Pioneers in the field were George Hempl, Charles H.Grandgent, and O.F.Emerson.
62
Interest in American dialects led to the formation in 1889 of the American Dialect
Society, which published a journal called
Dialect Notes
. The society,
reorganized, now
issues
PADS (Publications of the American Dialect Society)
. In 1919 H.L.Mencken
published a book of nearly 500 pages which he called
The American Language
. This
contained a large amount of entertaining and valuable material presented in a popular
way and had the effect of stimulating a wider interest in the subject. It has gone through
four editions, and subsequently two supplements were published (1945 and 1948), both
larger than the original book.
63
A few years later a magazine called
American Speech
was
launched, in which popular and technical discussions appear as evidence of the twofold
appeal that American English has for the people of this country. In 1925 George P.Krapp
published the first comprehensive and scholarly treatment of American English in his
two-volume work
The English Language in America
. This is the
work of a philologist but
is not without its attraction for the lay person. Subsequently there have been prepared and
published at the University of Chicago
A Dictionary of American English on Historical
Principles,
edited by Sir William Craigie and James R. Hulbert (4 vols., Chicago, 1938–
1944), and A
Dictionary of Americanisms, on Historical Principles,
the work of Mitford
M.Mathews (2 vols., Chicago, 1951). An American dictionary comparable with Joseph
Wright’s
English Dialect Dictionary
has been a goal of the American Dialect Society
since its founding. The
Dictionary of American Regional English
(1985–) under the
editorship of Frederic G.Cassidy achieves that goal and provides an invaluable account of
American dialects as they were recorded between 1965 and 1970. The five-year period of
fieldwork in more than one thousand communities in all fifty states provides an almost
instantaneous picture in comparison with the time required for most dialect surveys.
Much longer in the making and in many ways the most important of the undertakings
designed to record the characteristics of American speech is the
62
Grandgent was interested in the speech of New England. His most important essays on the New
England dialect are reprinted
in a volume called
Old and New
(Cambridge, MA, 1920). Emerson’s
monograph on the dialect of Ithaca, New York, was the first extensive study of an American
dialect.
63
A convenient abridged edition in one volume, with annotations and new material is by Raven
McDavid, Jr. (New York, 1963).
A history of the english language 376
Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada,
publication of which began in 1939.
Although conceived as a single enterprise, the various regional projects
have evolved into
a series of independent but closely associated investigations. In this undertaking America
has followed the lead of Europe. In the latter part of the nineteenth century there began to
grow up an interest in linguistic geography, the study of the geographic distribution of
linguistic phenomena. Apart from the value of such study in ensuring the preservation of
accurate records of dialects and even languages that were in process of dying out, it was
seen that it might play an important role in linguistic science. The best way to study the
phenomena of linguistic evolution and change is in the living speech of communities
whose origin, cultural
development, and relation to other communities can still be traced.
Accordingly there have been published, or are in course of preparation, linguistic atlases
for more than a dozen European speech areas, notably French, German, and Italian.
64
The
proposal for an American atlas was made in 1928 at a meeting of the Modern Language
Association and, independently, at a session of the Linguistic Society. With the support
of the American Council of Learned Societies, work was begun in 1931 under the
direction of Professor Hans Kurath of the University of Michigan. The portion of the
Atlas
covering the New England states was published during the
first twelve years of the
project, the data being presented graphically in a series of 730 maps.
65
Records of the
speech of some 200 communities were made. “In each community at least two informants
(subjects) are selected: (1) An elderly representative of the long established families
whose speech is felt to be old fashioned. (2) A representative of the middle-aged group
who has not had too much schooling and has preserved, in the main, the local type of
speech.” The history of the settlement is traced and generally a
fairly full history of the
individual informant is obtained before he or she is approached. The material collected
covers pronunciation, grammatical forms, syntactical usages, and vocabulary and is
obtained
64
For an account of the various surveys then being made see J.Schrijnen,
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