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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 June 2016
For Three-Quarters of a century, scholars have had to rely for a general survey of the dialects of England either upon Volume V of On Early English Pronunciation by A. J. Ellis, published in 1889, or upon J. Wright’s The English Dialect Grammar, published in 1905. These two works have merit as pioneer studies but their accuracy and reliability are questioned today.
Studies in linguistic geography in Britain made an important step forward in 1962 with the publication of the first volume of a new, scientifically-conducted dialect survey, Survey of English Dialects (hereafter SED). This survey, when completed, will provide an extensive corpus of primary dialect material but as yet, because it would be largely premature, interpretative study of this material has not been attempted. Despite this, as the basic material for Northumberland, Durham, Cumberland, Westmoreland, Lancashire, and Yorkshire, the six northern counties of England, has been published, a study of questions confined to these counties is valid. It is the purpose of this paper to examine briefly four consonantal features of northern English dialects in the light of this newly-published material.
1 Criticism of Ellis was first made by Wright, J. (A Grammar of the Dialect of Windhill in the West Riding of Yorkshire, London, 1892, p. 174).Google Scholar Kökeritz, H. (The Phonology of the Suffolk Dialect, Uppsala, 1932, p. viii)Google Scholar, Orton, H. (The Phonology of a South Durham Dialect, London, 1933, §§ 123–4 Google Scholar) and Dieth, E. (“A New Survey of English Dialects,” Essays and Studies 32 (1946), pp. 85–6 Google Scholar), among others, have criticized both Ellis and Wright.
2 Under the editorship of H. Orton, Leeds, 1962-. For a review of the first volumes, see CJL 9:1 (1963), pp. 60-64.
3 Certain words in the questionnaire are marked with an asterisk. These words are included for their phonological value and consequently every effort was made to ascertain their pronunciation at each locality. Because they are recorded so regularly, they clearly lend themselves more easily to comparative treatment than other words. This study, therefore, confines itself to starred words. Of the asterisked words beginning with h, halfpennyworth has been discounted as paralleling too closely halfpenny, and hour has not been considered because its h is silent in standard English.
4 Bloomfield, L., Language, London, 1935, p. 340 Google ScholarPubMed: “Dialect geography thus gives evidence as to the former extension of linguistic features that now persist only as relic forms. Especially when a feature appears in detached districts that are separated by a compact area in which a competing feature is spoken, the map can usually be interpreted to mean that the detached districts were once part of a solid area.”