A Bibliographical List Of The Works That Have Been Published Or Are Known To Exist In Ms Illustrative Of The Various Dialects Of English

The Victorians and English Dialect tells the story of the Victorians' discovery of English dialect, and of the revaluation of local language that was brought about by the new, historical philology of the nineteenth century. Regional dialects came to be seen not as corrupt or pernicious, but rather as venerable and precious. The book examines the work of the ground-breaking collectors of the 1840s and 1850s, who first alerted their contemporaries to the importance of local dialect - and also to the perils that threatened it with extinction. Tracing the connection between dialect and literature, in the flourishing of dialect poetry and the foregrounding of regional voices in Victorian fiction. It goes on to explain how the antiquity of regional dialects cast light on the national past - the Celts, Anglo-Saxons, and Vikings - and how dialect study was also at the heart of the discovery of local folklore and oral culture: old words, old customs, old beliefs. And it tells the story of the three great monuments of Victorian dialect study that marked the apogee of regional philology: the 80 publications of the English Dialect Society (1873-96), an organization run by a committee of journalists and local historians in Manchester; the nationwide survey of The Existing Phonology of English Dialects (1889), which listened in on local speech in market squares and third-class railway carriages; and the multi-volume English Dialect Dictionary (1898-1905), which collected all the previous labours together, and made an enduring record of Victorian dialect.

Volume 2 treats, in great detail and, at times quite innovatively, the individual stages of development of the study of language as an autonomous discipline, from the growing awareness in 17th and 18th century Europe of genetic relationships among a host of languages to the establishment of comparative-historical Indo-European linguistics in the 19th century, from the generation of the Schlegels, Bopp, Rask, and Grimm to the Neogrammarians and the application of the comparative method to non-Indo-European languages from all over the globe. Typological linguistic interests, first synthesized by Humboldt, as well as the development of various other non-historical endeavours in the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, such as language and psychology, semantics, phonetics, and dialectology, receive ample attention.