This article reports on the use of the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP) as a teaching resource in historical sociolinguistics and historical linguistics courses at the University of Sheffield. Pronouncing dictionaries are an invaluable resource for students learning about processes of standardisation and language attitudes during the Late Modern English period (1700–1900), however they are not easy to use in their original format. Each author uses their own notation system to indicate their recommended pronunciation, while the terminology used to describe the quality of the vowels and consonants differs from that used today, and provides an additional obstacle to the student wishing to interrogate such sources. ECEP thus provides a valuable intermediary between the students and the source material, as it includes IPA equivalents for the recommended pronunciations, as well as any metalinguistic commentary offered by the authors about a particular pronunciation. This article demonstrates a teaching approach that not only uses ECEP as a tool in its own right, but also explores how it can be usefully combined with other materials covering language change in the Late Modern English period to enable students to undertake their own investigations in research-led courses.

This article presents the Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP) in the context of historical phonology and historical corpora. The eighteenth century witnessed the proliferation of works on elocution and orthoepy and yet the field lacks searchable digital sources comparable to those available in other disciplines like historical syntax or historical pragmatics. Because of this and for other reasons such as the difficulty in deciphering idiosyncratic notation systems in the original materials, there has been a certain disregard for the study of eighteenth-century phonological evidence. The ECEP database aims to redress this absence of research material by collecting data from eighteenth-century pronouncing dictionaries in the form of IPA transcriptions (c. 1,600 different example words totalling c. 17,600 transcriptions) and supplementary metadata, with a view to facilitating systematic analyses of phonological, chronological and geographic patterns, and also normative attitudes. The richness of the contents in ECEP will thus be of interest to phonologists, dialectologists and language variationists from the historical as well as the synchronic perspective, in that eighteenth-century orthoepists laid the ground for what became ‘Received Pronunciation’. Methodologically, the compilation of the ECEP database aims to contribute to the thriving field of corpus linguistics with a new research tool for the study of the history of English.