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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 , mottoeng = And knowledge will be increased , established = 1831 – Leeds School of Medicine1874 – Yorkshire College of Science1884 - Yorkshire College1887 – affiliated to the federal Victoria University1904 – University of Leeds , ...
. It aimed to collect the full range of speech in England and Wales before local differences were to disappear. Standardisation of the English language was expected with the post-war increase in
social mobility Social mobility is the movement of individuals, families, households or other categories of people within or between social strata in a society. It is a change in social status relative to one's current social location within a given society ...
and the spread of the mass media. The project originated in discussions between Professor Orton and Professor Eugen Dieth of the University of Zurich about the desirability of producing a linguistic atlas of England in 1946, and a
questionnaire A questionnaire is a research instrument that consists of a set of questions (or other types of prompts) for the purpose of gathering information from respondents through survey or statistical study. A research questionnaire is typically a mix ...
containing 1,300 questions was devised between 1947 and 1952.


Methodology

313 localities were selected from England, the
Isle of Man ) , anthem = " O Land of Our Birth" , image = Isle of Man by Sentinel-2.jpg , image_map = Europe-Isle_of_Man.svg , mapsize = , map_alt = Location of the Isle of Man in Europe , map_caption = Location of the Isle of Man (green) in Europ ...
and some areas of
Wales Wales ( cy, Cymru ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is bordered by England to the east, the Irish Sea to the north and west, the Celtic Sea to the south west and the Bristol Channel to the south. It had a population in ...
close to the English border. Priority was given to rural areas with a history of a stable population. When selecting speakers, priority was given to men, to the elderly and to those who worked in the main industry of the area, for these were all seen as traits that were connected to use of local dialect. One field worker gathering material claimed they had to dress in old clothes to gain the confidence of elderly villagers."Dialect survey needs cash", ''The Times'', 17 September 1969 Typically between three and six informants were interviewed at each site. At a few sites, only one or two suitable informants were found and interviewed. The Survey was one of the first to make tape recordings of informants. However, the early tape recordings were of such poor quality that they were unusable. Many of the sites visited had not yet been electrified, which made recording difficult. In the Isle of Man, the fieldworker Michael Barry risked electrocuting himself by plugging a recorder into a light socket for the sake of a recording of the local dialect. Only 287 of the 313 sites had a recording made, and the recording is not always of the same informants that answered the questionnaire. Most of the recordings are of inhabitants discussing their local industry, but one of the recordings, that at Skelmanthorpe in West Yorkshire, discussed a sighting of a ghost. Extracts from these recordings are now all freely available online through the British Library, together with some transcriptions in the X-SAMPA phonetic alphabet. The ethnographer
Werner Kissling Werner Friedrich Theodor Kissling (or Kißling) (11 April 1895, Breslau, Germany – 3 February 1988, Dumfries, Scotland) was an ethnographer and photographer. His mother, Johanna, was a photographer and she was a central figure in his life. ...
took some photographs in some areas (e.g. Wensleydale) as part of the Survey. Most of the sites were small villages. The literature usually refers to the "four urban sites" of Hackney,
Leeds Leeds () is a city and the administrative centre of the City of Leeds district in West Yorkshire, England. It is built around the River Aire and is in the eastern foothills of the Pennines. It is also the third-largest settlement (by popul ...
,
Sheffield Sheffield is a city in South Yorkshire, England, whose name derives from the River Sheaf which runs through it. The city serves as the administrative centre of the City of Sheffield. It is historically part of the West Riding of Yorkshire ...
and
York York is a cathedral city with Roman origins, sited at the confluence of the rivers Ouse and Foss in North Yorkshire, England. It is the historic county town of Yorkshire. The city has many historic buildings and other structures, such as a ...
, where large parts of the questionnaire were not asked as the residents were unlikely to be familiar with the agricultural subject matter. The large town (now a city) of Newport, then in
Monmouthshire Monmouthshire ( cy, Sir Fynwy) is a county in the south-east of Wales. The name derives from the historic county of the same name; the modern county covers the eastern three-fifths of the historic county. The largest town is Abergavenny, wit ...
, was included late in the survey. There were also some towns (e.g. Fleetwood, Washington) and suburbs (e.g. Harwood in Bolton, Wibsey in Bradford) where, although the full questionnaire was administered, some of the questions focused on agriculture found no answer. It was originally planned to survey urban areas at a later date, but this was plan was abandoned owing to a lack of financial resources. In the Introduction volume, Harold Orton wrote, "For our investigation of the town dialects we contemplate the use of a 'short' questionnaire, which will omit the books relating to husbandry, but on the other hand will include more notions relating to the life of the artisan and the syntactical aspects of his speech." One of the main fieldworkers, Stanley Ellis, later wrote, "The problems of the investigation of town dialects … are so complex as to be insoluble, in the opinion of this reviewer". The original book ''Survey of English Dialects: Introduction'' (1962) listed only 311 sites, excluding Newport and the village of
Lyonshall Lyonshall is a historic village and civil parish in Herefordshire, England. The civil parish includes the hamlet of Penrhos. According to the 2001 Census, the civil parish had a population of 750, increasing to 757 at the 2011 Census. Geo ...
in Herefordshire, close to the Welsh border. The introduction to the Basic Material for the West Midlands stated that these two sites had been added after the initial selection of the other sites, and there had been concerns about including Newport's responses in the Survey, as the respondent had only been able to answer two of the nine questionnaire books, but it was eventually included on the basis that other urban sites were also missing answers to some books. However, the original 311 figure was repeated without correction in the list of localities at the start of the final ''Linguistic Atlas of England'' (1975), even though the sites were plotted on maps as ''Mon7'' for Newport and ''He7'' for Lyonshall. The figure of 311 has been reproduced many times since in textbooks such as ''English Around the World'' (1997, p. 160) and ''Methods and Data in English Historical Dialectology'' (2004, p. 142), but the correct number of sites is 313.


