Amercian Speech: 1600 to the Present

The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings 1983 This publication is a collection of papers presented in June of 1983. This publication is a compilation of papers on dialects spoken in the American northeast during the three and a half centuries of its post-settlement history. The papers have been organized by source of linguistic data: work-lists, legal records, phonetic transcriptions, and popular literature; so far as practicable, the goal of editing has been to assist the reader and student in reconstructing American folk speech, the language of everyday people, during the colonial and early national periods.

The following is a list of the title and author of each paper:  Dialect Areas of the Atlantic Seaboard by Raven I McDavid, Jr., The folk Speech of Maine: Clues to Colonial English by Jacob Bennett, Regionalisms and Archaisms in Current Maine Place Names by Donald B. Sands, Lost Vocabulary of Colonial Rhode Island by Celia Millward, Household Vernacular in Concord, Massachusetts, Probate Inventories: 1655 – 1800 by Lisa H. Foote and Carol L. Haines, The Speech of Jonathan Fisher (1768 – 1847) of Blue Hill, Maine by Raoul N. Smith, New England Phonetic Transcriptions before 1850: Ezekiel Rich and Henry Martyn Parkhurst by Falk S. Johnson, Teague Talk; or, How to Impersonate a Stage Irishman in Five Lessons by Joyce Flynn, The Northeastern Urban Comedians’ Dialect and Mark Twain’s Vision by David E.E. Sloane, D.C. Johnston’s Pictorialization of Vernacular Humor in Jacksonian America by David Tatham, Reconstructing an Early Seventeenth-Century “American” Dialect by Leonard Travers.