We examine vowel formant variation in several natural speech corpora of North American and United Kingdom English. Labov (1994) has suggested that a speaker’s tokens of a particular vowel will be aligned along an axis coinciding with the direction that vowel is shifting diachronically in a given community. We compare the direction of change in apparent time with the axis of intraspeaker variation, for several vowel phonemes, in order to test this assertion. This is an opportunity to use Polyglot (McAuliffe et al. 2017, Figure 1) for large-scale vowel analysis. This is phase one of a project which will measure dozens of English corpora from both sides of the Atlantic.<br/
