Mapping The Existing Phonology of English Dialects

Abstract

Abstract Given its early date, breadth of coverage (geographical and linguistic) and the huge amount of data it contains, Alexander Ellis's The Existing Phonology of English Dialects marks an extremely significant episode in British dialectology. Despite this, there has been very little in the way of detailed linguistic analysis of Ellis’s survey, and no attempt has been made to construct a linguistic atlas from the data it contains, although several studies have included a few preliminary maps based on it. Why is this so, and what might we discover if we did investigate this early survey of the dialects of English and Scots in more detail? The aim of this paper is to begin such an investigation and, in particular, to demonstrate that there is considerable mileage (and benefit) in mapping the data in Ellis (1889).