https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9764-1167
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ABSTRACT
This article examines the extent to which “traditional” dialect lexis (TDL) attested in the Survey of English Dialects can be found in a contemporary online context virtually located in the North East of England, one of the most dialectally distinct parts of the country. The findings suggest that the rate of survival is perhaps higher than might be imagined, given the conclusions of previous research on lexical attrition in regional varieties of English in the UK. The article also shows the affordances of corpus-based dialect study, illustrating how access to the discursive contexts in which TDL occurs can offer insights into meaning and usage, and give access to the metalinguistic reflections of dialect users.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Upton, 307.
2 See Görlach, 213. Skeat wrote this in a letter to the First Lord of the Treasury in 1895, appealing for Joseph Wright to receive a pension from the Civil List to enable publication of the EDD. Three years later Wright was awarded a pension of £200 a year.
3 Penhallurick, 17.
4 Wales, “New Millennium”, 51.
5 It should be pointed out that while Orton and Dieth certainly saw themselves in a race against time, their main motivation was to collect reflexes of older forms in order to help with their historical reconstructions. There was little regret on their part for a changing language (Clive Upton, e-mail message to author, January 5, 2020).
6 Orton, Sanderson and Widdowson, n.p. Amongst the most important publications are The Linguistic Atlas of England (Orton, Sanderson and Widdowson 1978) and The Survey of English Dialects: The Dictionary and Grammar (Upton, Parry and Widdowson 1994).
7 Kerswill, 223.
8 Johnstone, 391.
9 See Pearce, “Linguistic Landscape”.
10 Upton and Davies, vii. The project's findings were publicly disseminated on programmes for national and local radio and television, and on the BBC's website. Most of the Voices data-set is housed in the British Library Sound Archive, alongside its extensive SED holdings (see Robinson et al.).
11 Upton, 182.
12 Ibid.
13 Macafee, 71.
14 Ibid.
15 Wales, 196.
16 Upton, 182.
17 See Holmes and Wilson, 268.
18 Upton, 181.
19 Szmrecsanyi, 4.
20 See Pearce, “Linguistic Landscape”, 74.
21 Szmrecsanyi and Anderwald, 303.
22 For FRED see Hernández. For DECTE see Corrigan, Buchstaller, Mearns and Moisl. https://research.ncl.ac.uk/decte.
23 See Hernández et al.
24 Nor is plodge present in the BBC Voices interview description material held in the British Library.
25 Szmrecsanyi and Anderwald, 310.
26 See Howard.
27 Kytölä, 228.
28 Androutsopoulos, “Participatory Culture”, 50. Web 2.0 has also given us Twitter: a vast source of geo-located data which has allowed scholars working at the interface of dialectometry and geographic information systems to garner new insights into the regional distribution of linguistic items (for a summary see Grieve et al.).
29 Lillis, 2.
30 Androutsopoulos, “Localizing the Global”, 209
31 Topics covered range from why people hate fish paste to the Higgs Boson.
32 Research and Development Unit for English Studies (1999–2019), Birmingham City University. All WebCorp searches reported were carried out in June and July 2019.
33 Wales, 196.
34 Upton and Widdowson, 22.
35 Beal, 64.
36 Burbano-Elizondo, 56.
37 Orton, 47. In the initial analysis I discounted those questions inserted to glean information about phonology and morphosyntax, though as the authors of the Linguistic Atlas of England point out, these categories “are not by any means mutually exclusive”.
38 Orton, 14.
39 Orton, 49–62.
40 Marks and Britton; Zayed, 15.
41 Census, 2011.
42 Orton and Dieth, 73. This comment on the development of the questionnaire was published in 1950, just before the main SED fieldwork started.
43 Wales, 195. While her general point stands, it is worth noting that all of these terms (from Simmelbauer's study), apart from boodies, are present in RTG (see ).
44 Although some lexical items are recorded in SED interviews archived in the British Library, but don't appear in the questionnaire results. This is the case with gully, for example.
45 Dent, 119.
46 Orton, 14.
47 Upton, 181.
48 Orton and Halliday, 698. This notion was not reported in my initial analysis because it was included in the SED primarily for phonological and morphological reasons. Perhaps fieldworkers were less concerned with eliciting lexical variants in these cases, so fewer variants were recorded. In RTG a common term for “drunk” is mortal, which is attested in EDD.
49 Ibid., 702–3.
50 Greene and Widdowson, 510.
51 See Trudgill, 121–32 and Dent.
52 Orton, 51 and 61.
53 The adjectival form is nebby.
54 Besnier, 419.
55 Ploat and dunch, for example.
56 Radford, 39.
57 Dent, 114.
58 The sample corpus was built using Sketch Engine.
59 Androutsopoulos, “Participatory Culture”, 53.
60 Sandow and Robinson, 335
61 Bakhtin, 293.
62 See Eckert, “Belten High”; Podesva; Campbell-Kibler.
63 Coupland, 147.
64 Though in a context where “taking issue” with what people post is common, for some such thread titles can provoke: “Old slang? i say and hear most of these every fucking day man”.
65 See Cutillas-Espinosa et al.
66 See Pearce, “Mam or mum”.
67 See Benson and Risdal.
68 Dent, 114.
69 Wales, 1.
70 Trudgill, 126.
71 See Montgomery's overview of perceptual dialectology research in England. It should also be noted that Geordie can be a problematic term for some people in North East England. In the region, the word is typically used as an ethnonym for the people of Newcastle and the Tyneside conurbation, so its application by outsiders to all North Easterners (particularly those whose loyalties lie with the other urban areas of Wearside and Teesside and their football clubs) can be a source of irritation (see Pearce, “Geordie”).
72 Di Martino, 140. The singer Cheryl Cole and the television presenters Ant and Dec fall into this category. However, the existence of a programme such as Geordie Shore indicates that not all media representations of North East England are entirely positive.
73 Garrett, 34.
74 Coupland, “Sociolinguistic Change”, 85–6.
75 Fairclough, 201.
76 Coupland, 177.
77 Eckert, 464.