Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction
- PART I Regional varieties of English in Great Britain and Ireland
- 2 ENGLISH IN SCOTLAND
- 3 ENGLISH IN WALES
- 4 ENGLISH IN IRELAND
- 5 THE DIALECTS OF ENGLAND SINCE 1776
- PART II English overseas
- Glossary of linguistic terms
- Bibliography
- Index
- THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
- Map 7.1 Movements of English/Creole speakers in the seventeenth century
- Map 7.2 Movements of English/Creole speakers after 1700
- References
5 - THE DIALECTS OF ENGLAND SINCE 1776
from PART I - Regional varieties of English in Great Britain and Ireland
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
Edited by
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction
- PART I Regional varieties of English in Great Britain and Ireland
- 2 ENGLISH IN SCOTLAND
- 3 ENGLISH IN WALES
- 4 ENGLISH IN IRELAND
- 5 THE DIALECTS OF ENGLAND SINCE 1776
- PART II English overseas
- Glossary of linguistic terms
- Bibliography
- Index
- THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
- Map 7.1 Movements of English/Creole speakers in the seventeenth century
- Map 7.2 Movements of English/Creole speakers after 1700
- References
Summary
Some early observations
Our knowledge of the dialects of England from about 1500 till the first systematic description towards the end of the nineteenth century comes from a variety of sources: occasional regional spellings that continued into written documents, comments (usually derogatory) by the orthoepists, grammarians and lexicographers, glossaries of ‘provincial words', occasional references to local speech in travel literature, fictional texts written to illustrate regional speech, and the use of dialect in literary works. Dialect in fiction is particularly interesting because it places regional speech in a social context. For instance, from Fielding's Tom Jones we gather that in the eighteenth century there were members of the landed gentry in the south-west who voiced their initial fricatives, used un for him, thee for thou and dropped the second person singular subject in questions, as in Dost fancy I don't know it as well as thee; they had the third person singular present-tense marker -th with auxiliaries, but -s with main verbs. What we do not find is the earlier common southern and south-western use of ich for ‘I', and we are left in the dark as to whether this form had become obsolete in the type of language described, was not used by the type of people the writer had in mind, or was simply not chosen by the writer to give local colouring. Generally speaking, the picture that emerges from the early evidence is patchy, difficult to interpret and open to conjecture.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of the English Language , pp. 197 - 274Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994
References
(1886). A Glossary of the Dorset Dialect with a Grammar. & , County Printers. (Reprinted St Peter Port, Guernsey via Britain: The Toucan Press, 1970.)
(1972). The morphemic distribution of the definite article in contemporary regional English. In (ed.) Patterns in the Folk 588Google Scholar
(1987). The grammar of Tyneside and Northumbrian English. In & (eds.) Regional Variation in British English Syntax. London: Economic and Social Research Council.Google Scholar
(1981). Non-standard Language in English Literature. London: André Deutsch.
(1875-6). On the dialects of Monmouthshire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, South Warwickshire, South Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Middlesex, and Surrey, with a new classification of the English dialects. Transactions of the Philological Society.Google Scholar
(1691). Some observations made and communicated by Mr. Francis Brokesby, concerning the dialect and various pronunciation of words in the East Riding of Yorkshire (attached to the 1691 edition of Ray 1674).Google Scholar
(1990). The development of pronunciation in English language dictionaries. In (ed.) 1990a.Google Scholar
(1963). English Dialects. London: André Deutsch.
(1833). The York Minster Screen. In the dialect of the North Riding of Yorkshire. In (ed.) (1896).Google Scholar
(1976). Lincolnshire Dialects. Boston: R. Kay.
& (1980). Dialectology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(1982). Variation in an English Dialect: a Sociolinguistic Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(1891). The Dialect of Hartland, Devonshire (English Dialect Society 65). London: , Trench, Trübner. (Reprinted Vaduz: Kraus, 1965.)
(1788). Elements of the Grammar of the English Language. London.
(1813). Words in Use at Hawsted, Suffolk (English Dialect Society 23). London: Trübner. (Reprinted Vaduz: Kraus, 1965.)
(1887). The Folk-Speech of South Cheshire (English Dialect Society 53). London: Trübner. (Reprinted Vaduz: Kraus, 1965.)
(1724-6). A Tour Thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain. With an Introduction by . London: Peter Davies, 1927.
(1968). English Pronunciation 1500-1700, vols. I and II. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
, , & , (eds.) (1985). Papers from the Fourth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
& (1985). Research on non-standard dialects of British English: progress and prospects. In (ed.) 1985b.Google Scholar
(1889). On Early English Pronunciation, Part V, The Existing Phonology of English Dialects Compared with That of West Saxon (Early English Text Society, Extra Series 56). Reprinted New York: Greenwood Press, 1968.
