Keith Malcolm Petyt (born February 1941) is a sociolinguist and

historian A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the stu ...

. As a native of Bradford, he investigated the speech of

West Yorkshire West Yorkshire is a metropolitan and ceremonial county in the Yorkshire and Humber Region of England. It is an inland and upland county having eastward-draining valleys while taking in the moors of the Pennines. West Yorkshire came into exis ...

in his early work. His first publication, ''Emily Brontë and the Haworth Dialect'', compared the speech of the servant Joseph in

Wuthering Heights ''Wuthering Heights'' is an 1847 novel by Emily Brontë, initially published under her pen name Ellis Bell. It concerns two families of the landed gentry living on the West Yorkshire moors, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, and their turbulent r ...

with information on the Haworth dialect from two informants. He was one of the first to apply

Labov William Labov ( ; born December 4, 1927) is an American linguist widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of ...

ian methods in Britain with his research in 1970–1 on the speech of

Bradford Bradford is a city and the administrative centre of the City of Bradford district in West Yorkshire, England. The city is in the Pennines' eastern foothills on the banks of the Bradford Beck. Bradford had a population of 349,561 at the 201 ...

, Halifax and

Huddersfield Huddersfield is a market town in the Kirklees district in West Yorkshire, England. It is the administrative centre and largest settlement in the Kirklees district. The town is in the foothills of the Pennines. The River Holme's confluence into t ...

. He concluded that the speech detailed in most of dialectology (e.g. A. J. Ellis, 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 ...

) had virtually disappeared, having found only one speaker out of his sample of 106 speakers who regularly used dialect. However, he found that differences in speech persisted as an indicator of social class, age and gender. This PhD dissertation was later adapted into a book, ''Dialect and Accent in Industrial West Yorkshire''. The work was criticised by Graham Shorrocks on the grounds that the sociolinguistic methods used were inappropriate for recording the traditional vernacular and that there was an inadequate basis for comparison with earlier dialect studies in West Yorkshire. His 1980 book ''The study of dialect: an introduction to dialectology'' was a critical history of dialect studies. He also wrote a generally positive review of the very successful textbook ''Accents of English'' by John C. Wells. After a brief appointment art University College Cardiff in the early 1960s, Petyt spent most of his professional career at the

University of Reading The University of Reading is a public university in Reading, Berkshire, England. It was founded in 1892 as University College, Reading, a University of Oxford extension college. The institution received the power to grant its own degrees in 19 ...

, lecturing in linguistic science. Later in his career, he published the book ''The Growth of Reading'' in 1993. He retired to the Yorkshire Dales and wrote a review of dialect studies in the Sedburgh area in 2014, which he donated to both the Sedbergh and District History Society and the Yorkshire Dialect Society. He is currently the Yorkshire Dales National Park's Member Champion for Recreation Management and is a vice president and former Chairman of the Yorkshire Dales Society.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Petyt, K M Linguists from England Writers from Bradford Sociolinguists Dialectologists Living people 1941 births