The Dialect Test was created by
A.J. Ellis in February 1879, and was used in the fieldwork for his work ''On Early English Pronunciation''. It stands as one of the earliest methods of identifying vowel sounds and features of speech. The aim was to capture the main
vowel
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (l ...
sounds of an individual
dialect
The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena:
One usage refers to a variety of a language that is ...
by listening to the reading of a short passage. All the categories of
West Saxon words and vowels were included in the test so that comparisons could be made with the historic West Saxon speech as well as with various other dialects.
# So I say, mates, you see now that I am right about that little girl coming from the school yonder.
# She is going down the road there through the red gate on the left hand side of the way.
# Sure enough, the child has gone straight up to the door of the wrong house,
# where she will chance to find that drunken deaf shrivelled fellow of the name of Thomas.
# We all know him very well.
# Won't the old chap soon teach her not to do it again, poor thing!
# Look! Isn't it true?
The test consists of seventy-six words, although some of the words are repeated. The pronunciation of each word or the substitution of another word
or example, many informants said "See!" rather than "Look!"is noted during the test. In ''On Early English Pronunciation'', A.J. Ellis distinguished forty-two different dialects in
England and the
Scottish Lowlands
The Lowlands ( sco, Lallans or ; gd, a' Ghalldachd, , place of the foreigners, ) is a cultural and historical region of Scotland. Culturally, the Lowlands and the Highlands diverged from the Late Middle Ages into the modern period, when Lo ...
.
In ''A Grammar of the Dialect of Windhill'',
Joseph Wright said of Ellis' work, "If his rendering of the dialect test of other dialect speeches is as inaccurate as that of the Windhill dialect, the value of these tests for phonetic and philological purposes is not very great." Peter Anderson argued that the small differences between Wright's and Ellis's descriptions of the Windhill dialect were likely to be matters of "transcriptional style", as also occurred between different fieldworkers in the
Survey of English Dialects
The Survey of English Dialects was undertaken between 1950 and 1961 under the direction of Professor Harold Orton of the English department of the University of Leeds. It aimed to collect the full range of speech in England and Wales before loca ...
.
[Anderson, Peter M. 1977. "A New Light on Early English Pronunciation". Transactions of the Yorkshire Dialect Society part 77, vol. 14. Page 39.]
The test was used to illustrate different dialects in a series of gramophone records produced by the British Drama League in the early 20th century.
Footnotes
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Dialects
English language