(1875). The Dialect of West Somerset. (From Transactions of the Philological Society (1875-6).) (Reprinted Vaduz: Kraus, 1965.)
(1877/9). An Outline of the Grammar of the Dialect of the West Somerset. (From Transactions of the Philological Society (1877-9).) (Reprinted Vaduz: Kraus, 1965.)
(1886). The West Somerset Word-Book: a Glossary of Dialectal and Archaic Words and Phrases Used in the West of Somerset and East Devon (English Dialect Society 50). London: Trubner. (Reprinted Vaduz: Kraus, 1965.)
(1969). The meaning of the palaeotype in On Early English Pronunciation, 1869-89. Transactions of the Philological Society.Google Scholar
(1976). Dialects in the South-West of England: a Lexical Investigation (The Cooper Monographs. English Dialect Series 25). Bern: Francke.
(ed.) (1989). The History and the Dialects of English. Festschrift for Eduard Kolb (Anglistische Forschung 203). Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitäts-verlag.
(1830). The Vocabulary of East Anglia, vols. I and II. London: J. B. Nichols.
(1991). Gender and deixis in Southwestern dialects. Neu-philologische Mitteilungen, 92, 1.Google Scholar
(1619). Alexander Gill's Logonomia Anglica (1619). Part II. Biographical and Bibliographical Introductions, notes by & , translation by (Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis/ Stockholm Studies in English 27). Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1972.
& (eds.) (1975). Speech Style and Social Evaluation. London, New York and San Francisco: Academic Press.
, , , & (1990). The social meaning of RP: an intergenerational perspective. In (ed.) 1990a.Google Scholar
(1989). An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English, 4th edn revised by . London, New York, Melbourne, Auckland: Edward Arnold.
(1974). The Scottish-English Linguistic Border. Lexical Aspects (The Cooper Monographs. English Dialect Series 20). Bern: Francke.
(1991). Transition areas versus focal areas in English dialectology. English World-wide 12, 1.Google Scholar
(1787). A Provincial Glossary, with a Collection of Local Proverbs, and Popular Superstitions. London: printed for . (Corrected edition 1790.)
(1881). A Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, Obsolete Phrases, Proverbs, and Ancient Customs, from the Fourteenth Century, vols. I and II, 10th edn (first published 1847). London: John Russell Smith.
(1969). Demonstrative adjectives and pronouns in a Devonshire dialect. Transactions of the Philological Society.Google Scholar
(1967). The Dialect of Dentdale in the West Riding of Yorkshire (Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis/Studia Anglica Upsaliensia 5). Uppsala: Appelbergs Boktryckeri AB.
(1892). Northumberland Words: a Glossary of Words Used in the County of Northumberland and on the Tyneside, vol. I (English Dialect Society 66, 68, 71). London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner. (Reprinted Vaduz: Kraus, 1965.)
(1892). The Peasant Speech of Devon. London: Elliott Stock.
(1746 [1778]). An Exmoor Scolding and Courtship (English Dialect Society 25), ed. . London: Trübner, 1879. (Reprinted Vaduz: Kraus, 1965.)
(1964). On the Concept of Standard English and the History of Modern English Pronunciation (Lund Universitets Årsskkrift. N.F. Avd. 1. vol. 56, no. 3). Lund: CWK Gleerup.
(1988). Talking proper: schooling and the establishment of English ‘Received Pronunciation’. In & (eds.).Google Scholar
& (1979). English Accents and Dialects: an Introduction to Social and Regional Varieties of British English (accompanied by a recording). London: Edward Arnold.
(1976). Periphrastic ‘do’ in affirmative sentences in the dialect of East Somerset. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 11.Google Scholar
(1980). Relative clauses in the dialect of Somerset. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 81.Google Scholar
(1986). An inquiry into the nature of mixed grammars: two cases of grammatical variation in dialectal British English. In & (eds.).Google Scholar
(1987). Towards a grammar of the Somerset dialect: a case study of the language of J. M. Neophilologica Fennica: Modern Language Society 100 Years (Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique 45), ed. . Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.Google Scholar
(1988b). Working with dialectal material stored in a dBase file. In , & (eds.) Corpus Linguistics: Hard and Soft. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
(1990a). Methodological preliminaries to the study of linguistic change in dialectal English: evaluating the grammars of Barnes and Elworthy as sources of linguistic evidence. In , , & (eds.) Papers from the 5th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, Cambridge, 6-9 April, 1987. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
(1990b). A source of data for the study of English dialectal syntax: the Helsinki Corpus. In & (eds.) Theory and Practice in Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
(1991). The grammatical subject in educated and dialectal English: comparing the London-Lund Corpus and the Helsinki Corpus of Modern English Dialects’. In & (eds.) English Computer Corpora. Selected Papers and Research Guide. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
(1825). Observations on Some of the Dialects in the West of England, Particularly Somersetshire. London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy.