Publication of material

404,000 items of information were gathered, and these were published as thirteen volumes of "basic material" beginning in 1962. The process took many years, and was prone to funding difficulties on more than one occasion. In 1966, Eduard Kolb published ''Linguistic atlas of England: Phonological atlas of the northern region; the six northern counties, North Lincolnshire and the Isle of Man'', which mapped variation in the most linguistically diverse part of England. This book is
out of print __NOTOC__ An out-of-print (OOP) or out-of-commerce item or work is something that is no longer being published. The term applies to all types of printed matter, visual media, sound recordings, and video recordings. An out-of-print book is a boo ...
and very rare. The basic material had been written using specialised phonetic shorthand unintelligible to the general reader: in 1974 a more accessible book, ''A Word Geography of England'' was published. Harold Orton died soon after this in March 1975. ''The Linguistic Atlas of England'' was published in 1978, edited by Orton, Stewart Sanderson and John Widdowson. Three further publications have been produced from the Survey's material, ''Word Maps'' (1987
015 Fifteen or 15 may refer to: *15 (number), the natural number following 14 and preceding 16 *one of the years 15 BC, AD 15, 1915, 2015 Music *Fifteen (band), a punk rock band Albums * ''15'' (Buckcherry album), 2005 * ''15'' (Ani Lorak albu ...
co-authored by Clive Upton, Sanderson and Widdowson, ''Survey of English Dialect: The Dictionary and Grammar'' (1994) co-authored by Upton, David Parry and Widdowson, and ''An Atlas of English Dialects'' (1996), co-authored by Upton and Widdowson. It was originally planned to published four "Companion Volumes" of selected incidental material, to correspond with the four volumes of the basic material. These were designed to investigate the development of the chief Middle English sounds, and of certain morphological features and syntactical usages, in each locality.


Archive material

A large amount of "incidental material" from the survey was not published. This is preserved in the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture in the Special Collections of the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds.


Sites for the survey

During the survey, each locality was given an identifying abbreviation, which is given in brackets.


