Studies

it is not surprising that vocabulary played a most important part in the early study of dialect. Undoubtedly the most famous work on dialect lexis is Joseph Wright‘s six-volume English Dialect Dictionary (1898-1905) which remains an essential text for all students of the subject. This pioneering work drew on the collections of the English Dialect Society, set up to gather its data and disbanded in 1896 when it saw its task to having been completed. But the torch was carried forward by innumerable independent enthusiasts and, most significantly amongst scholars, by Frederick Cassidy and the Dictionary of American English (DARE) team in the United States, and in England by Harold Orton and his Survey of English Dialects (SED).

In view of the scale of these efforts, it would be easy to see the lexicon as the prime focus for dialectologists. However, the other areas of study—into phonology and grammar—have not been neglected, and in recent years interest in lexis has rather faded. Decades before Joseph Wright, the English gentleman-scholar Alexander Ellis began to investigate regional pronunciation, no mean feat prior to the invention of the International Phonetic Alphabet and sound recording. Beginning his attempts at description in 1848, Ellis announced his intention to survey accents in 1871, shortly before his famous contemporary Georg Wenker began a German dialect-accent survey designed to test the ‘neogrammarian hypothesis’ that sound changes occur systematically across communities. Ellis’s monumental findings were published in his On Early English Pronunciation Part V, the title of which suggests the historical motivation of dialect studies at this time. Focus on pronunciation also occupied Joseph Wright, as did concentration on grammatical morphology (or ‘accidence’), both of which are discussed in the English Dialect Grammar appended to the Dictionary in its final volume dated 1905. And the widening of the scope of dialectology to encompass all areas of variation continued through the twentieth century: in the USA under the watchful eye of the American Dialect Society and in the UK with the work of the SED, and more recently the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects and the Linguistic Survey of Scotland.

4. The linguistic atlas of England and the United States.

A linguistic map is a thematic map showing the geographic distribution of the speakers of a language, or isoglosses of a dialect continuum of the same language. A collection of such maps is a linguistic atlas.

of England:

It is a record of how English is spoken in England. Over 400 maps detail differences in phonology, lexicon, morphology and syntax. The Atlas provides a unique survey of the linguistic geography of England. This volume was inspired by the English Dialect Survey which set out to elicit information about the current dialectical usages of the older members of the farming communities throughout rural England. The Survey secondly mapped this information to illustrate the regional distributions of those features of their speech which persisted from ancient times. The publication of this volume testified to the sustained interest in the linguistic geography of England.

of the United States:

The Atlas of North American English provides the first overall view of the pronunciation and vowel systems of the dialects of the U.S.. The Atlas re-defines the regional dialects of American English on the basis of sound changes active in the 1990s and draws new boundaries reflecting those changes. It is based on a telephone survey of 762 local speakers, representing all the urbanized areas of North America. The volume contains 23 chapters that re-define the geographic boundaries of North American dialects and trace the influence of gender, age, education, and city size on the progress of sound change; findings that show a dramatic and increasing divergence of English in North America; 139 four color maps that illustrate the regional distribution of phonological and phonetic variables across the North American continent; 120 four color vowel charts of individual speakers.