The Dictionary of American Regional English and the idea of dialect

Michael Adams
Indiana University Bloomington

Though originally conceived as an American dialect dictionary, on the model of the English Dialect Dictionary, the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) is significantly different from its predecessors, as well as theoretically and technically distinct from the dictionary the American Dialect Society thought its members would compile. DARE marks the transition from traditional dialectology to a more fluid approach to documenting and mapping variation in the second half of the twentieth century. Frederic G. Cassidy, who planned DARE and was its original chief editor, began to doubt the usefulness of the concept dialect in the 1940s, preferring to think of variation as regional, as reflected in the dictionary’s title. Regional variation resists isoglosses and reified dialect areas and instead distributes usage differently word by word, wherever the evidence leads, outliers and all. Cassidy’s innovations represent reactions both to his reading of William Dwight Whitney on dialect and to treatment of dialect in Leonard Bloomfield’s Language (1933). Cassidy’s new way of analyzing and representing variation converged with those developed in American sociolinguistics of the same period.

Publication history

Date received: 26 November 2024

Date accepted: 5 February 2025

Published online: 14 March 2025

Table of contents

The Dictionary of American Regional English (1985–2013; henceforth, DARE) is a bold synthesis of historical lexicography and linguistic geography (Adams 2011). Its six volumes contain a wealth of information about regional speech in the United States. Besides the expected pronunciation, definition, and etymology, many entries include quotations illustrating use and data from the DARE field survey conducted in the 1960s. Volume 5 includes column upon column of page upon page of acknowledgments, assuring us that the dictionary is not merely of the people and for the people, but also by the people — its object, method, makers, and audience are all hearteningly democratic (Adams 2013). Maps of the survey results for lexical items often accompany the relevant entry but they have a different shape from the usual political map, because the states are sized according to population at the time, rather than geographical area, and this adaptation affects the way one considers place, cultural space, and boundaries represented as isoglosses in linguistic atlases, but not on the DARE maps (see the online DARE Maps for examples).

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