Dictionary of American Regional English

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The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE or Dictionary) is a record of American English as spoken in the United States, from its beginning up to the present. It differs from other dictionaries in that it does not record the standard language used throughout the country; instead, it contains regional and folk speech, those words, phrases, and pronunciations that vary from one part of the country to another, or that we learn from our families and friends rather than from our teachers and books. For DARE a "region" may be as small as a city or part of a city, or as large as most of the country, as long as the particular feature is not found in the standard language of the entire country.^[1]

The Dictionary is based both on face-to-face interviews with 2,777 people carried out in 1,002 communities across the country between 1965 and 1970, and on a large collection of print and (recently) electronic materials, such as diaries, letters, novels, histories, biographies, government documents, and newspapers.^[2] These materials are cited in individual entries to illustrate how the words have been used from the seventeenth century through the beginning of the twenty-first. The entries may include pronunciations, variant forms, etymologies, and statements about regional and social distributions of words and forms.

The first four volumes of DARE, published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (1985-2002, eds. Frederic G. Cassidy and Joan Houston Hall), cover the letters A-Sk. Volume V (Sl-Z) is projected to be completed in 2009 or 2010, if the project can maintain adequate funding. A sixth volume will follow with comprehensive background material (as more fully explained below) as will an electronic edition.

DARE is a record of the language of the American people, reflecting all the richness and diversity of our history and culture. It is used by teachers, librarians, researchers, physicians, forensic linguists, journalists, historians, and playwrights, as well as by readers who simply love language.

Contents 1 History 2 Features 2.1 Contents of volumes, maps, and labels 2.2 Informants 2.3 Questionnaire 2.4 Audiotape recordings 3 Funding 4 Project headquarters 5 References 5.1 Notes 5.2 General references 6 External links

[edit] History

In 1889, when Joseph Wright began editing the English Dialect Dictionary, a group of American philologists founded the American Dialect Society with the ultimate purpose of producing a similar work for the United States. Members of the Society began to collect material, much of which was published in the Society's journal Dialect Notes, but little was done toward compiling a dictionary recording nationwide usage until Frederic G. Cassidy was appointed Chief Editor in 1963.^[3] Cassidy had done fieldwork in Wisconsin for the Linguistic Atlas of the North Central States project and in Jamaica for his Dictionary of Jamaican English, and had also, with the assistance of Audrey Duckert, designed and administered an intensive mail-questionnaire survey of Wisconsin (the Wisconsin English Language Survey).^[4] Drawing on this experience, he and Duckert made plans for a nationwide, fieldworker-administered questionnaire that would provide a comprehensive foundation for the projected Dictionary.

The fieldwork, supported by a grant from the U.S. Office of Education, was carried out in the years 1965-70. About eighty fieldworkers (mostly graduate students, but also some professors) were trained in phonetic transcription and fieldwork techniques and sent to 1,002 carefully selected communities across the country. (The communities were chosen to reflect population density and to account for settlement history and immigration patterns.) Each fieldworker was required to find "informants," people willing to provide information about words, who were natives of their communities and who had lived there all, or almost all, their lives. The informants were then asked to answer the questions in the DARE questionnaire. In many communities more than one person contributed answers, so the total number of informants, 2,777, is much larger than the number of communities.^[5]

While the fieldworkers were interviewing people across the country, Cassidy and others in Madison organized an extensive volunteer reading program. Printed materials of all kinds containing regional speech were chosen and sent to selected volunteers, who took quotations. These resources included historical and contemporary newspapers, diaries, letters, histories, biographies, novels, and government documents. A number of important unpublished collections of dialect materials were also donated to DARE to be used in documenting the Dictionary entries.^[6]

As the fieldworkers sent their questionnaires back to Madison, the approximately 2.3 million answers to the questions were keypunched, and software was written to create a question-by-question tabulation of responses and an index to those responses. In addition, programs were written that allowed the interactive creation of maps showing where the responses were found and the production of statistical tables itemizing the age, sex, race, education level, and community type for each person who gave a particular response. These tools allow the DARE editors to apply regional labels to entries based on where words were collected in the fieldwork project and to use social labels that describe the people who use those words.^[7]

