Emory University's Lee Pederson directed and brought to completion the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States, a cumulative study of the language patterns for eight states of the interior South, from Georgia west to Texas. From the Gulf States and Beyond demonstrates how LAGS material can be used to address issues important to socio-linguists, dialectologists, folklorists, and others about the speech and culture of the 20th-century South. In addition to the authors' own insights, these essays show how the LAGS project has created an enormous treasury for future research. The in-depth introduction to LAGS and the essays analyzing linguistic-atlas data make this volume an essential text for scholars analyzing LAGS and other linguistic-atlas data, as well as for linguistics courses in modern areal dialectology.