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Stanley Ellis, the son of a modest supervisor in the wool industry, very early in a unique am unexpectedly developing career, would establish his credentials as the leading English dialectologist of his generation through his unrivalled experience as the principal fieldworker for the Survey of English Dialects (SED). The highly ambitious project and remarkable National Survey - one jointly conceived by Harold Orton of the University of Leeds and Eugen Dieth of the University of Zurich, and directed by Orton from its inception in 1946 to its completion in 1962 - remains the definitive, and very likely the last, truly national investigation of the nation's regional 'English' speech possible in England. Fortunately, it was undertaken just before the rich diversity of still localised families, their localised dialects, and their oral culture and richly fed memories, was tragically overtaken by cataclysmic and massive media-induced phonological - and cultural - changes in the late twentieth century. Further, the project had managed to tap into so very many isolated groups often still free from 'vocabulary and speech contamination' by radio, newspapers, and the many more conforming forces that have operated to eliminate the distinctive style of culture so long the birthright of men am women in the places where they were born and had lived their proud and fiercely independent lives. |
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