The Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS) Project is a survey of regional and social dialects in eight southern states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Texas. This manual has been prepared both for those who will conduct the research and for those who are interested in the aims and methods of the LAGS Project. Four introductory essays outline the project and the relationships of the research to general linguistics, American dialectology, folklore study, and the teaching of English. These are followed by the complete text of the work sheets with the interviewing techniques used previously by researchers, maps, lists of countries, the index to the work sheets, vowel and consonant tables, and a personal data sheet. (JM)