Digitising our dialect
How dialect is connecting communities with their heritage
Language is always changing. Speak to anyone under a certain age and you’ll hear words you never knew existed; put the same people in a room with older generations and plenty could get lost in translation.
This is nothing new. The way we speak and the dialects we use have been evolving for centuries. By digitising and sharing material from one of the University’s archive collections, alongside collecting present day dialect and memories, a University of Leeds team has unlocked hidden stories that give fascinating insights into language and everyday life.
The Dialect and Heritage Project is a National Lottery Heritage-funded initiative based at the University of Leeds. The University is collaborating with five museums to present a snapshot of dialect in England today.
“I hatched the initial plan, but it’s taken a big team effort to make it happen,” said Fiona Douglas, who is leading the project.
Fiona is a linguist. She specialises in language and dialect, but this project is about more than that. It’s about heritage, people’s history, their stories. Dialect does more than just show us how people speak – it gives us a unique insight into the lives we live and our sense of belonging.
Fiona explained how the project came about: “I’ve been at Leeds for 20 years now, and when I first arrived, I realised the Brotherton Library’s Special Collections had all this fantastic material on English dialects that had been collected from the 1950s onwards.”
Library colleagues gave Fiona a peek ‘behind the scenes’ where she saw shelves and shelves of rich material, just waiting to be opened up.
There were audio tapes, photographs, handwritten notebooks, word maps, pronunciation maps, and lots of in-depth studies on everything from farming, housekeeping and local trades to customs and beliefs, the weather, Pace Egg plays (an Easter custom inspired by medieval mystery plays), folk medicine and superstitions about witchcraft.
“There was a wealth of riches, hidden away in a university”, she says. “Although it has always been possible to visit the collection, how many people were really going to see it? I felt it would mean much more to the people out there in the communities it came from than it ever could inside the University.”
A germ of an idea that grew into something more
The project started out with partnerships with museums to bring words, pictures and artefacts together.
Fiona explains, “I realised that folk life or living museums had the buildings and objects that matched up with our dialect words, audio recordings and photographs. Whilst we had been collecting words and pronunciations from older people, they had been collecting physical artefacts. If you put those things together, something amazing happens, so we partnered with five such museums from across the country.”
But it took lots of people with different skills to bring everything together. Getting materials out of the archives, digitised and ready for sharing involved lots of behind-the-scenes work from the project’s archivist, Caroline Bolton, University collections specialists Holly Smith, Rosie Dyson and Karen Mee, and a whole team of colleagues from the University’s digitisation studio.
Then it was over to a team of five engagement officers, one in each museum, to build local relationships, develop a programme of public engagement events, and work with the museums to see how they could marry their collections to the University’s.
Fiona and research assistant Rosemary Hall got stuck into devising both the Great Big Dialect Hunt – a dialect survey to gather more information – and the project’s research plans.
External consultants helped design a pop-up dialect kit (including a dialect jigsaw and dominoes, so that younger visitors could take part too) and a website. Project Manager Kathleen McGrath and project assistant Rae Hughes kept everything on track.
Fiona says, “That’s where it really started – the conviction that all this material had real value beyond the university walls.”
Dialects from all walks of life
Working with the community has really helped that value grow. It’s become more tangible, more personal. The team have worked with volunteers and interviewed many members of the public, some of whom are descended from the people in the original audio recordings.
According to Kathleen, that can lead to some surprising discoveries: “Some of the experiences of people who’ve come into contact with this project have really moved me. There was a letter from a lady telling us about a spelling mistake on a sign in Doncaster train station when she was being evacuated during the war. The fact she’d remembered that, then reached out and shared such a personal story with complete strangers … that’s what we’re giving people the opportunity to do.”
One of the great things about this project is that it’s accessible to everybody. People of all ages, nationalities and backgrounds. Everyone has a voice to share and a story to tell. In the 1950s, these voices were mainly collected from older people, particularly men, to get a window on the language of the past.
Some of the people whose voices were collected were born in the 1870s, so you are going right back in history. Women did take part but were usually asked questions about cooking and cleaning. A sign of the times, perhaps! And everyone interviewed had to have a good set of teeth, as pronunciation was really important! But things have changed.
“Our work is different. It’s the Great Big Dialect Hunt, and it’s for everybody. Everybody brings words from their everyday lives, and that’s one of the parts that really excites me,” says Kathleen.
