Joseph Wright (1855-1930) was a truly
remarkable English scholar. Growing up in
extreme poverty without compulsory school
education and disfavored by many years of
child work, he still pursued an
academic career as a philologist and
managed to become a professor of
comparative philology at the University of
Oxford.
English Dialect Dictionary and EDD Online
Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary (1898-1905) is the most
comprehensive English dialect dictionary ever written, documenting in
detail every dialect of English in the British Isles and Ireland, as well as
the USA, Canada, South Africa, and other colonial regions. In a long-term
project run at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, over the last 15 years,
it has been brought to life digitally as a freely available database resource,
EDD Online, which, by its sophisticated interface, provides access to this
unique collection of dialect data. The time covered is the Late Modern
English period (1700-1903), that is, a time when regional dialects where
still hardly superimposed by social criteria.
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“A magnificent toolkit.”
- Clive Upton
“Brilliant!”
- David Crystal
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New publication by the initiator and director of EDD Online:
Markus, Manfred. English Dialect Dictionary Online: A New Departure in
English Dialectology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
This book is a comprehensive user guide to
EDD Online, showing how to get the most out
of this unparalleled resource with step-by-step
instructions, illustrated with handy screenshots.
It also considers dialectological issues from
phonetics to pragmatics, and how searches can
be tailored to specific linguistic concerns, from
dialectology to fields such as historical
linguistics, corpus linguistics, lexicography and
sociolinguistics.
“An exceptional resource which ... deserves nothing but
praise and gratitude.”
- Javier Ruano-García