Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary and Beyond: Studies in Late Modern English Dialectology

One of the rather neglected fields of Late Modern English studies is English Dialectology. This volume includes sixteen papers based on presentations of the workshop Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary and Beyond at the 15th ICEHL in Munich (2008). The book is divided into three sections: The first two refer to the genesis and the structure of the EDD respectively. The third part throws light on other dictionaries, from OED3 to the Bank of Canadian English, and on research related to the Survey of English Dialects. This is the first edition of dialect studies that moves Wright’s remarkable dictionary in the centre of interest, at the same time seeing his contribution to dialectology critically from a modern point of view. Three of the papers are introductions to the book’s sections written by two of the editors. They not only represent the state of the art on Wright’s personal achievement as lexicographer and an in-depth analysis of the EDD’s complex structure, but also include a survey of the development of English dialectology in the early 20th century. The book’s general motivation is to promote the methodological reflection of dialectology in the face of recent corpus linguistics and digitised dictionaries.