The <i>Dictionary of American Regional English</i> and the idea of dialect

Summary 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.