Is American English being "homogenized" by the media and the mobility of the American public? Will we all talk alike within a few generations? The four published volumes of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) demonstrate that, while language change is inevitable over time, thousands of words, phrases, and pronunciations still vary from one part of our country to another. Regional distributions can be quite small (e.g., "tump" meaning 'a hummock' in the Chesapeake Bay area, or "tough jack" 'a kind of molasses candy' in Kentucky); or they can be very large (e.g., "teeter-totter," which is found across most of the North and West, and "see-saw," which is common throughout the South and Midland). With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Joan Houston Hall and the staff of DARE will continue work on Volume V of DARE (Sl-Z), projected for publication in 2009. The first four volumes of the Dictionary were published in 1985 (A-C), 1991 (D-H), 1996 (I-O), and 2002 (P-Sk) by the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
DARE materials (including audio recordings as well as the published volumes) have been widely used by teachers, linguists, historians, librarians, and lexicographers. They have also been used by forensic linguists, physicians (to understand folk medical terms used by their patients), psychiatrists (to evaluate regional synonyms not recognized in standardized tests), and by journalists, researchers, dialect coaches, and playwrights. They are also used by readers who simply delight in the variety and creativity of our American English language. DARE has been described in the New York Times as "the most exciting linguistic project going on in the United States" and "one of the glories of contemporary American scholarship."
