Electronic Dictionary of American Regional English: Infrastructure for the Study of Linguistic Variation

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

Language inevitably changes with the passage of time; there are thousands of words, phrases, and pronunciations that vary from one part of our country to another. The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), published in five volumes by Harvard University Press, 1985-2012, shows the history of regional words in American English, including their chronological range and geographic and social distributions. This language resource has been widely used by teachers, linguists, librarians, lexicographers, and historians. DARE dialect materials have proved useful to forensic linguists (who identify suspects based on their use of regional words); to physicians (who need to understand folk terms used by their patients); to psychiatrists (who use standardized vocabulary tests that often fail to recognize regional variation); and to journalists, researchers, dialect coaches, and playwrights. With partial support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Joan Houston Hall and the staff of DARE will produce an electronic version of this language resource, while adding new resources such as contrastive maps and audio recordings. eDARE will make available resources that have not previously been accessible, allow users to search the dictionary in innovative ways not possible with the print version, and make regular updates more practical. A volume of supplementary materials will be published, including 1) contrastive maps showing, for example, the geographic regions where various terms are used; 2) an index of the regional, usage, and etymological labels used in the five volumes of text; 3) lists of all the responses to 317 of the questions asked in the 1965-70 fieldwork project. Audio samples from DARE's original fieldwork recordings will be made available on two web sites. By creating a fully searchable database, this project contributes to the infrastructure of American dialectology, lexicography and sociolinguistics.