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6 - The Dictionary of American Regional English
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- By Joan Houston Hall, University of Wisconsin, Madison
- Edited by Edward Finegan, University of Southern California, John R. Rickford, Stanford University, California
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- Book:
- Language in the USA
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 24 June 2004, pp 92-112
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Summary
Editors' introduction
This chapter provides an introduction to the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) by its Chief Editor, who has been associated with the project since 1975. Associate Editor for many years, Joan Houston Hall became Chief Editor of DARE in 2000, when Frederic G. Cassidy, the founding Director and Chief Editor, died. DARE is one of the most comprehensive and accessible public resources on variation in American dialects, drawing on fieldwork conducted between 1965 and 1970 in more than 1,000 communities across the USA, and supplemented by the evidence of thousands of literary and other sources. Four of a projected six volumes have appeared to date, with completed entries running through Sk-.
The chapter describes several aspects of the fieldwork for DARE, including its extensive questionnaire (with 1,687 to 1,847 questions), and the way in which responses were electronically tabulated and analyzed, with the results indicated on DARE maps whose dimensions were poportional to the population density in each state. This chapter complements chapter 3 on regional dialects in that it shows how the 1940s distribution of variant words (like darning needle and other words for ‘dragonfly’ discussed in chapter 3) had spread west and otherwise changed (or not) in the intervening years. One of the conclusions of this chapter is similar to that of William Labov (cited in chapter 3): despite greater mobility and the influence of mass media, American English has not become homogenized, but shows striking regional variation.
5 - AMERICANISMS
- Edited by John Algeo, University of Georgia
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- Book:
- The Cambridge History of the English Language
- Published online:
- 28 March 2008
- Print publication:
- 07 February 2001, pp 184-218
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Summary
Introduction
The use of English as the de facto, though unofficial, language of the United States is a natural consequence of history. English, the language of the settlements from which the present nation grew, continued at first to be used just as it was in the motherland. But a gradual loss of contact between that motherland and the colonies and, more important, the natural growth of the language in the new land from the experiences of its speakers there produced many differences, which the Revolution and new nationhood were greatly to increase. So in four centuries a new growth has developed on the “family tree.” The aptness of the arboreal metaphor for the English language, with British English as the trunk from which American, Canadian, Australian, South African, and other branches have grown, has been questioned by John Algeo (“What Is a Briticism?” 1992b), who rightly points out that until the development of American English, there was no “British” English against which to compare it, there was simply English. That is, British English, as surely as American English, was born in 1776. Algeo goes on to say:
A language is not a landscape, a tree, a river, or any of the other
metaphors we use as concrete visualizations of what a language really is
– an abstract system of relationships contained in the minds of people
and expressed by sounds and marks. We must remind ourselves that
when two “branches” of a language grow apart, they are not
categorically distinct like the branches of a real tree, but continue to
exchange influences and may grow back together.
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