Talk Dialect is exactly what England needs right now — a digital dialect dictionary community for people and places, and words that are dialect poor and at risk of being forgotten.

Some of the culprits are time’s data gaps, getting smoothed over by modern technology, standardisation bias and, of course the latest tech on the block – AI.

We love a good challenge so it is part of our vision to use these very machines that threated to flatten and narrown our rich English language to broaded and deepen the corpus.

By building a crowdsourced central resource for everyone and cultural community that puts humans at the heart of our dialect dictionaries, we are setting sail into a new paradigm shift for dictionaries.

Our Dialect Rescue plan began with Buckinghamshire on the 23rd of April 2026.

This is supremely apt because one of the most famous folklore sayings from the historic county of Buckinghamshire is: It’s getting dark over Will’s Mother’s.

So far we have lifted Buckinghamshire off the bottom of the leaderboard up to 4th place.

And next our Dialect Detectives will be coming to a county near you soon.

Here is how Talk Dialect is effectively bringing incredible hyperlocal words back to life:

1. Focus on the “Hidden” Vocabulary

While many people know “Geordie” or “Scouse,” our project can shine by finding words used only within a 5-mile radius and making it so easy to add words even a child can do it: 

• The Mining/Industrial Lexicon: Many villages have specific words for tools, weather, or work tasks that died out when the local industry did.
• The Family “Familect”: Often, a village word survives only within a few households. By encouraging people to upload “what my grandad used to say,” you preserve words before they disappear with that generation.

2. Gamify the “Word Map”

Talk Dialect’s use of personal detective profiles and live word maps is its greatest strength. To make it “come to life”:

• The “Border Wars”: Create friendly “competitions” between neighboring towns (e.g., Bolton vs. Bury) to see who can submit the most unique terms for a common object, like a “bread roll” or “left-handed.”
• Visual Etymology: Use the site to show how a word like “mardy” (grumpy) travels along the M1 corridor but stops abruptly at certain county lines.

3. Bridge the Generational Gap

AI is our tool for revitalisation. We use our platform to:

• Oral History Clips: Don’t just record the text; we link out to real life submissions from people, so for one word you can have multiple submissions in multiple formats from audio to video. Hearing and seeing a 90-year-old from a small Cumberland village say “laik” gives the word a soul that a traditional dictionary definition doesn’t provide. See and hear Jill Scott Smith reciting some Lakeland Dialect Poetry by John Richardson.
• Youth Engagement: Use the “slang” section to show younger users that their modern “roadman” or “Gen Z” slang is just the latest chapter in a thousand-year-old story of English evolution.

4. Digital Dialect Rescue Bus and Boat 

[focus on what we have done with Bucks and PotBank Diary and Terry and Eddie Wren and William Dicken the original Cumberland enthusiast ]

and the propsoed bus tour

and how you can help