Wolfgang Viereck

Dialectal Speech Areas in England: Orton's Phonetic and Grammatical Evidence

The English interpretive works are ... disappointing. The 1975 Word Ceo9raplly of ~Fa9land is not a word geography; for it nowhere summarizes, in statement or maps, the characteristic vocabulary of any region in England. One may similarly judge the 1978 Lin9uistic ~4tlas oj t~’a9laad and Eduard Kolb’s somewhat redundant 1979 Aila5 of ~’a9lisll Sounds. In none of these works is the cartography comparable to Kurath’s; their charts treat too many variants with too many symbols. The delineation of English dialect areas from Orton’s B&5ic Natorials (SEO) is yet to come, from someone who will look at patterns rather than items. For the time being there is clearer evidence in Viereck’s 1975a presentation of the grammatical and lexical data in Lowman’s records (49).

The Growth of Dialectology.

Scientific concern about linguistic differences is of fairly long standing. Leaving the oldest, i.e., lexical, form of study (early dialect glossaries and dictionaries) as well as monographs on local dialect aside, 2 and limiting ourselves to geographical linguistic and dialectal studies, we can--in the beginning--group the latter under two fields of research: linguistic ethnology and dialectology. Ethnological research reached its first peak in the 18th century when Russia began to abandon her isolation and Catherine the Second, under the influence of the French Enlightenment, decreed that texts of most of the languages of her polyglot Eurasian empire be compiled. Different versions of the Lord’s Prayer formed part of these multilingual texts. Johann Christoph Adelung was able to collect the Lord’s Prayer in almost five hundred languages and dialects

The Atlas Linguarum Europae - A Brief Presentation

The Atlas Linguarum Europae (ALE) has been in existence for over a quarter century now. Recently fascicle 6 of volume I appeared (Viereck ed. 2002), fascicle 7 is with the publisher in Rome and the manuscripts of fascicle 8 are now being prepared for publication. At our last annual Editorial Board Meeting that was held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, in late May 2006, a number of notions considered for publication in fascicle 9 were presented and discussed. In 2005 Professor Nicolae Saramandu succeeded me as President of ALE and the responsibility for the continuation of the work of ALE has now passed into his hands. The ALE can be called a linguistic atlas of the fourth generation, being preceded by regional and national atlases as well as by atlases of language groups. Atlases of the fifth type, i.e. on entire language families such as Indo-European, or on the final type, namely a world linguistic atlas, do not exist as yet. The ALE is the first continental linguistic atlas. Its frontiers are neither political nor linguistic but simply geographic. The choice of the continent has nothing to do with Eurocentrism but only follows from the present state of research. The linguistic situation in Europe is quite complex. No fewer than six language families are present here: Altaic, Basque, Indo-European, Caucasian, Semitic and Uralic. In these language families altogether 22 language groups, such as Germanic and Romance, can be counted. These, in turn, consist of many individual languages. It thus becomes apparent that the demands on the scholars to interpret the heterogeneous data collected in 2,631 localities from Iceland to the Ural mountains are very high indeed. The ALE is, primarily, an interpretative word atlas. It uses both traditional and innovative methods. Among the former onomasiology and semasiology must be mentioned. Motivational mapping, however, is an innova-

Dialectology and Onomastics

The English of England has already been put on the map in a number of national and regional atlases, on detailed maps as well as on simplified ones. Surprisingly perhaps, there is not yet a comprehensive atlas of English family names. Such a project was begun not too long ago at my Chair of English Linguistics and Medieval English Literature at the University of Bamberg. Apart from sketching the databases and the mapping procedures used in this project, the examples chosen here for presentation will document the close connection between dialectology and onomastics. The examples mirror certain historical developments of English in both the vocalic and the consonantal area. The results will be compared on the one hand with Standard English to show that family names preserve fossilized forms of English and correlated with such aspects as blood group distribution on the other.