In 1974 Cassidy contracted with Harvard University Press to publish the Dictionary, and editing began in earnest in 1975. By 1980 it was clear that the idea of writing and publishing DARE as a single unit was impossible; early estimates of the time it would take to write and revise entries had been overly optimistic. Following the tradition of other historical dictionaries such as the Oxford English Dictionary, DARE decided to publish each volume as it was ready. Because Cassidy had contracted to supply the text of the Dictionary on magnetic tape fully coded for typesetting, with camera-ready maps, a production department had to be set up. A system was devised for coding the many specifications for format, type size and style, and special characters. Procedures were worked out for the meticulous checking and correcting of text that would be required.

[edit] Features

[edit] Contents of volumes, maps, and labels

The four published volumes contain approximately 50,000 headwords and senses in 4,019 pages. There are 2,303 computer-generated distribution maps included in the text, showing where the words were found during the fieldwork.^[8] The first volume also includes 156 pages of introductory matter, with an extensive introduction, an explanation of DARE's regions and maps, an essay on how language changes, a guide to pronunciation, the text of the questionnaire, and a list of informants (showing where and when they were interviewed, the community type, the person's age, sex, race, occupation, amount of formal education, and whether the person made an audiotape).

Four volumes of the Dictionary have been published by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Volume I (1985) contains detailed introductory material, plus the letters A-C; Volume II (1991) covers the letters D-H; Volume III (1996) contains I-O; and Volume IV (2002) includes P-Sk. Starting with Volume IV, digital libraries provided valuable resources for expanding the historical coverage of the entries. Volume V, covering the letters Sl-Z, is anticipated in 2009 or 2010, if the project can maintain adequate funding. A sixth volume will follow shortly thereafter. It will contain the bibliography; a cumulative index to all of the regional, etymological, and usage labels used in DARE; and sets of contrastive maps showing the geographic distributions of such regional synonyms as hero, hoagie, sub, grinder, Cuban, and torpedo (for a sandwich in a long bun). An electronic edition of DARE will follow.

An unusual feature of DARE is its inclusion of maps showing where words were found during the nationwide survey. The maps are adjusted to reflect population density rather than geographic area, so they look a bit strange at first, but one learns to "read" them quickly. Whenever possible, the editors apply regional labels to the entries, based both on the maps from the field survey and on the written citations. (There are nearly forty regional labels listed in the front matter to DARE, but the most frequently used in the text of the Dictionary tend to be for the "South," "South Midland," "North," "New England," "Northeast," "West," "Gulf States," and "southern Appalachians.") Since language is not restricted by state or regional boundaries, the labels often include qualifying language, such as "chiefly N[ew] Eng[land]," or "scattered, but most freq[uent] S[ou]th, S[outh] Midl[and]." If the evidence from the fieldwork shows that a term is used disproportionately frequently by a particular social group (based on age, sex, race, amount of education, or community type), a "social" label such as "old-fash[ioned]," "chiefly among women," or "esp[ecially] freq[uent] among Black speakers" will also be applied.^[9]

[edit] Informants

Some 2,777 people in 1,002 American communities served as DARE informants by answering all or part of the DARE questionnaire. Each person was a native of the selected community and had lived there all (or almost all) his or her life. The "List of Informants" in the front matter to Volume I of DARE includes the following details for each participant: informant code (a state abbreviation and a number, e.g., AL001 for the first informant interviewed in Alabama); community name; community type (urban, large city, small city, village, rural); age group (60 or older=old, 40-59=middle-aged, 18-39=young); year of birth; year of interview; education level (unknown; less than grade five; at least grade five; at least two years of high school; at least two years of college or vocational school); occupation; sex; race; and whether the informant made an audiotape recording. At the end of the "List of Informants" is a supplementary list of people who made audiotape recordings but who did not answer any parts of the questionnaire.