Wales

;Flintshire * Hanmer (Ch6) ;Monmouthshire *
Llanellen Llanellen ( cy, Llanelen) is a village in Monmouthshire, south-east Wales, United Kingdom. It is located south of Abergavenny. The population was 506 in 2011. Geography The Blorenge mountain towers above the village. The River Usk The Ri ...
(Mon2) * Llanfrechfa (Mon5) * Newport (Mon7) *
Raglan, Monmouthshire Raglan (; ( cy, Rhaglan) is a village and community in Monmouthshire, south east Wales, United Kingdom. It is located some 9 miles south-west of Monmouth, midway between Monmouth and Abergavenny on the A40 road very near to the junction with th ...
(Mon3) *
Crosskeys Crosskeys ( cy, Pont-y-cymer) is a village, community and an electoral ward in Caerphilly county borough in Wales. Etymology The village was originally named Pont-y-cymer and this remains the official Welsh name for the village. The name ...
(Mon4) *
Shirenewton Shirenewton ( cy, Drenewydd Gelli-farch) is a village and community in Monmouthshire, south east Wales. It is located 3 miles due west of Chepstow, 5 miles (8 km) by road. The village stands around 500 feet (154 m) above sea level, and has ...
(Mon6) * Skenfrith (Mon1)


Isle of Man

*
Andreas Andreas ( el, Ἀνδρέας) is a name usually given to males in Austria, Greece, Cyprus, Denmark, Armenia, Estonia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Finland, Flanders, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Romania, the Netherlands, and Indonesia. The ...
(Man1) *
Ronague Ronague ( gv, Eairy Shynnagh or ) is a tiny hamlet in the south of the Isle of Man, in the parish of Arbory. It consists of an old chapel, several houses and some farms. It lies to the north of the villages of Ballabeg and Colby, west of the ham ...
(Man2)


England


Criticisms

The output of the Survey was criticised by some linguists as outdated. In a review of ''The Linguistic Atlas of England'' John C Wells wrote, "the phonetic approach of the survey's scholars is pure nineteenth century: it takes no account of structuralist phonemics, let alone more recent developments in phonological theory."Review of the Linguistic Atlas of England
John C Wells, The Times Higher Education Supplement, 1 December 1978
He suggested that the survey should have been ''The Linguistic Atlas of Working-class Rural England'', and said that many well-known features of contemporary urban accents were not recorded in the Atlas. Similar criticisms of the sample were made by
sociolinguist Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used, and society's effect on language. It can overlap with the sociology of l ...
s such as Peter Trudgill and Jack Chambers. However, Sarah Elizabeth Haigh has said that this "seems to rather miss the point of the survey", which was to record dialects before they died out and was not to represent contemporary speech. KM Petyt has highlighted the problem of using several fieldworkers in the same survey and suggested that some of the
isogloss An isogloss, also called a heterogloss (see Etymology below), is the geographic boundary of a certain linguistic feature, such as the pronunciation of a vowel, the meaning of a word, or the use of some morphological or syntactic feature. Major ...
es are really "iso-fieldworkers". He gives the subtle distinction between the sounds ɔ and ɒ as an example of inconsistent recording in the survey, where some fieldworkers tended to write ɔ and others tended to write ɒ. Mark J. Jones has noted that the transcriptions for the SED do not always match the tape recordings made, most notably in the under-reporting of
glottal stop The glottal plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents thi ...
s. He wrote, "This is an unsurprising and expected consequence of impressionistic transcription, particularly when running speech is being transcribed, and in no way detracts from the feat achieved by the SED fieldworkers." The Survey of English Dialects has also been criticised by more traditional dialectologists. In the book ''
A Grammar of the Dialect of the Bolton Area ''A Grammar of the Dialect of the Bolton Area'' is a two-part dialectological book written by Graham Shorrocks, a professor at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, based on a series of research projects in the 1970s and 1980s. From 1972 to ...
'', Graham Shorrocks said that the contribution of the SED to syntax was "disappointing" with many regional forms missed by the questionnaire and the information recorded being done inconsistently by fieldworkers. On the questionnaire used in the Survey, Shorrocks said that this had the advantage of facilitating comparisons in how the same term was pronounced in different locations, but that this missed intricacies of particular dialects such as the use of multiple terms for the same thing, and the use of syntax and suprasegmentals in natural speech.


