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  • 5 - THE DIALECTS OF ENGLAND SINCE 1776

  • from PART I - Regional varieties of English in Great Britain and Ireland
  • Edited by Robert Burchfield, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the English Language
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    17 November 1994, pp 197-274

  • Summary

    Important early evidence for reconstructing dialect areas comes from dialect dictionaries. It would seem that from 1776 till the second half of the nineteenth century dialects were stable, and although regional English was seen as an obstacle to social advancement and as something to be avoided, there appears to have been no actual educational policy at work to create a unified 'polite' English, although there had been individual attempts to codify a spoken standard such as Sheridan and Walker. This chapter summarises the main dialect features that appear in the literature from the late eighteenth century up to about 1870. Most of the relevant sources were reprinted by the English Dialect Society in the late nineteenth century and are easily available. The English Dialect Society bibliography, which covers dialect texts and studies of dialect up to 1877, gives an idea of the amount of attention various regional varieties had attracted.