Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Dialects as a window on the past
- 3 The Roots Archive
- 4 Methods of analysis
- 5 Word endings
- 6 Joining sentences
- 7 Time, necessity and possession
- 8 Expressions
- 9 Comparative sociolinguistics
- 10 The legacy of British and Irish dialects
- Notes
- References
- Index
3 - The Roots Archive
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Dialects as a window on the past
- 3 The Roots Archive
- 4 Methods of analysis
- 5 Word endings
- 6 Joining sentences
- 7 Time, necessity and possession
- 8 Expressions
- 9 Comparative sociolinguistics
- 10 The legacy of British and Irish dialects
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
It’s roots. You get your roots down, you know.
(Samuel Clark, 85, YRK)In this chapter, I detail data-collection methods and procedures, fieldwork experiences and corpus compilation. I also introduce the communities and the individuals as well as provide many lively examples of the fascinating features of the dialects.
A well-known fact of historical linguistics and sociolinguistics is that certain dialects tend to be more conservative than others. Crucially for the sociolinguist, the dialectologist and the historical linguist, they do not participate in ongoing linguistic change at the same rate as others. This may simply be due to their geographical separation from the mainstream, but it can also be due to some combination of social and/or cultural separation as well. Meillet (1967) observed that ‘very often it is sufficient to arrange facts geographically to understand their history’. Although synchronic dialects cannot exactly replicate varieties of English as they were spoken in earlier days, they provide at least a partial ‘snapshot’ of earlier stages in the history of the language.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Roots of EnglishExploring the History of Dialects, pp. 27 - 48Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012