Some Preliminary Findings from Dare

T HERE ARE THREE TOPICS to be discussed in this paper: an outline of the nature and progress of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE); some conclusions based on data taken from the files of DARE; and some suggestions for areas of research for which the dictionary files can provide valuable data.’ The Dictionary of American Regional English, directed by Frederic G. Cassidy, is an American Dialect Society project funded jointly by the United States Office of Education and the University of Wisconsin for the period 1965-70 and jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Wisconsin from 1970 to the present. The primary purpose of DARE is to collect, edit, and publish information about lexical items of American English which have regionally limited distribution. The idea of a dictionary of regional terms in the United States officially dates from 1889, when the American Dialect Society was founded, with the study of localisms as its primary purpose. A similar undertaking by the English Dialect Society (culminating in Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary) provided the model for the American endeavors. For many years lexical items were collected in a somewhat random fashion, with the material intended to become the corpus for compiling a dictionary of American regionalisms. Meanwhile, beginning in the late 1920s, another approach to the study of American English developed, embodying different assumptions and methodologies from those of the dialect societies. Utilizing linguistically trained fieldworkers, planned questionnaires, and careful choice of communities and informants, the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada set about systematically collecting not only lexical materials but phonological and grammatical materials as well. The findings and techniques of the Atlas had great influence on the work of scholars in the American Dialect Society. Therefore, when Cassidy was appointed director of the Dictionary of American Regional English project, the position was filled by one who was not only an experienced lexicographer and member of the American Dialect Society, but also a fieldworker for the Atlas.