The general considerations outlined, in particular with respect to the existence of distinct dialectal forms, have guided the selection of individual varieties. Their arrangement roughly follows geographical and historical patterns, with the US and Canada followed by the Caribbean and varieties being strung together according to their geographical proximity (moving from north to south and east to west in most instances) and their historical patterns of diffusion.

The first part covers phonological variation. For American English, Kretzschmar’s paper describes a baseline “Standard” variety, devoid of distinctly regional traces; this is followed by papers which focus upon the most distinctive regional varieties: New England (Nagy and Roberts), the staging cities of the East Coast and the urban dialects of the interior North, including the ongoing change known as the “Northern Cities Shift” (Gordon), the South (with Thomas documenting the richness of rural Southern pronunciations and Tillery and Bailey discussing ongoing changes in the wake of urbanization), and the West and Midwest (Gordon, again). Boberg covers Canadian English, and Clarke describes the Newfoundland dialects. Ethnic varieties of AmE include AAVE (Edwards), Gullah (Weldon), Cajun Vernacular English (Dubois and Horvath), and Chicano English (Santa Ana and Bailey). In the Caribbean, the varieties represented are the Bahamas (Childs and Wolfram), Jamaica (with Devonish and Harry describing both English and Creole), smaller islands of the Eastern Caribbean (Aceto), Barbados (Blake), Trinidad and Tobago (Youssef and James), and Suriname (Smith and Haabo).

The morphosyntax part also starts with a baseline paper, covering structural phenomena which occur widely in colloquial AmE (Murray and Simon). Regionally distinctive grammatical variation in North America has been investigated in a small number of salient locations, including the Appalachians, enclave communities in the Southeast (discussed by Wolfram), and Newfoundland (documented by Clarke). The primary topics of grammatical research have been ethnic varieties, most notably AAVE (its urban form, discussed by Wolfram; its historical evolution, described by Kautzsch; and the extant creole form of Gullah, studied by Mufwene), but also Chicano English. For the Caribbean, on the other hand, regional differences from one island or region to another are obvious enough to justify such an arrangement, so there are papers on the Bahamas (Reaser and Torbert), Jamaica (Patrick), eastern islands (Aceto), Trinidad and Tobago (James and Youssef), Suriname (Winford and Migge), as well as Central America with special emphasis on Belize (Escure). Coverage of Barbadian Creole (Bajan) and Guyanese Creole would have been desirable, but, regrettably, papers commissioned on these topics failed to materialize.

Every selection of this kind requires decisions and categorizations, of course; I trust that the decisions made reflect the directions and intensity of ongoing research activities. This applies in the few cases where the commissioned papers for phonology and grammar do not match, for instance: Investigations of Cajun English have taught us much about the dialect’s phonology but little about its grammar; conversely, an extensive debate on the emergence of AAVE has been concerned with grammar almost exclusively; and many writings on Caribbean creoles have discussed grammatical but not primarily phonological features (hence the coverage of Belize plus Central America, focussing on grammar only). Of course, other considerations also applied, including space restrictions and the amount of existing research documentation: a handbook survey like the present one requires a certain degree of comprehensiveness and systematicity of earlier investigations of specific varieties, which is not available in many cases. It would have been very interesting to include papers on native American or Asian forms of English, for instance, but publications and research on these dialects have been eclectic so far; a great many facts are either unknown or assumed to be largely similar to “mainstream” forms of AmE. Space constraints and the fact that our project set out to describe “major” varieties exclude strictly local dialects, like, for example, those spoken by the Texas Seminoles in Bracketville (Hancock 1980), on small islands like the Caymans (Washabaugh 1983), or in the city of Americana, Brazil (Montgomery and Melo 1990). The same applies to Falkland Islands English (Sudbury 2001) and, of geographically uncertain association with any continent, the dialect of Tristan da Cunha – well documented and interesting in the light of dialect contact (Schreier 2002, 2003) but spoken by less than three hundred people. Finally Hawai’i, even if politically a part of the US, is discussed in the Pacific (and Australian) part, in line with its geographical location.