(1755). A Dictionary of the English Language. London. Reprinted Hildesheim: olms, 1968.
(1909). The Pronunciation of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(1917). An English Pronouncing Dictionary, 1st edn. London: J. M. Dent.
(1985). Tyneside syntax: a presentation of some data from the Tyneside Linguistic Survey. In (ed.) 1985b.Google Scholar
(1952). The definite article in living Yorkshire dialect. Leeds Studies in English and Kindred Languages.Google Scholar
(1983). Tyne Bytes: a Computerised Sociolinguistic Study of Tyneside (Bamberger Beiträge zur englischen Sprachwissenschaft 11). Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
& , eds. (1986). Linguistics across Historical and Geographical Boundaries. In Honour of Jacek Fisiak on the Occasion of His Fiftieth Birthday, vol. I: Linguistic Theory and Historical Linguistics (Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs 32). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
(forthcoming a). Dialect areas in the south-west of England: an exercise in cluster analysis. To appear in (ed.) ZDL-Beiheft 74: Verhandlungen des internationalen Dialektologenkongresses. Bamberg 1990, vol. III. Stuttgart: Franz Stein, 1994.Google Scholar
(forthcoming b). Periphrastic ‘do’ in south-western dialects of British English: a reassessment. To appear in Dialectogia et Geolinguistica 2 (1994).Google Scholar
(1987). Patterns of Spoken English: an Introduction to English Phonetics. London and New York: Longman.
(1932). The Phonology of the Suffolk Dialect. Descriptive and Historical (Uppsala Universitets Årsskrift 1932). Uppsala: A.-B. Lundequistska Bokhandeln.
(1938/9). Alexander Gill (1621) on the dialects of South and East England. Studio Neophilologica 11.Google Scholar
(1966). Phonological Atlas of the Northern Region. Berne: Francke.
(1987). The Shape of English: Structure and History. London and Melbourne: J. M. Dent.
(1984). Studies in the Phonology of Colloquial English. London and Sydney: Croom Helm.
(1762). A Short Introduction to English Grammar. Delmar, New York: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1979.
(1787). Provincialisms of East Norfolk. (English Dialect Society 1, 1873). London: Trübner. (Reprinted Vaduz: Kraus, 1965.)
(1788). Provincialisms of East Yorkshire (English Dialect Society 1, 1873). London: Trübner. (Reprinted Vaduz: Kraus, 1965.)Google Scholar
(1789). Provincialisms of the Vale of Glocester (English Dialect Society 1, 1873). London: Trübner. (Reprinted Vaduz: Kraus, 1965.)Google Scholar
(1790). Provincialisms of the Midland Counties (English Dialect Society 1, 1873). London: Trübner. (Reprinted Vaduz: Kraus, 1965.)Google Scholar
(1796). Provincialisms of West Devonshire (English Dialect Society 1, 1873). London: Trübner. (Reprinted Vaduz: Kraus, 1965.)Google Scholar
(1938/72). Cockney Past and Present: a Short History of the Dialect of London. Reprinted 1972 with additional preface. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
(1972). Studies in Yorkshire Dialects Based on Recordings of 13 Dialect Speakers in the West Riding, Parts I and II (Stockholm Theses in English 9). Stockholm.
(1684). A Yorkshire Dialogue in its pure natural dialect as it is now commonly spoken in the North parts of Yorkshire. In (ed.) (1896).Google Scholar
& (1985). Authority in Language. Investigating Language Prescription and Standardisation. London, Boston and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
(eds.) (1987). Regional Variation in English Syntax. Swindon: The Economic and Social Research Council.
(1964). Historical Outlines of English Sounds and Inflections, revised by . Ann Arbor, MI: George Wahr.
& (eds.) (1988). An Historic Tongue: Studies in English Linguistics in Memory of Barbara Strang. London and New York: Routledge.
& (1974). A Word Geography of England. London, New York and San Francisco: Seminar Press.
(1933). The Phonology of a South Durham Dialect. London: K. Paul, T. Trübner.
(1973). Speech in the English Novel (English Language Series 8). London: Longman.
(1972). The Northumbrian Burr: a Sociolinguistic Study (Lund Studies in English 41). Lund: CWK Gleerup.
(1889). A Glossary of Words used in the Wapentakes of Manley and Corringham, Lincolnshire, 2nd edn (English Dialect Society 58, 59). London: Trübner. (Reprinted Vaduz: Kraus, 1965.)
(1980). The Study of Dialect: an Introduction to Dialectology (The Language Library). London: André Deutsch.
(1985). Dialect and Accent in Industrial West Yorkshire (Varieties of English Around the World G 6). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
(1990). Perceptual Dialectology: Non-linguists' Views of Areal Linguistics. Dordrecht: Foris.