Fieldworkers were asked to weight their selection of informants toward older people in an effort to collect words for objects and practices that were going out of use. As a result, 66% of the DARE informants were over 60 when interviewed between 1965 and 1970; 24% were middle-aged; and 10% were young. Knowing the proportion of informants from each age group who gave a particular response and contrasting that to the proportion of informants from each age group who answered that particular question allows DARE editors to detect which words are becoming old-fashioned and which are coming into greater use.^[10]

[edit] Questionnaire

The DARE questionnaire included a total of 1,847 questions. (Some that proved not to be fruitful in the early interviews were dropped, with others being added in their place.) The questionnaire aimed to elicit responses about as many as possible of the activities of our daily lives in America. It includes 41 sections, starting with the neutral subjects of time and weather and moving to more personal subjects such as religion and health. Also included are the questions used in the early questionnaire only. The text of each question is included in the front matter to Volume I, and the quotations in the text of the Dictionary usually include full or abbreviated versions of each question; in cases where only the question number is cited, a reader can go to the front matter to see the text. The categories are listed below:

• Time
• Weather
• Topography
• Houses
• Furniture
• Utensils
• Dishes
• Foods
• Vegetables and Fruit
• Domestic Animals
• Farm Animals
• Farming
• Farm Buildings
• Vehicles and Transportation
• Boats and Sailing
• Fishing, Hunting, Wildlife
• Birds
• Insects
• Wildflowers, Weeds
• Trees, Bushes, etc.
• Buying and Selling, Money
• Honesty and Dishonesty
• Clothing, Men's and Women's
• Parts of the Body
• Physical Actions
• Family Relationships
• Courtship, Marriage, Childbearing
• Health and Disease
• Religion and Beliefs
• Tobacco, Liquor
• Children's Games
• Entertainments and Celebrations
• Emotional States and Attitudes
• Types and Attitudes of People
• Relationships among People
• Schoolgoing, Mental Actions
• Manner of Action or Being
• Size, Quantity and Number
• Position
• Exclamations
• Verbs Forms (these are scattered throughout the questionnaire)

[edit] Audiotape recordings

In addition to answering questions in the DARE questionnaire, informants were invited to make audiotape recordings in which they both read a set passage and conversed informally about any topic of their choice. The use of the reading passage, a contrived story called "Arthur the Rat" that was designed to elicit all significant pronunciation variants in American English, allows comparison of sounds in the same context from places all across the country. The use of free conversation invites the introduction of topics not covered in the questionnaire, resulting in a corpus of informal speech that can be contrasted to the formal style of the reading passage and that also provides an extremely valuable oral history of mid-twentieth-century America.

In all, 1,843 DARE informants agreed to make audiotape recordings. These people are itemized in the "List of Informants" in the front matter to Volume I of DARE, in the last column, marked "Audiotape."

In an ongoing project with the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures, and the University of Wisconsin Digital Collection Center, DARE is making its collection of readings of "Arthur the Rat" available for listeners. (This collaborative project was funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services.) Examples have been posted at "American Languages: Our Nation's Many Voices Online" (http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/AmerLangs/About.shtml). (Use the "Guided Search" option, enter "Arthur the Rat" as a phrase in "Any Field," and enter a state name in the "Place/Time" field to hear examples from a particular state.) In addition, samples of free conversation from the DARE audiotapes will also be posted.

[edit] Funding

DARE is supported financially by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, private foundations, and many individuals. The University of Wisconsin-Madison also provides some assistance, particularly in the form of funding for graduate assistants.

[edit] Project headquarters

The DARE offices are located in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Staff members may be contacted at 6125 Helen White Hall, 600 North Park Street, Madison WI 53706; by telephone at (608) 263-3810; by e-mail at lvonschn@wisc.edu.

[edit] References

[edit] Notes

[edit] General references

[edit] External links

Dictionary of American Regional English

"American Languages: Our Nation's Many Voices Online"

"Wisconsin Englishes," which includes a podcast about DARE

"Wordsmith Chat"