Folklore Material in the English Dialect Survey

Abstract

THE close association of folklore study and dialect study has a long and honourable history, both in Britain and elsewhere. It first becomes notable in the later part of the seventeenth century, when men of learning began to realise that folklore and dialects were important phenomena in the history of nations and of their languages, and that one could confess to an interest in these vulgar manifestations of society these aspects of popular culture, as later generations learned to say without entirely losing one's respectability. In England differences in regional dialects had of course been noted and commented on much earlier. One remembers from the fourteenth century John Trevisa's translation of the passage in Higden's Polychronicon: 'English men..,. had from the beginning three manner speech, northern, southern, and middle speech in the middle of the land, as they come from three manner people of Germania ...', and he goes on to tell us, in a passage based on Walter of Malmesbury's Gesta Pontificum Anglorum (and dealing therefore with linguistic conditions one hundred and fifty years earlier), that 'men of the east... accordeth more in sownynge of speeche... with men of the west..,. than men of the north with men of the south.' And I think one can detect a familiar ring of prejudice echoing across the centuries when Trevisa the Cornishman goes on to say that Northumbrian, or north-country, speech 'is so sharp, slitting (piercing), and frotyng (grating) and unschape (shapeless) that we southern men that language unnethe understonde.'