This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

We meet Professor Higgins in Pygmalion (1912) eavesdropping on the impending subject of his sociolinguistic experiment, taking notes on the wretched flower girl’s stretched, strangulated speech. He boasts of placing a man’s accent to within two miles in London, “sometimes within two streets”.

George Bernard Shaw based the acerbic Higgins in part on the abrasive Henry Sweet, the leading philologist and phonetician of the time. He was one of a cadre of 19th century lexicologists and dialectologists who recorded the demotic before its demise from the threefold threat of factory, railway and schoolhouse.

Yet English dialects had their champions and readership long before they were considered endangered. The botanist and taxonomist John Ray FRS was a pioneer glossarist whose Collection of English Words (1674) was reprinted three times. However, much of this early beachcombing produced alphabetical lists without any standard pronunciation guide — for none existed — and definitions were at the whim of the writer.

Interest in language was the domain of antiquarians, clergymen, schoolmasters and the self-taught. Until the mid-19th century philology was considered as a continental scourge (well exemplified in Charles Neaves’ 1867 poem “Grimm’s Law”), but the dissemination of Darwinian ideas on evolution and anthropology broadened the horizons. Richard Chenevix Trench viewed language as he might geology: “strata and deposits, not of gravel and chalk, sandstone and limestone, but of Celtic, Latin, Saxon, Danish”.

The English Dialect Society (1873–96) was the principal outlet for surveys and later provided the impetus for the English Dialect Dictionary (1898–1905). Founded by Walter William Skeat, the first professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge, the society functioned as a publisher and what we might call today a research network and standards-setting body.

A typical work was A Glossary of Words Used in Holderness (1877). No rural idyll this: low-lying, damp and a gateway to Norse invaders (e.g. “love-begot: a bastard”; “muck-spoot: one who uses filthy language”; “slap-em-imooth-ish: inclined to fight”).

Word-hunters bagged phrases from rural labourers as well as from the carpenter, potter and waggoner. Thomas Hallam travelled widely across Lancashire and Lincolnshire listening and taking notes in third-class railway carriages and recorded his informants: “man in lane … boys playing cricket … tradesmen.”

By the early 1880s their dialects, Sweet wrote, were “perishing fast”. Later, studies of the nomenclature of flora and fauna became common, as did those on the supernatural (e.g. boggles, hobhoulards, Robin Goodfellows). Noting this burgeoning publishing trend for regionalisms, the naturalist J.R. Wise commented drily: “A Derbyshire peasant uses eight different terms for a pigsty.” In saying so, he seems to have anticipated by several decades the debate on “50 words for snow in Inuit”.

Thomas Hardy was alive to his native Dorset dialect, using it liberally between his Wessex characters. Equally, he was aware of language change and the coming era of standardisation: “Mrs Durbeyfield habitually spoke the dialect; her daughter … spoke two languages; the dialect at home, more or less; ordinary English abroad and to persons of quality” (Tess of the d’Urbervilles, 1891).

If Hardy was alive to the dialect, his fellow Dorset writer William Barnes lived for it. Barnes was an English Romantic obsessed with attaining the linguistic purity of English by expunging from it as much French, Latin and Greek as possible, retaining the Anglo-Saxon core.

Accessibility and intelligibility were his aims — phonology and spelling reform carried weight at the time — along with a deep, underlying yearning for a return to a pre-Conquest state of mind. In the process, thousands of neologisms were coined (e.g. “book-lore: literature”; “out-gate: exit”; “speech-craft: grammar”). Barnes ploughed a lonely furrow, later to be branded the “Anglish” movement, but his “Do’set” poetry was admired by Hardy and Tennyson.

The Victorians and English Dialect is a work on searchers, enthusiasts and linguists written by someone who is all three. Matthew Townend’s research into a half-century of English philology is unfalteringly thorough. His accounts of the amateur lexicologists’ spadework in search of rough gems are wrought in detail. Fun is to be had in discovering these words whose currency has long since been totally devalued.

There is much (perhaps a little too much) on publishers, print format, submission forms, archives, subscriptions and so forth. One for the completist dialectologist, without doubt. But there remains plenty here to please the general reader as well.