There's a sound change that a lot of people have in the cities near the Great Bodies of Water, where the sound in "cat" and "back" becomes very high, the sound in "hot" and "lock" becomes very front, and a few other sounds change too. In the state I was looking at, it turns out that a lot of people have this sound change even as far away as the right edge (so to speak) of the state—but the "cat" sound only becomes high in cities that were founded by people from the state that's further down and to the right, along the Sound. I think the reason the "cat" sound doesn't become that high in cities that were founded by people from other places might be because there's a bigger space between the "cat" sound and the "can't" sound in those cities, and the "can't" sound is already very high. This means that who founded which cities can still be important to how people talk even hundreds of years later.
Also, I found out that people in most parts of the state have different sounds in "hot" and "lock" on the one hand and in "caught" and "talk" on the other hand. The only part of the state where most people have the same sound in the middle of all of those words is the far top right corner. However, it looks like changes are happening that will end up with people saying them the same in most of the rest of the state; for younger people, the "hot" sound is a lot further back than it is for older people. I didn't expect that. But it shows that when two different sounds come to be said the same way in one area, it really is easy for that change to be picked up by people in other areas. Having that sound change I mentioned above, where "hot" became more front, doesn't stop them from picking up this other change; they just started moving "hot" back again.
Finally, I listened to how people say the long word that you use to talk about the kind of school that children between the ages of about five and ten go to. It turns out that in most of the state, except for the part near that one big city, they make the second-to-last bit of that word much stronger than people in most places (though the middle bit is still the strongest). That's kind of weird.
(see http://splasho.com/upgoer5)
