The Dictionary of American Regional English, the recently completed landmark project we profiled recently, is based largely on research by a team of fieldworkers who fanned out across the country some 50 years ago in vans called Word Wagons, querying Americans about their ways of talking about kitchen implements, farm animals, bodily ailments, misbehaving children, stupid neighbors and more.
The linguists of the future, however, may not have to go to such literal lengths to find geographical variations in speech.