On Collecting American Dialect

Abstract

THE American Dialect Society was founded in 1889 by leading language 1 scholars of that dayl with the purpose of doing fcxr the English language of North America what had been done for the British Isles in Wright's great English Dialect Dictionary. The new Society intended to collect materials wherever possible until there should be enough at hand so that the dictionary might be compiled. Publication of word lists and special studies was accordingly begun in Dialect Notes, and continued for many years. Almost sixty years later, however, the Society is not yet ready to make the dictionary. As recently as 1930 an assessment of the situation was made by Professor Percy W. Long, then secretary of the Society. Professor Long frankly admitted that the time had not yet come for the editing of the dictionary.2 There were, he pointed out, about thirty thousand entries in the publications of the Society, from which 'a dictionary of a kind could be prepared,' but such a work would not parallel the English Dialect Dictionary. It was still necessary, he felt, to compile a large stock of illustrative quotations, special glossaries of regional dialects, and to have a group of regional correspondents who could be consulted on points at issue during the process of editing. Professor Long concluded that 'to complete the Dictionary in advance of special work which should be available for it, would certainly be unwise.' Meantime, with advances in linguistic method and in lexicography, it has become evident that even the EngZish Dialect Dictionary leaves something to be desired as a model. The Oxford English Dictionary, the Dictionary of American English, and the Linguistic Atlas of New England have set more exacting standards for a dialect dictionary worth doing than were perhaps fully conceived of when the Society was founded. In short, we are still far from ready to think of editing a really full American dialect dictionary. Dr. Harold Wentworth's helpful compilation3 is the result of an understandable impatience, on one man's part, to see something of this kind in print after so many years; but that author knows his business to<} well to claim that his book has fully covered the Seld.