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Late Modern Lancashire English in lexicographical context: representations of Lancashire speech and the English Dialect Dictionary

An investigation of how nineteenth-century Lancashire dialect literature contributed to Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 December 2012

Javier Ruano-García
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Extract

The longstanding vernacular literary pedigree of the county of Lancashire has made it home to a large body of regional writings comparable only to those of the neighbouring Yorkshire. Both past and present scholarship have acknowledged this fact, arguing that the literary tradition of the dialect may be taken as a source to get some insight into the linguistic history of the county. Research so far concentrated on the linguistic mining of Lancashire literary texts has shown that they provide valuable guidance to approach the language of bygone times, especially in terms of phonology and morphology (see Brunner, 1920; Haworth, 1920, 1927; Whitehall, 1929; Shorrocks, 1988, 1992, 1999; Wagner, 1999; Ruano-García, 2007, 2010b). To my knowledge, there is however little research that has attempted to evaluate the lexicographic potential of these documents, and their contribution to Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary (henceforth EDD), so as to further our understanding of lexical variation in regional Englishes of the Late Modern English period (LModE).

Type
Research Article
Information
English Today , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , December 2012 , pp. 60 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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