) and Schneider (1996) on North American varieties in general, Montgomery and Bailey (1986), Bernstein, Nunnally and Sabino (1997), Montgomery and Nunnally (1998) and Nagle and Sanders (2003) on Southern English, Frazer (1993) on the Midwest, as well as Carrington, Craig and Dandare (1983), Christie (1998), several volumes of the “Creole Language Library” series published by Benjamins, and, most recently, Aceto and Williams (2003) on Caribbean creoles and dialects.

Schneider (1996a), in a volume that uniquely unites dialectologists, sociolinguists and creolists, surveys ongoing research activities on North American Englishes, both quantitatively and qualitatively.