The year in review

Happy holidays from the International Dialects of English Archive. As we look toward what we hope will be a happy and productive 2016 for us all, we thought we’d remember 2015 and remind ourselves of the changes the past year has brought to IDEA:

We welcomed four new associate editors: Linda Nicholls-Gidley, Lynnae Lehfeldt, Amelia Morse Kolkmeyer, and Irene-Chen Shen. In addition, we posted 33 new samples, bringing the total in the archive to 1,183, plus 47 recordings in our “Special Collections” (play names and terms, General American recordings, Holocaust survivors, etc.).

While there are still new places to explore (see our Wish List), IDEA has samples from 114 countries and territories, and 48 U.S. states (Idaho and Delaware still elude us), on all inhabited continents. (The combined running time of all the recordings in the archive, not including Special Collections, is now a staggering 163 hours.) Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, IDEA continues to be the longest-established and most often consulted and cited online archive devoted to preserving English as spoken throughout the world, with almost 3 million annual Internet visitors.

This couldn’t have happened without the support of our senior editors, associate editors, and all of you reading this post. Thank you. (Remember, if you’d like to contribute to IDEA, we’d love to have you! Please see the various pages under the “Submissions” tab on the menu bar to learn more.)