Dictionary of American Regional English

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

Have the media and the mobility of the American population caused the "homogenization" of American English? Will we all talk alike within a few generations? The four published volumes of the Dictionary of American Regional English demonstrate that, while language change is inevitable over time, thousands of words, phrases, and pronunciations still vary from one part of our country to another. Regional distributions can be quite small (e.g., stuffie 'a stuffed quahog' in Rhode Island, strubbly 'disheveled' in the Pennsylvania German settlement area, or stubbleberry 'deadly nightshade' in North and South Dakota) or very large (demonstrated by the contrast between tennis shoe, which is widespread but least frequent in the Northeast, and sneaker, which is widespread but most frequent in the Northeast and North Central states). With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Joan Houston Hall and the staff of DARE will continue their work on Volume V of DARE (Sl-Z), which is projected for publication in 2009. The first four volumes of the Dictionary were published in 1985 (A-C), 1991 (D-H), 1996 (I-O), and 2002 (P-Sk) by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Like the Oxford English Dictionary, DARE provides historical treatment of its entries, illustrating the use of each word with quotations that demonstrate both chronological range and regional distribution. Unique to DARE is the inclusion of maps (adjusted to reflect population density rather than geographic area) that are based on an extensive program of fieldwork conducted in 1,002 communities across the United States between 1965 and 1970. Supplementing the fieldwork is a massive collection of written sources (including materials such as diaries, letters, newspapers, novels, folklore collections, and government reports) that document our language from the seventeenth century to the present. Work on the current volume is greatly enhanced by the recent availability of valuable digital resources. DARE materials (including audio recordings and special collections as well as the published volumes) have been widely used by teachers, linguists, sociolinguists, librarians, and lexicographers. They have also been used by forensic linguists (to profile crime suspects on the basis of language use), physicians (to understand the folk medical terms used by their patients), psychiatrists (to evaluate the results of standardized vocabulary tests that fail to recognize regional variation in their scoring sheets), and by journalists, researchers, historians, and playwrights. They are also used by readers who simply delight in the variety and creativity of our American English language.