Voices connecting with the past
There is no doubt that words have power. And technology is now unlocking some of that power.
Today we take recording for granted. With smartphones in everyone’s hands, it’s easy to just pick one up and start recording. But back in the day, people didn’t have that kind of technology, meaning many voices were lost. Until now.
“When you meet the grandchildren who are hearing that voice from all that time ago, it’s incredibly emotional,” says Kathleen.
“You can see what this work means to people. The fact it really matters is tangible. People have rediscovered family connections through this, and shared wonderful memories, stories and family history that they would never have known about otherwise. At that point I’m just a bystander - it’s about giving people the opportunity to explore what’s really theirs.”
When you meet the grandchildren who are hearing that voice from all that time ago, it’s incredibly emotional”
While this is a research project, it’s also something special for local communities and much more visceral. It allows people to effectively go back in time and connect with stories and voices and ways of life long since forgotten.
“When I was working on the archives, I had some really great conversations with my grandad,” says collections assistant, Holly.
“Some of the drawings in the response books to the 1950s survey were of old farm wagons. They vary across the country with different regional designs. So, I showed them to my grandad. A few days later he emailed me. He’d mocked up these really technical drawings of how farm wagons used to look when he was a child. They were from all these different angles, properly detailed. I’ve no idea how he could remember it all.”
Holly’s grandad did more than just draw the wagons; he also described them. He remembered the man who used to make them was also the local funeral director and made coffins too.
This project provokes conversations that wouldn’t have happened without it. It brings generations together and connects communities with their past.
Big themes, tiny details
All this emotive work couldn’t happen without the dedication of the team behind it. “I look after the operational side of things,” says Kathleen.
“We have partner museums around the country, and engagement managers looking for people to interview. The work they do isn’t possible from a central place. You need to be in the community making those connections, and I look after that team to try and make the process as smooth as possible.”
Rae assists with this and dived head-first into the project when she first joined. “I was absolutely taken back by what the archive had to offer”, she says. “I was going through the project’s Instagram and showing friends the digitised material, and they got hooked by the 1950s informants talking about bread, cattle and things like that.”
In total, the 1950s survey materials led to the creation of 313 response books, each filled with answers to questions about dialect words, scribbled notes and doodles of memories, plus hundreds of recordings.
Through a painstaking process, this all now lives in the University’s digital repository, and can be accessed via the Dialect and Heritage project’s website and the Special Collections catalogue. People can scroll through history and access insights from hundreds of years ago.
“One of the most challenging things about this is size,” says Fiona. “It’s complex, with big themes and tiny details. There are many, many spreadsheets that sit behind the fun stuff you see on the website.”
But as much as this project has relied on the team behind it, none of it would be possible without the public, who have really taken the project to heart.
One older gentleman hadn’t left his house throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. His daughter persuaded him to go along to an event at the local museum and take part in the dialect project. All masked up, he sat in the corner and watched from a distance, but returned a week later, telling one of the volunteers that the project was the reason he came out of his house and started to experience the world again.
There are many, many spreadsheets that sit behind the fun stuff you see on the website”
Dialect may have changed throughout history, but it’s as important today as it ever was. It’s more than just the way we speak; it’s also our stories, our history and our legacy.
Thanks to the work of the Dialect and Heritage project, it’s something that will now be available for future generations.
About Fiona
Fiona Douglas joined the School of English in 2003. Before that, she was the research assistant for the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech at the University of Glasgow.
She began her academic career focusing on Scottish dialects but since moving to Leeds, she has sought to build on and extend the University of Leeds’ research excellence in English dialects.
About Kathleen
Kathleen McGrath is a project manager on the Dialect and Heritage project. Kathleen is a passionate advocate of celebrating the heritage of everyday lives of the past and of sharing the enjoyment of words.
About Holly
Holly Smith is a Collections Assistant within the University of Leeds’ Special Collections team.
About Rae
Rae Hughes is a Project Assistant on the Dialect and Heritage project.
About Rosemary
Rosemary Hall is a trained oral historian and has a special interest in the overlap between sociolinguistic fieldwork and oral history interviewing.
About Caroline
Caroline Bolton is the Project Archivist on the Dialect and Heritage project.
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