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.
Two major milestones were reached during the full period of the grant: 1) the final print volume was published in January of 2013: Dictionary of American Regional English, Volume VI, Contrastive Maps, Index to Entry Labels, Questionnaire and Fieldwork Data. Joan Houston Hall, with Luanne von Schneidemesser. Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 2013; and 2) the digital version of the full dictionary was launched in December of 2013: www.daredictionary.com. Completion of the six-volume print edition was recognized by the American Library Association, which awarded DARE its 2013 Dartmouth Medal for "a reference work of outstanding quality and significance." The recent posting of the DARE Data Summary (all of the responses to all of the questions in the original fieldwork survey, 1965-70) makes this large corpus of American regional vocabulary freely available: http://dare.wisc.edu/survey-results. The full text of the Questionnaire is also posted, allowing researchers to replicate all or parts of the field method: http://dare.wisc.edu/sites/dare.wisc.edu/files/QRText.pdf. Excerpts from DARE’s collection of audio recordings may be heard in two locations: http://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/collections/AmerLangs (where there are 1,380 examples of the reading of "The Story of Arthur the Rat" by people from across the country); and http://csumc.wisc.edu/AmericanLanguages/index.htm (where there are 177 samples of regional speech from 30 states and the District of Columbia.) Articles about and references to the DARE project over the full period of the grant may be viewed at http://dare.news.wisc.edu/category/in-the-news/. DARE’s research continues to confirm the ongoing vitality and variability of American English dialects. While it is a common notion that our language is being ‘homogenized’ by the media and the mobility of the population, DARE shows that there are still thousands of words, phrases, pronunciations, and grammatical forms that are not standard throughout the country but vary by region, social group, or ethnic background of the speaker. Many of these terms are not found in any other dictionary. DARE is widely used by linguists, teachers, researchers, librarians, oral historians, folklorists, journalists, novelists, poets, and playwrights—those people who might be expected to use such a reference work. But it has also proved to be extremely useful to members of other professions (such as primary care physicians, psychiatrists, lawyers, detectives, and forensic linguists), who need to understand the folk and regional terms used by the people with whom they interact. In addition, DARE is treasured by those who simply love the creativity and variety of American English, amply illustrated by the quotations that accompany each entry.
