Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Map
- Themes
- 1 History: how things came to be this way
- 2 Prescriptivism and other useless pastimes
- 3 Language change: observing and accepting it
- 4 What is happening to words?
- 5 Languages and dialects in contact and conflict
- 6 Respecting English grammar
- 7 Respecting ordinary language
- 8 Sounds and fury
- 9 Respecting local speech
- 10 Grammar: the wonder of it all
- 11 More about words
- 12 Origins
- 13 Accent rules
- 14 Respecting names
- Postscript
- Index
Foreword
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2016
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Map
- Themes
- 1 History: how things came to be this way
- 2 Prescriptivism and other useless pastimes
- 3 Language change: observing and accepting it
- 4 What is happening to words?
- 5 Languages and dialects in contact and conflict
- 6 Respecting English grammar
- 7 Respecting ordinary language
- 8 Sounds and fury
- 9 Respecting local speech
- 10 Grammar: the wonder of it all
- 11 More about words
- 12 Origins
- 13 Accent rules
- 14 Respecting names
- Postscript
- Index
Summary
Since 2012, I have been writing a weekly column on language and dialect for the Eastern Daily Press, the daily newspaper printed and published in the city of Norwich, which is in the county of Norfolk, in eastern England. The EDP is the biggest-selling regional morning newspaper in England, with a circulation of over 40,000, apparently implying a readership of over 100,000. It is the only newspaper in the country which outsells the tabloid newspaper The Sun in its circulation area, which consists of Norfolk, northern Suffolk and eastern Cambridgeshire.
This book is a collation of the first three years or so of my columns, which have been annotated and edited for this volume. The columns were obviously aimed first and foremost at a readership based in the circulation area, and so there are frequent references to the local dialects of East Anglia and to other regional features such as place-names. Some local knowledge on the part of the readership was assumed, so in this book Background notes have been added to many of the columns for the benefit of those readers who do not have this local knowledge. The Background notes to many of the columns also contain explanations aimed at readers from outside Britain, to help with any references to British places, people, institutions and history which may not be entirely clear to them.
All the columns are about language in some shape or form and contain linguistic information with, I hope, insights which will also be of interest to university students and teachers of linguistics, as well as to high-school English Language teachers and their classes. For the benefit of such readers, most of the columns in this book also have attached to them some brief Linguistic notes of a more technical nature, which general readers need not bother with unless they want to achieve a more academic understanding of the issues involved.
This book has two basic overall messages. The first is that language is a mysterious and fascinating and enjoyable phenomenon which not enough people know enough about: most of us can get great pleasure from finding out more about this most fundamental of human attributes.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Dialect MattersRespecting Vernacular Language, pp. xiii - xivPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016