Survey of English Dialects

Methodology

313 localities were selected from England, the Isle of Man and some areas of Wales that were located 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. 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.

The literature usually refers to the "four urban sites" of Hackney, Leeds, Sheffield and York. The survey does seem to have been generally more urban-focused in West Yorkshire. Some other sites had become suburbs of towns (e.g. Harwood in Bolton, Wibsey in Bradford) and many of the agricultural questions brought no answer at these sites. 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.

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 and very rare.

The basic material had been written using specialised phonetic shorthand unintelligible to the general reader: in 1975 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, John Widdowson and Clive Upton. Two further publications have been produced from the survey's material, Survey of English Dialect: the Dictionary and Grammar (1993) and An Atlas of English Dialects (1996), both co-authored by Upton and Widdowson.

Archive material

A large amount of "incidental material" from the survey was not published. This is preserved at the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture, part of the School of English of the University of Leeds.

Sites for the survey

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

Wales

Isle of Man

Criticisms

The output of the Survey was criticised by some linguists as using outdated methodology to research dialects that did not represent the speech of most people in the areas covered. 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." 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 sociolinguists such as Peter Trudgill and Jack Chambers.

KM Petyt has highlighted the problem of using several fieldworkers in the same survey and suggested that some of the isoglosses 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.

The German linguist Wolfgang Viereck argued that these criticisms had caused an unnatural separation between traditional dialectology and sociolinguistics. He argues that the criticisms of the SED are "superficial" as sociolinguists have often used the data from the survey extensively in their own work and they have not made any steps to undertake a new nationwide survey to vindicate their methods as superior.

The Survey of English Dialects has also been criticised by more traditional dialectologists. Graham Shorrocks, whilst writing on the dialect of Bolton, criticised the lack of questions relating to syntax with five specific points:

1. Interrogative forms were poorly covered. For example, there was no question to find "couldn't you?", which would have produced /'kɔtnt/ in Bolton.
2. The use of converting questions led to cases of unanswered questions, irregular responses and pressured responses.
3. The recording of information was not consistent. For example, pronouns were not recorded at some sites, but the use of contractions for pronouns in some dialects made it difficult to know whether the pronoun had been accounted for.
4. The distinction between a stressed and an unstressed pronunciation was not always controlled.
5. As Shorrocks wrote, "there is also a quite disastrous failure to control strictly for number!" Several dialects made a distinction between the second person singular (often a form of thou) and the second person plural (often you).

Voices survey 2007-2010

Following the last Survey of English Dialects, the University of Leeds has started work on a new project. In May 2007 the Arts and Humanities Research Council awarded a grant to a team led by Sally Johnson, Professor of Linguistics and Phonetics at Leeds University to study British regional dialects.

Johnson's team are sifting through a large collection of examples of regional slang words and phrases turned up by the "Voices project" run by the BBC, in which the BBC invited the public to send 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 will also be collated and analysed by Johnson's team both for content and where it was reported. "Perhaps the most remarkable finding in the Voices study is that the English language is as diverse as ever, despite our increased mobility and constant exposure to other accents and dialects through television and radio." Work by the team on the project was expected to end in 2010.