JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. 's call for a dictionary of black American English on historical principles. I also (and perhaps too truculently) took issue with the nature and scope of the dictionary he seemed to propose (Dillard 1977). The present study suggests in greater detail one profitable direction for editors of such a dictionary to pursue. The direction is one of systematic comparison of black speech and white over identical sociolinguistic domains-no easy or inexpensive task, to be sure, but a necessary one if such a dictionary is going to be nonarbitrary, nonracist, and reasonably complete. The project I am suggesting would be similar in many respects to the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE). In fact, DARE (all of whose files will be archived at the University of Wisconsin after the project is complete) has at least begun the process.Though DARE is not intended to provide a complete lexicon of Afro-American speech, it will nevertheless provide students of the language and culture of black Americans with numerous examples of the black idiom which have heretofore remained undocumented, a variety of perspectives from which to approach black semantics, and a methodological paradigm for the systematic investigation of the field. It will do so because the working definition of regional which governs selection of entries for this dictionary has been broadly conceived to encompass social as well as geographical limitations of usage. While DARE is above all concerned with documenting the geographical region in which a word or expression is most likely to occur, its editors are also very much aware that any expression may most frequently be employed by speakers of a given age group, community-type, education level, sex, or race. On the basis of both spoken and written evidence, its entries will be specified with respect to any of these variables which prove to be a significant description of usage.The key word in the preceding sentence is EVIDENCE. Every historical dictionary since Murray's has proceeded by analysis of quotation slips taken from written sources. DARE is no exception. Its computerized Main File of written sources comprises slips taken from several hundred works, including early American diaries, autobiographies and collections 163 This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Thu, 5 Feb 2015 09:04:04 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 164 AMERICAN SPEECH 57.3 (1982)of folklore both black and white, regional and ethnic literatures in various genres, and scholarly works dealing with American dialects. The latter group includes, besides the Linguistic Atlases, lexical material published in such journals as Dialect Notes, American Speech, Publication of the American Di...

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