The Voice of the Dead

Abstract

This article comprises a sociolinguistic analysis of the distribution of northern features in two sixteenth-century collections of wills of urban and rural provenance ( York Clergy Wills and Swaledale Wills and Inventories, respectively). It is suggested that there is a correlation between dialect features such as the Northern Subject Rule, the uninflected genitive, and the third person plural pronouns and the urban or rural provenance of the wills as well as, to some extent, the social rank of the testators. This sheds light on how social factors might condition the resilience of dialect features in sixteenth-century northern English.