Editors’ Notes

This issue represents the final issue of the centennial volume of American Speech. Recall that the Centennial Planning Committee (Kate Carmichael, Charles Carson, Connie Eble, Jessi Grieser, Natalie Schilling, and me) felt it best to celebrate the 100th volume by grouping the backlog of accepted papers into conceptual clumps. We assembled papers for AS 100.1 around historical dialect work, while the articles in AS 100.2 center around new technology applied to established speech communities. AS 100.3 focuses on African American English. Initially, we envisioned the articles in this final issue of the centennial volume as touching on different populations and incipient varieties. It was also decided that this year's Publication of the American Dialect Society (PADS 110) would supplement the American Speech centennial volume by including several articles awaiting publication in the journal that align with my personal interest in vowel studies or analyses of Midwestern English. Let's call it the editor's special issue.The adjective incipient is defined as “[b]eginning; commencing; coming into, or in an early stage of, existence; in an initial stage” (OED Online). After 100 years of research in the journal and looking forward to the next 100 years, we might think that we've moved a ways past our beginnings. However, this issue rightly commemorates the notion of beginnings, although perhaps not in the anticipated manner. For this issue, we settled on two research papers, a review, a Miscellany piece, and the latest “Among the New Words” installment. Each of these works has an underlying theme of incipientness or beginning.By employing historical recordings of Canadian veterans from the western provinces, Charles Boberg's analysis of their vowels provides a window into the initial stages of one of the more recently formed regional varieties of English in North America, Western Canadian English. His article is followed by Michael Picone's overview of the glocalization of the French language in North America, which exemplifies our now-explicitly inclusive editorial purview, encouraging the submission and publication of articles on languages of North America beyond English. It is appropriate that Picone's article closes our centennial volume given that it was his editorial (“Just What Is ‘American Speech’ Anyway?” AS 97, no. 1 [2022]: 5–30) that sparked this adjustment to the journal's mission. I hope others will follow suit and explore dialectology of other North American languages. The research papers by Boberg and Picone are followed by Georgia Zellou's review of Hazel Price and Dan McIntyre's book on outreach by linguists, by a heckuva Miscellany piece from Marc Pierce, and the latest “Among the New Words” installment on how video game terms have moved into everyday parlance.This issue also signals the end of my oversight of American Speech and the beginning of the tenure for our new academic editors. Jennifer Cramer and Derek Denis come with editorial experience, as you will read about in their introduction to this volume. They have already proven that their combined skills will accelerate the effectiveness of the journal. Their engagement with journal matters this past year makes me excited about its future. I'm grateful that they agreed to undertake this important service for the ADS. Another editorial beginning is that our long-time managing editor Charles Carson and his colleagues at Duke University Press (DUP) conceived of and implemented a new design for the journal. I have enjoyed how Charles has taken each of the past three issues to a different era of the journal.As I move away from the academic editor position, I want, once again, to express my appreciation to all the scholars who have thought enough of the journal to submit papers, to all the authors who have put up with our Author Queries and at times heavy-handed edits, and to all the readers who have found our publication both informative and enjoyable to read. Additionally, I would be remiss if I failed to sign off without thanking the various ADS officers over the past 10 years for their support of American Speech, all my colleagues who served on the Editorial Advisory Committee, and my associate editors during my tenure (Allison Burkette, Katie Carmichael, Alex D'Arcy, Christine Mallinson, and Jeff Reaser). For fielding editorial questions at various stages of my tenure, I give a shout out to prior editors’ advice from Connie Eble and Michael Adams, as well as to my editorial mentor and my UW-Madison colleague Joe Salmons. Lastly, we could not have done this without the stabilizing foundation of Charles Carson and the support of Duke University Press. Thank you, all. —thomas purnellThe first three issues of this centennial volume have featured layouts inspired by the journal's past designs (see figure 1): the February issue's cover and front matter were laid out based on the journal's original design, created by William Passano of Waverly Press for Baltimore publisher Williams & Wilkins Co.; the design of the May issue reflects the journal's appearance during its brief tenure at publisher Warwick & York, Inc., under the direction of Heinrich Buchholz; and the August issue imitated Columbia University Press's early look, created by the publisher's printer Melvin Loos. With the exception of a new cover in 2000 in honor of its 75th anniversary, created by DUP journals designer Sue Hall and myself, the journal's layout, especially of its interior pages, has remained relatively unchanged since its redesign by Loos in 1933. I think it's safe to say that it has moved through its stylish, traditional, classic, and retro stages and is now approaching obsolescence. With this issue, American Speech enters the next century with a complete makeover, created by DUP journals designer Heather Hensley (cover) and myself (interior) with input from DUP's art director Dave Rainey.Incorporated into much of the design are elements of the ADS logo (see figure 2), created by Craig Gephart in 2009. The design agency C&G Partners had reached out to ADS executive secretary Alan Metcalf offering to create a logo for the society. It was intended to be part of a larger effort by the agency to design logos for a list of nonprofit groups gratis, but it never got through the As.Selecting a new typeface proved to be a challenge. It needed to be attractive and legible both in print and on screen, have a distinct italic that would stand out in a paragraph of regular type, have an extended glyph set that included at least the IPA, and be Unicode compliant. Our long-time typeface, New Baskerville, did not meet these criteria. Because it was originally created for printing, its design relied on the spread of ink on paper to thicken the fine lines in the letter forms, but this doesn't happen on high-resolution digital displays, thus causing the fine lines to visually drop out, resulting in a “twinkly” appearance on screen. Additionally, no Unicode-compliant version of New Baskerville with IPA symbols exists. The custom ASp New Baskerville typeface I created in 2001 mapped phonetic characters onto a standard keyboard (e.g., A = ɑ, O = ɔ), but the Unicode standard makes these kinds of conversions unnecessary. Our new type family, Alegreya, meets all the above criteria and more, including a sans serif version, multiple weights, and support for the Cyrillic (Кириллица) and Greek (Ελληνικό) alphabets.With this issue, we're also implementing the style changes made in the 18th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style (2024). We are still using the author-date system with a reference list, as described in CMS chapters 13 and 14, for source documentation, but expository notes are moving back to the foot of the page. Footnotes were eliminated in American Speech during its transition to the University of Alabama Press in 1975, when MLA's author-date style was adopted and discursive notes moved to the back. The latter made typesetting easier but at the expense of the reader; however, such compromises are no longer necessary with modern page layout software. —charles e. carson

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.