Old English dialectology has not made serious progress in recent years, as has been noted in several publications. It has been beset by numerous methodological as well as other problems (e.g. the paucity of evidence). The further the dialectological research moved into the past, the more questions emerged. The problems which are encountered in contemporary dialect research are amplified when linguistic variation is analysed for the period at a remove of several centuries from now.

In some of my earlier works (e.g. Fisiak 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985a, b) I attempted to review critically the situation in medieval dialectology (on the basis of late Middle English) when ample textual and onomastic evidence was on hand. In the present paper I would like to focus my attention on a situation where texts are scarce and other supporting evidence is likewise far from sufficient. Thus on the basis of Old English I shall discuss the possibility of characterising a dialect which has come down to us in a few inscriptions and a certain number of place-names. It must be stressed at this point that the present paper is only a report on a certain aspect of research in progress and that the interpretation of a fair portion of my late Old English data may undergo further modification in the future.

Questions which will have to be answered before attempting any characterisation of an Old English dialect include the following. What is the nature of a medieval dialect (i.e. was it written or spoken)? Is the notion of dialect as applied to regional variation in contemporary languages tenable when referring to the distant past? Is it entity strictly localisable in time and space? What is dialect reconstruction? (Is it reconstruction of the dominant set of linguistic features and/or of bundling isoglosses setting off one linguistic area from another, or should it be some statistical characterisation of a political, administrative or ecclesiastical unit in terms of the occurrence of a certain number of linguistic features?) Even if these questions are satisfactorily answered one can still wonder whether it is possible to set off e.g. the East Anglian area from the rest of the East Midlands as a genuinely separate dialect region in Old English.