English Dialects from the Eighth Century to the Present Day

by Walter W. Skeat

English dialects, from the eighth century to the present day. The evidence, which is necessarily somewhat imperfect, goes to show that the older dialects appear to have been few in number, each being tolerably uniform over a wide area; and that the rather numerous dialects of the present day were gradually developed by the breaking up of the older groups into subdialects. This is especially true of the old Northumbrian dialect, in which the speech of Aberdeen was hardly distinguishable from that of Yorkshire, down to the end of the fourteenth century; soon after which date, the use of it for literary purposes survived in Scotland only. The chief literary dialect, in the earliest period, was Northumbrian or A nglian, down to the middle of the ninth century.

Genres: Linguistics, Language, Nonfiction, Academic, History

139 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1912

About the author

Walter William Skeat, English philologist, educated at King's College School (Wimbledon), Highgate School, and Christ's College, Cambridge, of which he became a fellow in July 1860. The noted palaeographer T. C. Skeat was his grandson.

In 1878 he was elected Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge. He completed Mitchell Kemble's edition of the Anglo-Saxon Gospels, and did much other work both in Anglo-Saxon and in Gothic, but is perhaps most generally known for his labours in Middle English, and for his standard editions of Chaucer and Langland's Piers Plowman.

As he himself generously declared, he was at first mainly guided in the study of Chaucer by Henry Bradshaw, with whom he was to have participated in the edition of Chaucer planned in 1870 by the University of Oxford, having declined in Bradshaw's favour an offer of the editorship made to himself. Bradshaw's perseverance was not equal to his genius, and the scheme came to nothing for the time, but was eventually resumed and carried into effect by Skeat in an edition of six volumes (1894), a supplementary volume of Chaucerian Pieces being published in 1897. He also issued an edition of Chaucer in one volume for general readers, and a separate edition of his Treatise on the Astrolabe, with a learned commentary.

His edition of Piers Plowman in three parallel texts was published in 1886; and, besides the Treatise on the Astrolabe, he edited numerous books for the Early English Text Society, including the Bruce of John Barbour, Pierce the Ploughman's Crede, the romances of Havelok the Dane and William of Palerne, and Ælfric's Lives of the Saints (4 vols.). For the Scottish Text Society he edited The Kingis Quair, usually ascribed to James I of Scotland, and he published an edition (2 vols., 1871) of Chatterton, with an investigation of the sources of the obsolete words employed by him.

He is buried at the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge.

Reviews

[Boris Glebov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite being quite brief, this book is packed with a wealth of information, examples, and documentary references. Personally, I most enjoyed maybe the first third of the book, which discusses not only the early English dialects, but also their history and role in English culture and literature. Later discussions becomes much more technical, focusing on geographic and philological specifics that are a bit dense to someone not already intimately familiar with distribution of English towns and counties, or peculiarities of local accents and dialects.

[Anie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brief, but with quite a bit of good introductory information on the history of English dialects in the medieval period.

[Avis Black · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rather technical but contains some interesting tidbits. For example, I never knew that the lowland Scots weren't Celts. They're actually Germanic. The lowland Scots brogue is an old English dialect known as Old Northumbrian, and it was the speech of the Angles (as in Anglo-Saxons). It used to be spoken in the north of England as well, but gradually died out south of the border over the centuries. The Saxon dialect used in the south and Old Northumbrian differed so much that they were not mutually intelligible. Thus the Midlands dialect, the Mercian, which could be understood by all parties, became the ancestor of modern English as we know it.

[Volsung]

This is still a really nice (and concise) basic introduction and overview.