''American Speech'' is a quarterly

academic journal An academic journal (or scholarly journal or scientific journal) is a periodical publication in which Scholarly method, scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. They serve as permanent and transparent forums for the ...

of the American Dialect Society, established in 1925 and currently published by

Duke University Press Duke University Press is an academic publisher and university press affiliated with Duke University. It was founded in 1921 by William T. Laprade as The Trinity College Press. (Duke University was initially called Trinity College). In 1926 ...

. It focuses primarily on the

English language English is a West Germanic language that developed in early medieval England and has since become a English as a lingua franca, global lingua franca. The namesake of the language is the Angles (tribe), Angles, one of the Germanic peoples th ...

used in the

Western Hemisphere The Western Hemisphere is the half of the planet Earth that lies west of the Prime Meridian (which crosses Greenwich, London, United Kingdom) and east of the 180th meridian.- The other half is called the Eastern Hemisphere. Geopolitically, ...

, but also publishes contributions on other varieties of English, outside influences on the language, and

linguistic Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

theory. The current editor is Thomas Purnell (

University of Wisconsin–Madison The University of Wisconsin–Madison (University of Wisconsin, Wisconsin, UW, UW–Madison, or simply Madison) is a public land-grant research university in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. It was founded in 1848 when Wisconsin achieved st ...

). The ''

Chronicle of Higher Education ''The Chronicle of Higher Education'' is an American newspaper and website that presents news, information, and jobs for college and university faculty and student affairs professionals, including staff members and administrators. A subscriptio ...

's Lingua Franca'' considers it a "consistently reliable peer-reviewed source of information" and states that "though it is scholarly and research based, there’s a surprising amount of information that is intelligible to anyone, even without special training in linguistics."

History

The journal was established in 1925 by

Kemp Malone Kemp Malone (March 14, 1889 – October 13, 1971) was an American medievalist, etymology, etymologist, philologist, and specialist in Geoffrey Chaucer, Chaucer. He was a lecturer and then professor of English literature at Johns Hopkins Universit ...

, Louise Pound, and Arthur G. Kennedy "to present information about English in America in a form appealing to general readers", and was inspired by H. L. Mencken. According to Mencken: It became the official journal of the American Dialect Society in 1970.

Among the New Words

In addition to research articles, ''American Speech'' publishes a section titled "Among the New Words", which reports on recent

neologism In linguistics, a neologism (; also known as a coinage) is any newly formed word, term, or phrase that has achieved popular or institutional recognition and is becoming accepted into mainstream language. Most definitively, a word can be considered ...

s and provides lexicographical documentation of their uses and origins. The section was introduced to the journal in 1941 by Dwight Bolinger. The section frequently discusses the words nominated for the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year selection.

Abstracting and indexing

This journal is indexed by the following services: *

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/Arts and Humanities *

/Social and Behavioral Sciences *

Social Sciences Citation Index The Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) is a commercial citation index product of Clarivate Analytics. It was originally developed by the Institute for Scientific Information from the Science Citation Index. The Social Sciences Citation Index is ...

Scopus Scopus is a scientific abstract and citation database, launched by the academic publisher Elsevier as a competitor to older Web of Science in 2004. The ensuing competition between the two databases has been characterized as "intense" and is c ...

* Academic Search * H. W. Wilson Company databases

References

External links

* Academic journals established in 1925 Linguistics journals Quarterly journals English-language journals Duke University Press academic journals {{Linguistics journals