Atlas Linguarum Europae. Edited by Mario Alinei et al. Vol. 1: Cartes, deuxième fascicule; Commentaires, deuxième fascicule. Assen, The Netherlands: Van Gorcum. 1986. cxiii + 230

The first fascicle of the ALE appeared in 1983. It was thus the first computerized linguistic atlas ever to appear. Only three years later the second fascicle has now come out, comprising nine lexical maps together with a base map and a map of language groups. Altogether there are now twenty-eight lexical maps available covering the whole of Europe from Iceland to the Ural Mountains in the Soviet Union, even though this coverage is rather uneven, as the base map shows. Over thirty nations in Eastern and Western Europe from Albania to Yugoslavia have participated in this project, from which only Bulgaria withdrew in the early 1980s. It is worth remembering in this connection that the roughly one million Turks living in Bulgaria had to adopt Bulgarian names in 1985. That minorities and less frequently used languages receive very different treatment in western European states, too, can be exemplified by the Republic of Ireland, a state with two official languages of completely unequal numerical weight, whose capital, Dublin, is mentioned on the map only in Irish, Baile Atha Cliath, although the great majority of the population there is English-speaking; and Greece, which ignores or suppresses her minorities completely: only Greek is indicated on the map. There can be no doubt that a European legal framework for the protection of ethnic and linguistic minorities is a worthy goal, although one difficult to achieve. As a consequence of political attitudes, the linguistic maps

Dialectology: An Introduction. By W. Nelson Francis. London: Longman. 1983. ix + 240

Several introductory books dealing with variation in language have appeared within the last few years, reflecting the increasing importance of regioand sociolinguistics. Among those concentrating on English we might mention Chambers and Trudgill 1980, Petyt 1980, and Davis 1983. Tempting though it might be to compare these three books in some detail with Francis’, I will confine myself to the general statement that I believe that Francis’ book will become the standard textbook on the subject. Francis states his purpose clearly (&dquo;a text which surveys the discipline and introduces the student to the methods, goals, and results of dialect study&dquo; [vii]), writes lucidly, explains complicated problems in an intelligible way, chooses his examples carefully, and is, furthermore, reliable in details. In short, the book can be strongly recommended to students.

The Editor Recommends@@@A Bibliography of Writings on Varieties of English, 1965-1983

1. Prefatory Note 2. A bibliography of writings on varieties of English spoken in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland and on attitudes towards them (1965- mid - 1983) (by Viereck, Wolfgang) 3. Index 4. A bibliography of writings on American and Canadian English (1965-1983) (by Schneider, Edgar W.) 5. Index 6. A selective bibliography of English as a world language (1965-1983) (by Gorlach, Manfred) 7. Index

Altenglische Grammatik. Herbert Pilch. Pp. 267. Commentationes Societatis Linguisticae Europaeae I, 1. Munich: Max Hueber Verlag, 1970, and Altenglischer Lehrgang: Begleitband zur Altenglischen Grammatik. Pp. 82. Commentationes Societatis Linguisticae Europaeae I, 2. Munich: Max Hueber Verlag, 1970

English grammar?&dquo; &dquo; There are indeed important innovations in the grammar under review. This is one of the first grammarsl that systematically describes Old English from a synchronic point of view. 2 It has not-as have the standard grammars of Old English--an Indo-Germanic3 orientation. Old English used to be studied with the aim of reconstructing Indo-Germanic, but today we often study Old English in order to understand Modern English in its histori-

Phonological Atlas of the Northern Region: The Six Northern Counties, North Lincolnshire and the Isle of Man. Eduard Kolb. Pp. 390. Bern: Francke Verlag, 1966

&dquo;This book has been a long time in the making. The late Professor Eugen Dieth of Zurich University began the spade-work on it in 1955 after he and Professor Harold Orton, the directors of the Survey of English Dialects [SED], had agreed on a division of labour: Eugen Dieth was to prepare and publish maps, while Harold Orton undertook to edit the material in tabular form&dquo; &dquo; (p. 3). The accompanying list form material had already been published four years and three years prior to the maps: Harold Orton and Wilfrid J. Halliday (eds. ), Survey of English Dialects (B), The Basic Material, Vol. I: The Six Northern Counties and the Isle of Man. Part 1 (Leeds, 1962), Parts 2 3 (Leeds, 1963). That Kolb’s book is a publication parallel to the northern volume of the SED is, however, not apparent at first glance, neither in size, color, nor title. Further-