What is the Significance of the Dragonfly?

We use a dragonfly as our group symbol because the dragonfly has many different traditional names in different parts of the United States and it represents our roots in American English dialectology, which paved the way for modern language survey research. In the data for the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS; the largest American dialect survey to date, 1162 people from large areas of the East Coast, interviewed mainly in the 1930s and 1940s), the words that refer to the dragonfly that occurred most frequently are:

Snake doctor (536) Click to Enlarge	Snake feeder (413) Click to Enlarge	Mosquito hawk (360) Click to Enlarge
Darning needle (294) Click to Enlarge	Dragonfly (196) Click to Enlarge	Skeeter hawk (175) Click to Enlarge

As the maps show, snake doctor occurred mainly in the Midland and Southern dialect regions, from Philadelphia south through Virginia and West Virginia to the Carolinas and Georgia. Snake feeder occurred just in the Midland region, from Philadelphia south to Georgia. Mosquito hawk and skeeter hawk were found along mainly in the Southern coastal region, from New Jersey to Florida. Darning needle was found mainly in the Northern dialect region, including New York State, northern New Jersey, and northern Pennsylvania. The term dragonfly has scattered occurrences throughout the entire survey area. The regional distribution of words for the dragonfly is unusually clear, and the geographical patterns of the different variants show that main American English regional dialect areas, which explains why dialectologists like to use it for an illustration. While the LAMSAS survey data is certainly historical at this point, regional terms like these typically are very long lasting, and so people who grew up in these regions are likely to have heard the terms, even though the word dragonfly has become the most common term in general use today.

Thus our symbol represents what we can do. We take it as an emblem of scientific empirical investigation of language, and of the patterns in language that experienced linguists can find even though most people are unaware of them.

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