Dictionary of American Regional English

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Joan Houston Hall and the staff of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) will continue their documentation of regional and social variation in American English. Specifically, they will concentrate on entries to appear in Volume V of DARE (Sl-Z), which is projected for publication in 2008. Three volumes of DARE have been published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (A-C, 1985; D-H, 1991; I-O 1996), and the fourth (P-Sk) is expected late in 2002. DARE is based both on an extensive program of fieldwork conducted in 1,002 communities across the United States between 1965 and 1970, and on a massive collection of written sources (including materials such as diaries, letters, newspapers, novels, folklore collections, government documents, and electronic collections) that document our language from the seventeenth century to the present. The Dictionary of American Regional English provides full historical treatment of the words, phrases, and pronunciations that vary from one part of our country to another or that characterize the usage of one social group or another. Unique to DARE is the inclusion of maps (adjusted to reflect population density rather than geographic area) showing distributions of words. Although language change is inevitable over time, and though some have predicted the "homogenization" of American English, DARE makes it clear that regional words and phrases are still very much alive in our language. The published volumes of DARE and the tape recordings and other materials collected for the project have been used by linguists, sociolinguists, and other lexicographers. They have also proved useful to forensic linguists, who have used them to help identify crime suspects; to physicians, who may not be familiar with the folk terms for ailments and diseases; and to psychiatrists and gerontologists who often use diagnostic tools that ask patients to give the names of everyday objects - in such cases, not knowing that there are regional terms for the objects can skew test scores, resulting in misdiagnoses. The DARE volumes are also widely used by teachers, researchers, librarians, journalists, historians, and playwrights, as well as by readers who simply delight in our American English language.