Counter-criticism

The German linguist Wolfgang Viereck has argued that critics of the SED often make "superficial" criticisms whilst simultaneously using the SED data extensively for their own work. He has criticised the claims of sociolinguists to have superior methods to the SED and challenged sociolinguists to undertake a new nationwide survey to vindicate their methods as superior. He has written: :The criticism that the Survey of English Dialects (SED) has received has not always been constructive and fair. One should not forget the magnitude of the task and the difficult post-war years when the SED fieldwork was begun. One should also not criticise the SED for not being able to answer questions that it never set out to answer. Some modern sociolinguists tend to do this, but even they cannot afford to neglect its data. In an article named ''The Historiography of Dialectology'', Craig Frees defended the SED against a series of criticisms. Frees argues that many of the criticisms ignore the role of the SED within a broader programme of dialect research at the University of Leeds, which included more than 100 separate dialect monographs, and the history of funding difficulties, which led to the abandonment of the plan to investigate urban dialects at a later date. Frees wrote of the SED's co-founder, Harold Orton: "despite everything he did for British dialectology and English cultural studies, there is still no dedicated biography or in-depth critical analysis of his career, and his work is trivialised through misrepresentation, the unchecked repetition of mistakes, and what appears to be a superficial and historically ungrounded critique."


Subsequent work

The SED was a strong influence of the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects and the uncompleted Survey of Hiberno-English Speech. Although comparisons are often made between the SED and the
Linguistic Survey of Scotland The Linguistic Survey of Scotland was a long-term project at the University of Edinburgh to cover the use of language in Scotland, including Scottish English, Scots and Scottish Gaelic. The Survey began at a time when the modern subject of linguis ...
, there was no link between the two. The SED fieldworker Peter Wright, a native of the seaside town of Fleetwood, developed a questionnaire for a proposed follow-up survey of coastal communities in England, on the basis that these communities had different ways of speaking from inland areas and had been largely missed by the survey. A full survey was never undertaken, but the questionnaire was used in some sites, such as in a 1980 study of the dialect of
Holy Island Sacred space, sacred ground, sacred place, sacred temple, holy ground, or holy place refers to a location which is deemed to be sacred or hallowed. The sacredness of a natural feature may accrue through tradition or be granted through a bles ...
. Sixty-six of the 313 sites from the SED were subsequently used for the Atlas Linguarum Europae, a project that compared dialects and languages across all countries in Europe. The ALE data were collected in the late 1970s and often showed reduced lexical variation from the SED, or even a universal term where previously several had been recorded (e.g. the word "icicle" displaced all other variants). In May 2007 the
Arts and Humanities Research Council The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), formerly Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB), is a British research council, established in 1998, supporting research and postgraduate study in the arts and humanities. History The Arts ...
awarded a grant to the University of Leeds to enable a team led by Sally Johnson, Professor of Linguistics and Phonetics and Clive Upton, Professor of Modern English Language to study British regional dialects. Mapping the English language – from cockney to Orkney
Leeds University , mottoeng = And knowledge will be increased , established = 1831 – Leeds School of Medicine1874 – Yorkshire College of Science1884 - Yorkshire College1887 – affiliated to the federal Victoria University1904 – University of Leeds , t ...
website, 25 May 2007.
The team analysed the results from the "Voices project" run by the BBC, in which the public sent in examples of English still spoken throughout the country. The BBC Voices project also collected hundreds of news articles about how the British speak English from swearing through to items on language schools. This information was collated and analysed both for content and where it was reported. Work on the project ended in 2010. Reports of its analyses were published in ''Analysing Twenty-first Century British English'' (2013), edited by Clive Upton and Bethan L. Davies. In October 2017, a National Lottery grant of £798,000 was awarded to the University of Leeds to undertake a project named ''Dialect and Heritage: the State of the Nation''. The project is due to run with five museums in different parts of England to open up the materials found by the Survey to a modern audience. In November 2019, an article in ''The Guardian'' noted that this work was progressing under Fiona Douglas from Leeds School of English with help from three living fieldworkers from the original survey.


