Dialect surveys

Although they are neither very recent nor focused upon the accents of major centres of population, a small group of major regional dialect surveys are heavily drawn upon in the writing of the topics, as they must inevitably be by anyone commenting on variation in the speech of the British Isles. Foremost among these, for England, is the Survey of English Dialects (SED). This essentially rural survey from the mid-twentieth century continues to be drawn upon for information because of its detailed coverage, its reliability (given the constraints under which it operated) and the accessibility of its information: it is fair to say that no reliable statements can be made about the widespread distribution of linguistic features within England without reference to its findings, since there exists no more recent country-wide comprehensive evidence. The SED is paralleled by its contemporary in Scotland, the Linguistic Survey of Scotland, in Wales by the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects, and in Ireland by the Tape-recorded Survey of Hiberno-English Speech. The last two surveys were in some large measure directly inspired by the SED, under whose founder, Harold Orton, some of their founder-workers had trained.

Recently, however, whilst there have been some comparatively large-scale efforts at data-gathering, the reader will notice that, with the notable exception of the latter, even these have not been on the scale of earlier surveys. This has not, however, been accidental or the result of academic indolence on the part of the linguistic community. Rather, recent concentration on social variation in speech, in order to better understand the mechanisms of language change, has resulted in focus being on small(er) areas and fewer locations in which diverse populations can be studied in close detail: the wide sweeps of variation that were the object of earlier research do not speak to the considerations of motivation for language use, and for language variation, which are a preoccupation of today’s dialectologists. (In this regard, there have been a number of recent seminal works which have been drawn upon in the present volume, such as Foulkes and Docherty’s Urban Voices [1999] and Milroy and Milroy’s Real English [1993].) Beyond the larger survey materials, therefore, the authors have drawn upon a wide range of materials which result from their own and others’ intensive study of the localized speech of their respective areas.