Dialect & Oral History: The East Midlands

Project Overview

The materials provided within the pages of this website form the outputs of a collaborative research project conducted by researchers from the University of Leicester and Nottingham Trent University. This British Academy funded project concerned itself with identifying variation and potential changes in the East Midlands dialect that can be observed to have taken place over the last century. In order to address a gap in previous linguistic research in the area, this study aimed to examine a number of recorded oral history interviews that were conducted in the latter half of the last century and compare those with interviews conducted more recently.

In approaching this task, the East Midlands area was divided into four counties for which example recordings of spoken vernacular could be obtained:

Derbyshire

Leicestershire

Lincolnshire

Nottinghamshire

Between 6 and 8 speakers were selected as a representative sample for both male/female, younger/older and urban/rural speakers from each county. A short extract was then taken from each interview from which linguistic notes were made regarding particularly interesting features of non-standard pronunciation (phonology), grammar and lexis (region-specific dialect words). By non-standard, we mean those features that would not be shared by a speaker of Standard English with an RP accent.

If you would like to listen to any of the recordings that were analysed as part of this project and/or read through the accompanying linguistic notes, simply select the location that you would be interested in* by clicking on the appropriate red marker on the map to the right. If you would prefer to view the complete list of interviews and an overview of the salient features that were observed across the region, you can find this under the 'Findings' tab above.

*If you hover your mouse over each of the red dots, the location name will pop up.

 

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