The Traditional Dialects of England and the History of English

This chapter explores the importance of England’s traditional dialects for understanding the history of the English language more generally. These dialects are now largely moribund as a result of dialect levelling, standardisation and dialect death but were recorded in considerable detail by linguists in the late nineteenth and early to mid twentieth centuries, and were represented in literary dialect and, especially, dialect literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The chapter discusses the nature of these dialects, the data we have for them, and gives examples of the kinds of things we can learn about the history of English from their study. The history of English has always been one of dialect variation, and the history of the language cannot be properly understood without an analysis of England’s traditional dialects.