Thanks to ResearchBuzz, an always great place for news about online databases, digital archives, and more, that you do want to know about, for sharing about this database.
The post, American voices from the past live again, as DARE recordings available online, talks about how “Fifty years after their voices were captured on tape, Americans who were interviewed for the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) are speaking again.”
Between 1965 and 1970, DARE Fieldworkers talked with nearly 3,000 people in 1,002 communities, large and small, across the United States. Their responses to the DARE Questionnaire formed a basis for the entries in the six-volume Dictionary of American Regional English (1985-2013) and Digital DARE (2013).
Many of those talked with agreed to be recorded and the over 1,800 recordings are now available online hosted by the University of Wisconsin’s Digital Collections Center.
We don’t all speak English the same way. The same was true for our ancestors. Given that so much paperwork was written by others based on what they “heard” and “understood,” insight into how our ancestors spoke helps us figure out how names, places, and other details might have been changed (sometimes butchered) leading to all those spelling variants we have to keep track of!
What resources do you use to help you get a sense of how your ancestors might have spoken and how that influences how clerks wrote their names or other details?
Editor’s Note: Liked this article, check out Raleigh (NC) Accent Fades ... an evolving southern community (2016), Upfront Mini Bytes – Adoption, Chicago, Tribal Maps, Odd French Linguistics, Surname Distribution, Tips for Reading Old Handwriting, Historic Photos, and Digitized Australian Newspapers (2014), Many Languages, One America -- neat infographic of "A history of Languages in the United States" (2014), The trench talk that is now entrenched in the English language (2013)
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