Did you have or drank your tea, dinner or dinner last night? Before, did you feel cramped, exhausted, hungry, hungry, tired or just bored?
Are you still hanging out in Yorkshire? Heining in Somerset? Hawking in Cambridgeshire? Hoying in Durham? Walking around Cheshire? Pelting in Northamptonshire? Yerking in Leicestershire? Or are you throwing now?
How to pronounce scone?
Researchers at the University of Leeds are interested in answering all such questions as they embark on a heritage project to help research and preserve English dialects.
Details have been released on how the university plans to use its valuable archive of English life and language collected by field workers at the University of Leeds in the 1950s and 1960s. The results remain the most famous and complete study of dialects in England.
The university said it was making its extensive library of English dialects available to the public by launching The Great Big Dialect Hunt. It says researchers will look for “new phrases and expressions to carry the archive into the 21st century and preserve today’s language for future generations.”
A field worker talks to a man in North Yorkshire about the initial study. Photo: University of Leeds
Fiona Douglas, of the university’s English language department in charge of the project, said they were not trying to replicate the scale of an initial study in which field workers went out to interview people over 65 in more than 300 predominantly rural communities. “It was very, very big and there were many, many questions,” she said.
The results, which include lots of photos and audio, are a fabulously rich picture of how people in England have lived and spoken.
If you want a regional map of what cow’s clippings, freckles or chips are called all over England, they are in the archives. In the case of clippings, there are 50 options from craps and scratches to scratches and scratches.
A man from Yorkshire describes the “night of mischief” in the archive of English dialects – audio
Leeds researchers want to know if some words are outdated. So, do you give someone a piggyback or pig-a-pack, cuddycaddy, callycode, colliebucky or backy?
If you were from the East of England, would you describe a crooked shelf as “slightly raised” and would you point to more than two of something like “a pair of three”?
An interactive audio sound map of England allows people to hear people speak in different areas when the survey is collected. “The recordings are just phenomenal because people talk about their lives and experiences, so it’s a window to the past, and you can hear those fantastic voices,” Douglas said.
People who play wolop or nine pins. Photo: Leeds Folk Culture Archive
She said the new project could be better described as a “mini-survey” and, importantly, was not limited to older voices. “We would like everyone to fill out our survey. It doesn’t matter where you are from or how long you live there, whether you think you have a dialect or not. ”
The website will allow people to add their own voices and words to the archive. The university has partnered with five museums across England where people can physically go and add dialects.
The project is funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, which provided £ 530,500 to digitize notebooks, photos, text cards and audio recordings of the original fieldwork.
“We would like to share what we have, but we are also interested in the dialects that people have now because they are not something left in the flood,” Douglas said. “It’s not just a thing of the past.”
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The deaths of the dialects have been predicted since the 18th century, but Douglas said they are still here, thriving and thriving.
Hearing someone with a loud ring was always a thrill, she said. “It transports you. There’s something absolutely visceral about what makes you think: oh, wow, I’m home, or these people are like me.
“A lot of it is about this sense of connection, sense of belonging, sense of rooting and even in our 24/7 global digitally overgrown world, I think that really matters.
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