McDAVID, Raven I(oor), Jr

McDAVID, Raven I(oor), Jr [1911–84]. American DIALECT geographer, born in Greenville, South Carolina, and educated at Furman U., completing a Ph.D. on Milton at Duke U. in 1935. McDavid came to an early appreciation of speech varieties and cultural STEREOTYPES when he found ‘speech correctionists’ from outside his native region eager to alter his locally standard dialect. In 1937, he attended a summer school at the U. of Michigan where Bernard Bloch, a fieldworker for the Linguistic Atlas of New England, taught linguistic geography and selected him as an informant for the course. The excitement of dialect study that summer shaped his subsequent career. During World War II, along with other linguists he prepared language materials to assist in the war effort; his tasks included studies of Burmese and pedagogical tools to assist Italians learning English. In 1945, McDavid turned full-time to fieldwork for the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS) under the general direction of Hans Kurath. He conducted several hundred field interviews recorded in precise phonetic transcription, not only in the South Atlantic region, but later in the Middle Atlantic and North Central States as well. McDavid joined the U. of Chicago in 1957 where he remained until retirement and beyond. When Kurath retired from active management of the Linguistic Atlas projects, McDavid became his successor. Editing LAMSAS and the Linguistic Atlas of the North Central States began under his direction and is continued today by his successors. With Kurath, he was co-author of the first comprehensive work drawing on Atlas files: The Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States (1961). His abridgement and updating of MENCKEN'S AMERICAN LANGUAGE (1963) renewed the popularity of that book. His many essays were revised and collected in two volumes: Dialects in Culture (1979) and Varieties of American English (1980). See AMERICAN ENGLISH, GENERAL AMERICAN, SOUTHERN ENGLISH.