(1589). The Arte of English Poesie, ed. . London: Murray, 1869.
(ed.) (1990a). Studies in the Pronunciation of English. A Commemorative Volume in Honour of A. C. Gimson. London and New York: Routledge.
(1674). A Collection of English Words Not Generally Used, With Their Significations and Original: in Two Alphabetical Catalogues: The One of Such as Are Proper to the Northern, the Other to the Southern Counties (English Dialect Society 6, Series B: Reprinted Glossaries XV-XVII), ed. . London: Trübner, 1874. (Reprinted Vaduz: Kraus, 1965.)
(1950). The border between the Northern and North-Midland dialects. Transactions of the Yorkshire Dialect Society, vol. 8, Part L.Google Scholar
(1982). Vowel Systems and Lexical-Phonemic Patterns in South-East Cumbria. Bergen: Department of English, University of Bergen.
(1762). A Course of Lectures on Elocution. Reprinted Menston, Yorks.: The Scolar Press, 1974.
(1780). A General Dictionary of the English Language. Reprinted Menston, Yorks.: The Scolar Press, 1967.
(1960). Cockney Phonology (Oslo Studies in English 8). Oslo: Oslo University Press.
& (comps.) (1877). A Bibliographical List (English Dialect Society 2, 8, 18). London: Trübner. (Reprinted Vaduz: Kraus, 1965.)
(1911). English Dialects from the Eighth Century to the Present Day. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(ed.) (1873). Reprinted Glossaries. (English Dialect Society 1). London: Trübner. (Reprinted Vaduz: Kraus, 1965.)
(ed.) (1896). Nine Specimens of English Dialects Edited from Various Sources (English Dialect Society 76). London: Henry Frowde. (Reprinted Vaduz: Kraus, 1965.)
Speech of the British Isles. London: Athlone Press of the University of London.
(1840). Supplement to Forby's ‘Vocabulary of East Anglia’. (English Dialect Society 23). London: Trubner. (Reprinted Vaduz: Kraus, 1965.)Google Scholar
(ed.) (1988). Methods in Dialectology. Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference Held at the University College of North Wales, 3rd-7th August 1987 (Multilingual Matters 48). Clevedon and Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters.
(1979). The Dialect of Egton in North Yorkshire. Göteborg: Bokmaskinen.
& (1978). On the sociolinguistics of vocalic mergers: transfer and approximation in East Anglia. In (ed.).Google Scholar
(1974). The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 13). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(1983). On Dialect. Social and Geographical Perspectives. New York and London: New York University Press.
(1986). Dialects in Contact. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
(1990). The Dialects of England. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
(ed.) (1978). Sociolinguistic Patterns in British English. London: Edward Arnold.
(ed.) (1984). Language in the British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(1966). Phonematische Analyse des Dialekts von Gateshead-upon-Tyne/Co. Durham (Britannica et Americana 14). Hamburg: Cram, de Gruyter.
(1975). Regionale und soziale Erscheinungsformen des britischen und amerikanischen Englisch (Anglistische Arbeitshefte 4). Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
(1980). The dialectal structure of British English: Lowman's evidence. English World-wide 1, 1.Google Scholar
in collaboration with (1991). The Computer Developed Linguistic Atlas of England, vol. I. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
(ed.) (1985). Focus on: England and Wales (Varieties of English Around the World G 4). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
, & (comps.) (1984). A Bibliography of Writings on Varieties of English, 1965-1983. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
(1975). Language and History in Cornwall. Leicester: Leicester University Press.
(1977). English Dialects: an Introduction, 2nd, rev. edn. London: The Athlone Press of the University of London.
(1986a). The Southwest of England (Varieties of English Around the World, Text Series 5). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
(1986b). The ‘Exmoor Courtship’ and ‘Exmoor Scolding’: an evaluation of two eighteenth-century dialect texts. In & (eds.).
(1988a). The phonology of South-Western English 1500-1700. In (ed.) Historical Dialectology: Regional and Social. Berlin, New York and Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
(1988b). The Archaeology of English. London: B. T. Batsford.
(1791). A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language: to which are prefixed Principles of English Pronunciation; the whole interspersed with Observations, Philological, Critical, and Grammatical. London.
(1982). Accents of English. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(1983). Non-standard periphrasti. do in the dialects of south west Britain. Lore and Language 3, 8.Google Scholar
(1949). Studies on the Dorset Dialect (Lund Studies in English 16). Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup.
(1913). The Dialect of the New Forest in Hampshire (as Spoken in the Village of Burley). London: Oxford University Press for the Philological Society.
(1892). A Grammar of the District of Windfall, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. London: Kegan Paul, Trübner.
(1956). A History of Modern Colloquial English. Re-issue of enlarged edn of 1936. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
- 35
- Cited by