Dictionary of American Regional English

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

Is American English being "homogenized" by the media and the mobility of the American public? Will we all use the same vocabulary within a few generations? The four published volumes of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) demonstrate that, while language inevitably changes with the passage of time, there are still thousands of words, phrases, and pronunciations that vary from one part of our country to another. Regional distributions can be quite small (e.g., "tump," meaning "a hummock" in the Chesapeake Bay area, or "tough jack," denoting a kind of molasses candy in Kentucky); or they can be very large (e.g., "teeter-totter," which is found across most of the North and West, and "see-saw," the complementary term used in much of the South and Midland). With partial support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Joan Houston Hall and the staff of DARE will complete Volume V (Sl-Z), scheduled for publication in 2010 by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Volume I (A-C) was published in 1985, followed by Volume II (D-H) in 1996, Volume III (I-O) in 1996, and Volume IV (P-Sk) in 2002. The DARE staff will also work on Volume VI, which will include a comprehensive bibliography, an index to the regional, usage, and etymological labels used in the five volumes of DARE text, and a collection of contrastive maps showing the regional distributions of lexical sets (e.g., "hero," "hoagie," "sub," "grinder," "torpedo," "Cuban," "wedge," etc., to describe a sandwich in a long bun). They will also continue with the preparatory work for an electronic edition. DARE materials (including audio recordings as well as the published volumes) have been widely used by teachers, linguists, librarians, lexicographers, and historians. They have also proved to be highly useful to forensic linguists (who identify suspects based on their use of regional vocabulary); to physicians (who need to understand the folk terms used by their patients to describe their ailments); to psychiatrists (who use standardized vocabulary tests with answer keys that often fail to recognize regional variation); and journalists, researchers, dialect coaches, and playwrights. The "Dictionary of American Regional English" is also enjoyed by readers who delight in the variety and creativity of our American English language. DARE has been described in the New York Times as "the most exciting linguistic project going on in the United States" and "one of the glories of contemporary American scholarship."