Historic dialect recordings go online
Interviews with ordinary people recorded as part of the most comprehensive survey of English dialects ever carried out are now available to listen to online.
The Survey of English Dialects was conducted between 1946 and 1978 with the aim of recording England’s unique dialects, which were in danger of being lost.
Its archives are now held at the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture at the University of Leeds.
In 2019, following a £530,500 grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the university announced the Dialect and Heritage Project, a three-year initiative to digitise the archive.
The archive is now available at dialectandheritage.org.uk.
Members of the public can see documents and photographs from the survey, and listen to recordings of men and women talking about their lives over 70 years ago.
For example, a housekeeper known as Miss Dibnah, born in 1890, was interviewed in Welwick, Yorkshire, in 1955.
In a recording, she describes in detail her process for baking her own bread, noting, “If you don’t knead it real weel, well, you don’t get good bread.”
The project has also announced The Great Big Dialect Hunt, which invites members of the public to take part in researching modernday English dialects.
You can add your own voice samples and words via the Dialect and Heritage Project website, or at events in five museums this year: the Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings in Worcestershire, Dales Countryside Museum and Ryedale Folk Museum in North Yorkshire, the Food Museum in Suffolk, and the Weald and Downland Living Museum in West Sussex.
Volunteers are also sought to transcribe the dialect recordings, carry out modern-day oral history interviews and help out at events. You can get involved via the site.