Rydland, Kurt: The Orton Corpus

A Dictionary of Northumbrian English 1928-1939This book presents the material of the Orton Corpus, which is a collection of dialect material from Northumberland, Tync and Wear, and County Durham, recorded in the period 1928-1939 as part of a survey of the phonology of Northumbrian dialects. The project was initiated and directed by Harold Orton, who later became co-founder (with Eugen Dieth of Zürich) and director of the Survey of English Dialects, and the collection is named after him. The material of this extensive corpus is now published for the first time. The introduction contains an outline of the history of Orton´s Northumbrian survey, an overview of localities and informants, and a description of the sources and the nature of the material. There is also a thorough discussion of editorial principles as well as explanations of the phonetic transcription and the method of presentation. The main part of the book is an alphabetical dictionary of the material of the Orton Corpus. The dictionary includes over 8000 headwords and some 46000 phonetic entries, and contains a wealth of information about traditional Nortumbrian speech at a time when it remained relatively unaffected by outside influence. The material constitutes an indispensable source of reference for scholars and others with an interest in the pronunciation of Northumbrian English, and of Northern English in general. Kurt Rydland is professor of English Language in the Department of English at the University of Bergen.