Back in 1962, Fred Cassidy was named chief editor of an American dialect dictionary project.
He envisioned the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) would be complete by 1976; the first volume was not published until 1985, and covered A to C. The final volume, V, is published in March.
DARE stands alone as the most exhaustive record of regional speech in America, each page bursting with geographically nuanced information about the country’s diverse lexicon. It’s a joy to page through: Where else would you learn that snuff for chewing is called snoose in the Pacific Northwest, and also goes by the name Swedish condition powder?
Though DARE is finally done, with Volume V officially publishing in March, the varied language of Americans marches on. How can DARE avoid becoming a relic? It’s a substantial challenge of capturing something as dynamic as American dialects: No single historical snapshot can really do it justice, especially one trapped on the printed page.
To address these concerns, Harvard University Press is planning an online interactive edition of the dictionary, slated to launch next year. And if Hall has her way, the work of DARE will continue, with a return to the communities that the fieldworkers visited with their Word Wagons. (Source: Boston.com)
DARE is an incredible accomplishment, let’s hope the Harvard University Press project adds to it.
I lived on the Jersey Shore for a summer working at an ice cream store, so I know the accent pretty well. Here’s a great video on how New Jersey dialects are changing:
The New York accent is familiar to us through movies and television. But many believe it is in decline, and Heather Quinlan is determined to record its variety.
Quinlan is a native New Yorker and filmmaker and is recording the accent for her first documentary, If These Knishes Could Talk. Many believe the accent evolved from Irish, Jewish and Italian immigrants, but in fact London is where the accent originates, according to sociolinguist Prof William Labov.
“Back about 1800 all the major cities in the eastern seaboard of the United States began to copy the British pronunciation of not pronouncing the final ‘r’ as a consonant, saying ‘caah’ instead of ‘car’.
“But New York didn’t imitate London directly, there were quite a few changes in the vowels so that the New York City dialect began to go in its own direction still following that London pattern of r-less speech.”
Another giveaway that someone is a New Yorker is their broadening of the vowel “a”, saying “awe-ful” instead of “awful”, for example. (Source: BBC News)
With New York City constantly changing, the accent is evolving too. According to Prof Labov, it’s because of the decline in white mainstream speakers and the growth of Hispanic and African-American populations, which have their own dialect. Quinlan is not ready to abandon the old accent though:
“People think New Yorkers are gruff and demanding and short-tempered and that’s kind of how they feel about the accent, but once you get a bit underneath you realize that there is a lot of chutzpah and heart and character and that’s what I want to try and come through.”
Someone kindly pointed me to this post on the Language Log blog, about a survey on North American English Dialects that is being conducted by (I think) researchers at Yale University.
We are doing research on different accents in American English. We know that Americans and Canadians have a great deal in common in the way they speak, but there are also differences. In order to study the ways that North American accents differ, we have put together a survey of common words, and we’d like you to participate!
To participate, you need to have grown up speaking English in America or Canada, and some computer equipment as the recordings are being made over the internet. The survey asks for some basic demographic information but participants are anonymous.