See also

* Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects * Cockney *
Cumbrian dialect The Cumberland dialect is a local Northern English dialect in decline, spoken in Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire North of the Sands, not to be confused with the area's extinct Celtic language, Cumbric. Some parts of Cumbria have a mor ...
* East Anglian English * East Midlands English *
Pitmatic __NOTOC__ Pitmatic (originally: "Pitmatical", colloquially known as "Yakka") is a group of traditional Northern English dialects spoken in rural areas of the Northumberland and Durham Coalfield in England. The separating dialectal developmen ...
* Welsh English * West Country dialects *
West Midlands English West Midlands English is a group of dialects of the English language native to the English West Midlands. County accents Certain areas of the West Midlands are stereotyped as having stronger accents than others, Dudley in the Black Coun ...
*
Yorkshire dialect and accent Yorkshire ( ; abbreviated Yorks), formally known as the County of York, is a historic county in northern England and by far the largest in the United Kingdom. Because of its large area in comparison with other English counties, functions have ...


References


Bibliography (selection)

* McDavid, Raven I. Jr. (1981). "Review of The Linguistic Atlas of England, by Harold Orton, Stewart Sanderson and John Widdowson." ''American Speech'' 56, 219–234. * Fischer, Andreas; Ammann, Daniel (1991). "An Index to Dialect Maps of Great Britain". ''Varieties of English Around the World. General Series 10.'' Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. * Kolb, Eduard (1966). ''Phonological Atlas of the Northern Region: the Six Northern Counties, North Lincolnshire and the Isle of Man.'' Bern: Francke. * Meier, Hans Heinrich (1964). "Review of Introduction by Harold Orton and The Basic Material, Volume I by Harold Orton and Wilfrid J. Halliday." ''English Studies'' 45, 240–245. * Orton, Harold (1971). ''Editorial Problems of an English Dialect Atlas.'' In: Burghardt, Lorraine H. (ed.): ''Dialectology: Problems and Perspectives.'' Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee, pp. 79–115. * Orton, Harold; Dieth, Eugen (1952). ''A Questionnaire for a Linguistic Atlas of England.'' Leeds: Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society. * Orton, Harold; Wright, Nathalia (1974). ''A Word Geography of England.'' New York: Seminar Press. * Orton, Harold et al. (1962–71). ''Survey of English Dialects: Basic Materials.'' Introduction and 4 vols. (each in 3 parts). Leeds: E. J. Arnold & Son. * Upton, Clive; Sanderson, Stewart; Widdowson, J. D. A. (1987). ''Word Maps: A Dialect Atlas of England.'' London, New York, Sydney: Croom Helm. eprinted 2015 Routledge Library Editions, The English Language, Volume 27. London and New York: Routledge * Upton, Clive; Parry, David; Widdowson, J. D. A. (1994). ''Survey of English Dialects: The Dictionary and Grammar.'' London and New York: Routledge. * Upton, Clive; Widdowson, J. D. A. (2006). ''An Atlas of English Dialects.'' 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge. * Upton, Clive; Davies, Bethan L. (2013). ''Analysing Twenty-first Century British English: Conceptual and methodological aspects of the'' Voices ''Project''. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. * Viereck, Wolfgang (1990). ''The Computer-Developed Linguistic Atlas of England.'' Tübingen: Niemeyer. * Viereck, Wolfgang; Ramisch, Heinrich (1997). ''The Computer Developed Linguistic Atlas of England 2.'' Tübingen: Niemeyer.


Further reading


Sounds Familiar?
udio examples of regional accents and dialects from across the UK on the British Library's website
The Survey of English Dialects (University of Leeds)Extracts from the survey (British Library) Dialect researchers given a 'canny load of chink' to sort 'pikeys' from 'chavs' in regional accents
''
The Independent ''The Independent'' is a British online newspaper. It was established in 1986 as a national morning printed paper. Nicknamed the ''Indy'', it began as a broadsheet and changed to tabloid format in 2003. The last printed edition was publish ...
'', 1 June 2007, Page 20. McSmith, Andy. Includes a list of regional words and expressions from the BBC Voices project which is currently being studied by the Leeds University team(2007-2020). {{English dialects by continent * English culture Languages of the United Kingdom University of Leeds