Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Regional vocabularies of American English

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep and cleanup. King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 00:37, 26 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Regional vocabularies of American English

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This was PRODed, but it has an extensive history and a lot of activity, so I figured it should probably go to AfD for discussion. The original prodder said "OR, possibly unencyclopedic, possibly POV, largely unsourced, largely unverifiable, hard to maintain". I agree with most of those concerns, but would add that an article about this topic is perhaps possible. However, the current article should be deleted since it is just a collection of local "slangish" terms. However, I am open to the possibility of someone writing a real article (although I am not sure it is actually reasonably possible). ThaddeusB (talk) 21:12, 19 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Language-related deletion discussions. -- ThaddeusB (talk) 21:13, 19 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of United States of America-related deletion discussions. -- ThaddeusB (talk) 21:13, 19 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
It's certainly possible to write a real article on this topic; there is a lot of work published on lexical regionalisms of American English. I'm leaning toward keep but stubbify, i.e. relentlessly remove everything unsourced (and continue relentlessly removing it, because they will come back and add their favorite local phrases on the basis of their own personal knowledge). +
gr 22:16, 19 May 2009 (UTC)[reply
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Comment: I would be fine with stubifying if there is the possibility of content that isn't already part of North American English regional phonology (I should have mentioned this real article to begin with) - otherwise I favor delete and then create a redirect to the relevant section of that page. I am not knowledgeable enough to know if this is the case or not. --ThaddeusB (talk) 22:38, 19 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep phonology is how "the study of variations in the pronunciation of spoken English", not the study of what words they use for things. This article can complement that one. There are certainly excellent sources for this material--Dictionary of American Regional English is the classic, at least for the A-Sk in the 4 very large published vols. published so far. Thgere are furthermore 100s of books discussing the basis of the variations. DGG (talk) 22:54, 19 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Comment A holdover from the "sources, shmources" days of Wikipedia. Although the rambling style is actually rather common in books on the subject (such as Mario Pei's The Story of English) this needs a serious rewrite, beginning with some citations. It's pretty obvious that a lot of the entries are from people who might have heard someone in Eastern Wisconsin, Southern Louisiana, St. Louis, etc. use a word and (a) they think it's unique to that area or (b) it's not really common, but an old man used the word. Interesting? Definitely. Reliable? "Who knows?", default to "no". For my part, I'd hate to lose the article or its history, but bringing it up to code means looking at one of the online sources and then eliminating anything that you can't find a source for. Mandsford (talk) 02:37, 20 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Given a library with printed books, one could probably source every one. The academic as well as the populaar literature on this is immense. DGG (talk) 04:40, 21 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Keep per DGG. Some content may have to be excised as unsourced, but the article itself should be kept. --Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 22:12, 20 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep but prune mercilessly. As suggested above, articles such as this one often become stuffed with OR, which needs to be periodically pruned. However, the Dictionary of American Regional English, American Dialect Research, the journal "American Speech" and plenty of other sources exist for verifiable content. Also repeating suggestions made above, variation in vocabulary is distinct from variation in phonology. Cnilep (talk) 15:18, 21 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keep, remove OR, convert the lists into prose, and provide a citation/footnote for each statement. I'm [dʒæˑkɫɜmbɚ] and I approve this message. 03:15, 24 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.