American Dictionaries and Variant Pronunciations

Abstract

AT THE request of the editors of American Speech, I have expanded some private comments on Professor G. P. Wilson's 'American Dictionaries and Pronunciation'1 into the present article. Though I agree with some of Professor Wilson's statements of fact, opinion, and policy, I believe that others require further discussion. The difficulty of compiling and assessing the facts of American pronunciation is generally known, to the editors of dictionaries2 as well as to the rest of us. Consider, first, the time required for collecting and editing the New England material for the Linguistic Atlas. Consider, also, the familiar statements that 'everybody' pronounces such and such a word in such and such a way, and the ease with which we can build generalizations on our own pronunciations and our own dialects. It is as natural, for instance, for a central New Yorker to regard [:rind3] as the normal pronunciation of orange as for a North Carolinian to prefer [arindl]. For more objective judgments, however, some of us have found it useful to collect and catalogue a record of pronunciations used by large numbers of people. My own record, started in 1932, shows the following instances of [a], [D], and [:] for those parts of the United States in which I have heard orange pronounced frequently enough to warrant an estimate of regional preference: