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- The Survey of English Dialects was undertaken between 1950 and 1961 under the direction of Professor Harold Orton of the English department of the University of Leeds. It aimed to collect the full range of speech in England and Wales before local differences were to disappear. Standardisation of the English language was expected with the post-war increase in social mobility and the spread of the mass media. The project originated in discussions between Professor Orton and Professor Eugen Dieth of the University of Zurich about the desirability of producing a linguistic atlas of England in 1946, and a questionnaire containing 1,300 questions was devised between 1947 and 1952. 313 localities were selected from England, the Isle of Man and some areas of Wales close to the English border. Priority was given to rural areas with a history of a stable population. When selecting speakers, priority was given to men, to the elderly and to those who worked in the main industry of the area, for these were all seen as traits that were connected to use of local dialect. One field worker gathering material claimed they had to dress in old clothes to gain the confidence of elderly villagers. Most of the recordings are of inhabitants discussing their local industry, but one of the richest dialects found in the survey, that at Skelmanthorpe in West Yorkshire, discussed a sighting of a ghost. The literature usually refers to the "four urban sites" of Hackney, Leeds, Sheffield and York. The survey does seem to have been generally more urban-focused in West Yorkshire. The sites Carlton, Thornhill and Wibsey were within the then boundaries of Pontefract, Dewsbury and Bradford respectively. Also, Ecclesfield and Golcar were urban districts in the West Riding. Outside of London and West Yorkshire, nowhere near to a large city was examined. 404,000 items of information were gathered, and these were published as thirteen volumes of "basic material" beginning in 1962. The process took many years, and was prone to funding difficulties on more than one occasion. The basic material had been written using specialised phonetic shorthand unintelligible to the general reader: in 1975 a more accessible book, A Word Geography of England was published. Harold Orton died soon after this in March, 1975. The Linguistic Atlas of England was published in 1978, edited by Orton, John Widdowson and Clive Upton Two further publications have been produced from the survey's material, Survey of English Dialect: the Dictionary and Grammar (1993) and An Atlas of English Dialects (1996), both co-authored by Upton and Widdowson. A large amount of "incidental material" from the survey was not published. This is preserved at the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture, part of the School of English of the University of Leeds. An entire book was written based in part on the findings at Egton in the North Riding of Yorkshire, which had such an isolated dialect that it was akin to a separate language.
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