Are you still in Yorkshire? Haining in Somerset? Hocksing in Cambridgeshire? Hoying in Durham? Nails in Cheshire? Pelting in Northamptonshire? Are you sedating in Leicestershire? Or are you flying now? How do you pronounce scone? Researchers at the University of Leeds are interested in answering all of these questions as they begin a heritage project to help explore and preserve English dialects. Details of how the university plans to use the valuable archive of English life and language collected by field workers at the University of Leeds in the 1950s and 1960s have been announced. The results remain the most famous and comprehensive dialect research. in England. The university said it has made its extensive library of English dialects accessible to the public through the release of The Great Big Dialect Hunt. He said researchers would look for “new phrases and expressions to bring the archive into the 21st century and to preserve the current language for future generations”. A field worker talks to a man in North Yorkshire about the initial investigation. Photo: University of Leeds Fiona Douglas, of the university’s English department, who led the project, said they were not trying to replicate the scale of the original survey, in which field workers went to interview people over the age of 65 in more than 300 predominantly rural communities. “It was very, very big and there were many, many questions,” he said. The results, which include lots of photos and sound, equate to a surprisingly rich snapshot of how people lived and spoke in England. If you want a peripheral map with what a cow house was called or freckles or chips all over England, they are on file. In the case of scrapers, there are 50 variations of craps and cratchings on scratch and scratchings. A man from Yorkshire describes the “night of disorder” in an archive of English dialects – sound Leeds researchers want to know if certain words are outdated. So do you give someone a pig or a pack, cuddycaddy, calycode, colliebucky or backy? If you were from the East of England, would you describe a shelf with a sloping face that is “slightly in the re” and would refer to more than two of something as a “pair of three”? An interactive sound map of England lets people hear how people spoke in different areas when the survey was conducted. “The recordings are just amazing because people are talking about their lives and experiences, so it’s a window into the past and you can hear these fantastic voices,” Douglas said. People playing wallops, or nine pins. Photo: Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture He said the new project could best be described as a “mini-survey” and, above all, was not limited to older voices. “We want everyone to complete our research. “It does not matter where you are from or how long you have lived there, or whether you think you have a dialect or not.” The site will allow people to add their own voices and words to the file. The university works with five museums across England, where people can of course go to add dialects. The project is funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, which donated 30 530,500 to digitize notebooks, photographs, word maps and recordings from the original fieldwork. “We would like to share what we have, but we are also interested in the dialects that people have now because it is not something that is kept in place,” Douglas said. “It’s not just a thing of the past.” Subscribe to the First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every day at 7 p.m. BST The death of the dialects had been predicted since the 18th century, but Douglas said they were still here, flourishing and evolving. Listening to someone with loud noise has always been exciting, he said. “It transports you. There is something utterly pitiful about what makes you think: oh wow, am I home or these people are like me. “A lot has to do with this sense of connection, the sense of belonging, the sense of the root, and even in our globally digital world 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, I think it really matters.”
