The Juto-Kentish Dialect Boundary

Abstract

proper. This holds good particularly of the Kentish e, e for the i-mutated PrG u, u, which became y, y in standard West-Saxon and f, u (= [ii]) in southern ME. In his Handbuch der mittelenglischen Grammatik' Richard Jordan assigns to what he calls the 'e-area,' besides Kent, the south-eastern Midlands (i.e. Middlesex, Essex, Suffolk) and, south of the Thames, the counties of Sussex and Surrey, the latter, however, with some hesitation. More recently the publication by the English Place-Name Society of The Place-Names of Surrey (1934) has revealed that in the relevant Surrey material 'the e-forms tend to be among the earliest.'2 Naturally uand i-forms also occur, which may indicate that Surrey was originally a mixed dialect. As I propose to show in what follows, even other districts should be added to Jordan's e-area. Such an annexation, however, does not solve at a stroke their dialectal classification. The close linguistic affinity between Kent and the neighboring counties frequently renders it difficult to decide whether a phonological feature should be labelled as Kentish or south-eastern.3 Dialects behave like the colors of the spectrum: they shade off imperceptibly into each other. Thus if the pure or ideal Kentish dialect may, by way of illustration, be represented by yellow, there is a wide range of green until we reach the blue of the northern dialects and an equally wide range of orange before we reach the red of the south-western and the purple of the north-western dialects. For this reason the term south-eastern seems preferable unless greater precision is required or made possible through the evidence of early Kentish colonization in the district under consideration. In that case the archaeological and historical aspect becomes of prime importance for the dialectological interpretation of the linguistic material.