Next week, at midday on Thursday, 23rd April 2026 — Shakespeare’s birthday and deathday, and St George’s Day — Talk Dialect steps out to put our best foot forward to help those who have walked before us and are working now to help record dialect languages.

Talk Dialect is the first English digital dialect community, all in one central place for all time, and we aim to help record and revitalise these types of words before they disappear forever out of our lives.

From this baseline we will build a new type of digital dialect dictionary too. One that has old people and self-expression and creativity at the heart of everything we do.

One thing we are really excited about is creating and coining new words and phrases to help all people express themselves better and create a whole new bank of words in the wake of dialect levelling and algo-speak flattening.

But before we do that, first we want to heartily acknowledge all those who have been before us and are still tirelessly and meticulously working now with these most interesting and meaningful of words — dialect.

Read on, dear reader, read on!

Key People:

• Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755)
• Rasmus Rask (1787–1832) – One of the founders of historical linguistics.
• Jakob Grimm (1785–1863) – Grimm’s Law (1822) is the basis for historical phonology → crucial for Ellis & Murray.
• August Schleicher (1821–1868) – Created the Stammbaum (family-tree) model → hugely influential in Wright’s grammar.
• Jacob Georg Forster (c.1754–1798) – Among the earliest to treat languages ethnographically.
• John Trotter Brockett (1788–1842) – Glossary of North Country Words.
• Robert Nares (1753–1829) – Collected historical and regional words.
• James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps (1820–1889) – Massive compiler of Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words (1847).
• Walter William Skeat (1835–1912)
• Walter William Skeat (1835–1912) – The most important single predecessor to Murray. Founder of the English Dialect Society (1873), which Joseph Wright later inherited as editor of its dictionary.
• Sir Isaac Pitman (1813–1897) Invented phonetic shorthand → important precursor to Ellis’s phonetic alphabets.
• Henry Sweet (1845–1912) – Major force in English phonetics, influential on both Ellis and Wright.
• JAH Murray – Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland (1873)
• Alexander John Ellis – On Early Pronunciation (1889)
• Joseph Wright – English Dialect Dictionary (1898–1905)
• Elizabeth Mary Wright – Assisted Joseph Wright: proofreading, editing and fieldwork
• Alexander John Ellis – Early phonetics and dialect surveys (19th c.)
• Alexander Hargreaves – ‘A Grammar of the Dialect of Adlington (Lancashire)’ (1903)
• Henry Bradley – Editor, Oxford English Dictionary
• James Murray – Editor, Oxford English Dictionary
• Orton, Sanderson, and Widdowson – Linguistic Atlas of England (LAE)
• Peter Trudgill – Modern sociolinguistics and dialect study
• David Crystal – Popular linguistics, dialect promotion
• Harold Orton – Founder of Survey of English Dialects
• Paul Kerswill – Contemporary dialect change studies
• Mark Davies — creator of the British National Corpus 1994
• Ryan Starkey — Detailed Map of British English Dialects
• Professor Rob Drummond – Co-ordinator of Manchester Voices (2022)
• Manfred Markus is Professor Emeritus of English linguistics and mediaeval English literature at the University of Innsbruck
• Syd Calderbank aka Mr Lancashire and The Lancashire Dialect Reading Group – meets 10.30 a.m. Monday mornings at Euxton Library, Lancashire.

Key Projects / Surveys / Corpora:

• English Dialect Dictionary (EDD) – Joseph Wright, 80k+ words
• The English Dialect Society (1873–1896).
• Survey of English Dialects (SED) – 1950s–1960s, detailed regional data
• Linguistic Atlas of England (LAE) – Mid-20th century, mapping dialect features
• Oxford English Dictionary (OED) – Historical and regional usage included
• British National Corpus (BNC) – Late 20th century, massive text corpus
• British National Corpus (BNC2014) more modern extension of BNC above
• Dialect Maps by Orton, Sanderson, Widdowson – Visual representation of regional speech
• Linguistic Survey of England (LSE)
• Dialect and Heritage Project (University of Leeds)
• EDD Online, a freely available digital database from the University of Innsbruck

Ongoing dialect research projects and modern digital records

• Wiktionary (2002)
• National corpus projects e.g. NOW, COCA, Glosbe
• BBC Voices (2005)
• Our Dialects (2013)
• The English Dialect App (University of Cambridge, 2016)
• International Dialect of English Archive (IDEA) (ongoing)
• Speak for Yersel (Scotland focussed)
• Talk Dialect (2026 ongoing)

The Talk Dialect Team would especially like to thank the Lancashire Dialect Reading Group, who very generously gave Nikki Wordsmith their full Lancashire Dialect Glossary many many moons ago. This group is alive and well, run by Sid Calderbank, aka Mr Lancashire, at 10.30 a.m. Mondays at Euxton Library, Lancashire. It is in this spirit of generosity that Talk Dialect will endeavour to carry the language of dialect light 💡

Please do get in touch if someone or a project is not mentioned so we can add on any key names and projects immediately. Thank You 🙏

For even more on this subject see the endlessly helpful free online dictionary Wiktionary.

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