Chambers and Trudgill have called dialect geography‘a kind of linguistic archaeology’. Is this fair or accurate?

Chambers and Trudgill have called dialect geography
‘a kind of linguistic archaeology’. Is this fair or accurate?


Since the early days of dialectological research, many of its practitioners have been at least partly concerned that it should be historical in its approach. By this we mean that dialect geography (the study of regional variations of phonetic and syntactic aspects of speech) should look to the past, and to older living speakers, for analysis.

The philologist Alexander J. Ellis was very keen to seek out older speakers of regional dialects in England for his late 19th Century work On Early English Pronunciation, of which Volume V was the first major dialectological survey to be published in Britain. In it, Ellis mapped out regional variation in British dialects, showing 10 ‘transverse lines’, which would later become called ‘isoglosses’. He remarked that “collecting country words is looked upon as an amusement”, but this was certainly not his own ...