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Five programmes recorded on location at definitive collections. |
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Quentin Cooper talks to Dr Clive Upton of Leeds University about the history and uses of the Survey of English Dialects - the only comprehensive survey of dialects spoken in England. They listen to and discuss some of its rich collection of recordings of rural speech from half a century ago.
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The Survey of English Dialects was a massive linguistic research project, undertaken in the 1950s and 60s. The aim was to create a comprehensive database of the dialects spoken in rural communities the length and breadth of England. Its purpose was to be a resource by which linguistic historians could then unearth the sounds, vocabulary and grammar of English in Medieval times and earlier.
The survey's fieldworkers visited 313 villages and interviewed about 1000 people. The subjects selected were those deemed to be most likely to speak the traditional, 'uncontaminated' dialect of their area. So they were generally in their sixties or older, had left education early and had not travelled much from their village. They also needed a good set of teeth. Each was subjected to a questionnaire of 1,300 questions. Physically, the survey is a large number of reference volumes, listing pronounciations of words and phonemes and local grammatical constructions and words. And there are hundreds of sound recordings in which subjects talk about their memories, families, work and the folklore of the countryside from a century ago.
The custodian of the Survey today is Dr Clive Upton of Leeds University's Department of English. He plays Quentin Cooper some of the recordings and describes how they've been used to reconstruct spoken English in the times of Shakespeare, Chaucer and earlier. Clive Upton also explains that the Survey is not only an invaluable resource for linguistics - actors wanting to perfect a specific accent pay visits, as do police involved in forensic linguistic investigations (trying to identify a suspect from a phone message he's left).
 Listen again to the programme
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