The Survey Of English Dialects On Cd-Rom: The Spoken Corpus Recorded In England 1948-1973

Synopsis

This CD-ROM provides a detailed dialect survey for the whole of England. The SED is a repository of data on the traditional dialects of England in the mid-20th century. During the course of the survey a number of recordings were made as well as detailed interviews from 313 locations from all over rural England. These were originally published as the SED: Basic Material in the 1960s and have been reprinted by Routledge. This was the core data that supplied the material for the SED: Dictionary and Grammar and also the Linguistic Atlas of England . The SED CD-ROM contains 286 of the original 313 recordings, made from the 1950s to the 1970s, which are between 5 and 30 minutes duration. The whole corpus consists of about 60 hours of dialogue. They are invariably of elderly people talking about life, work and recreation, and have not previously been widely available. This resource is aimed at dialectologists, but also at linguistics, those studying variation in world Englishes and many historians. Indeed, this material should be of interest to sociolinguists and phoneticians, as well as researchers working on corpus linguistics both in universities and in the commercial sector.