The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) is a record of regional variations within American English, published in five volumes from 1985 to 2012 and based on data mostly collected in the 1960s. It differs from other dictionaries in that it does not document 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 are learned from family and friends rather than from teachers and books. For DARE, a "region" may be as small as a city or part of a city, or as large as most (but not all) of the country. Humanities magazine has described it as "a bold synthesis of linguistic atlas and historical dictionary", and William Safire called it "the most exciting new linguistic project in the twentieth century".
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, including diaries, letters, novels, histories, biographies, government documents, and newspapers.Ed. Frederic G. Cassidy. Dictionary of American Regional English, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Volume I, 1985, p. xx. These sources are cited in individual entries to illustrate how the words have been used from the 17th century through the beginning of the 21st century. Entries may include pronunciations, variant forms, etymologies, and statements about regional and social distributions of words and forms.
Five volumes of text were published by Harvard University Press between 1985 and 2012: Volume I (A–C), with Frederic G. Cassidy serving as Chief Editor, appeared in 1985; Volume II (D–H), edited by Cassidy and Associate Editor Joan Houston Hall, was published in 1991; Volume III (I–O), by Cassidy and Hall, came out in 1996; Volume IV (P–Sk), by Hall, who succeeded Cassidy as Chief Editor upon his death, appeared in 2002; and Volume V (Sl–Z), with Hall as editor, finished the set in 2012. A sixth volume, subtitled "Contrastive Maps, Index to Entry Labels, Questionnaire, and Fieldwork Data," edited by Hall with Luanne von Schneidemesser serving as Senior Editor, was published early in 2013. Late that same year, the digital version was launched.
History In 1889, when Joseph Wright began editing the English Dialect Dictionary (EDD), 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 1962.Ed. Frederic G. Cassidy. Dictionary of American Regional English, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Volume I, 1985, p. xii. 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. With the assistance of Audrey Duckert, he had also designed and administered an intensive mail-questionnaire survey of Wisconsin (the Wisconsin English Language Survey). 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 Office of Education, was conducted during 1965–70. About eighty fieldworkers (mostly graduate students, but also some professors) were trained in phonetic transcription and fieldwork techniques; they were then sent to 1,002 carefully selected communities across the country, chosen to reflect population density and to account for settlement history and immigration patterns.Ed. Frederic G. Cassidy. Dictionary of American Regional English, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Volume I, 1985. pp. xii-xiii. 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.Hall, Joan Houston. "The Dictionary of American Regional English." Language in the USA: Perspectives for the 21st Century. Eds. Edward Finegan, John Rickford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 95.
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 were selected and sent to volunteers, who read them and identified regional words in context. 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 for use in documenting the Dictionary entries.Ed. Frederic G. Cassidy. Dictionary of American Regional English, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Volume I, 1985, p. xv.
As the fieldworkers sent their questionnaires back to Madison, the approximately 2.3 million answers were keypunched, and software was written to create a question-by-question tabulation of responses as well as an index.Ed. Frederic G. Cassidy. Dictionary of American Regional English, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Volume I, 1985. pp. xiv–xv. 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 DARE editors to apply regional labels to entries based on where words were collected in the fieldwork project and to use social labels describing individuals who use those words.Ed. Frederic G. Cassidy. Dictionary of American Regional English, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Volume I, 1985, p. xx.
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 (OED), 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.
Features
Contents of volumes, maps, and labels
Six print volumes of the DARE have been published by Harvard University's Belknap 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; Volume IV (2002) includes P-Sk; and Volume V (2012) covers Sl-Z as well as a bibliography of nearly 13,000 sources cited in the five volumes. (Starting with Volume IV, digital libraries provided many valuable resources for expanding the historical coverage of the entries.) Volume VI (2013) includes more than 1,700 maps showing contrastive distributions of regional synonyms (such as hero, hoagie, grinder, sub, torpedo, poor boy, and Cuban, all of which describe a sandwich in a long bun), as well as social distributions of regional terms (by age, sex, race, education, and community type). It also includes an index to the regional, usage, and etymological labels used in the five text volumes; the text of the DARE Questionnaire; the responses by all DARE informants to 430 of the questions asked in the original fieldwork. The digital version was launched in December 2013.
The five text volumes contain approximately 60,000 headwords and senses in 5,544 pages. There are nearly 3,000 computer-generated distribution maps included in the text, showing where the words were found during the fieldwork. 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, 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, education, and whether the person made an audiotape).
An unusual feature of DARE is its inclusion of maps showing where words were found during the nationwide fieldwork. 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 Volume I, but the most frequently used in the text of the Dictionary tend to be from 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, 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.
The digital version is available by subscription (for libraries or individuals) and perpetual access (libraries). In addition to the Basic Search, which yields both headwords and variant forms, an Advanced Search function allows Boolean searches of full text, headwords, parts of speech, variant forms, definitions, etymologies, quotations, and regional or social labels. Quotations link directly to specific entries in the bibliography, where users can link to every other quotation from that particular source.
The digital DARE also offers features based on the original fieldwork survey:
Users can click on a state on the DARE map, or select from any of 41 regions in a pull-down menu (e.g., Appalachians, Desert Southwest, Gulf States, North Central, South Atlantic), to get to a link to "View all entries for [that state or region]." Because language does not adhere to state or regional boundaries, the user is also guided to a list of larger regions of which the state or region is a part, with links to searches for additional words characteristic of that area.