Jonnie Robinson – författare

A thesaurus of present-day vernacular English from Berwick-upon-Tweed to the Channel Islands, this unique record of everyday English celebrates established regional dialects, emerging new varieties and colloquial forms young and old. Based on a prestigious nationwide survey, BBC Voices Recordings, it documents the linguistic landscape of England, Wales and the Channel Islands in the 21st century, and includes over 3000 separate entries, drawn from over 200 locations across the country. Each entry contains information about the term's origins, location and the social distribution of its users. With links to original sound files and cross-references to complementary dictionary sources, it is an authoritative reference work for academic linguists, but its accessible presentation also makes it suitable for creative audiences and non-specialist language enthusiasts seeking authentic, up-to-date information on British English dialect and slang, and for English language teachers and learners as an invaluable educational tool.

With over 2500 separate entries – from allt to zonked – captured in conversations from Whalsay to Annalong via Castletown, this Thesaurus takes a stroll through the fitpads, ginnels, pendies and vennels of Scotland, Northern Ireland and the Isle of Man. Entries contain additional information about a term’s origins, location and the social distribution of its users. Based on a prestigious nationwide survey, it is an authoritative reference work for academic linguists and an invaluable educational tool for language teachers and learners, creative audiences and non-specialist enthusiasts seeking access to authentic, up-to-date information on vernacular English and Scots. The data derives from the BBC Voices Recordings, a collaboration between BBC Local and Nations Radio, the University of Leeds and the British Library Sound Archive to document the linguistic landscape of the UK at the start of the 21st century.

This volume will provide a comprehensive yet accessible description of East Midlands English, an area of neglect in linguistic research. Existing publications, which aggregate the findings of earlier surveys and more recent localised studies presenting an overview of regional speech in the UK, are either lacking up-to-date research data from the East Midlands or simply ignore the region. A coordinated survey of dialects of the East Midlands was part of the Survey of English Dialects (SED) in the 1950s. This data is now over sixty years old and focuses almost exclusively on broad rural dialect speakers. This book will fill the knowledge and literature gaps by comparing vernacular speech in different urban and rural locations in the East Midlands, and examining whether the East Midlands is a 'transition zone' between the North and South. Recordings held by the British Library will be used, and will be supplemented with recordings made with local speakers.Language in the East Midlands is distinctive and there is considerable regional variety, for instance, between speech in the major urban centres of Nottingham, Derby and Leicester. Bringing out this regional variation will also improve our wider understanding of language variation in English. The concept of the East Midlands in itself is not a clear one, and this volume aims to address such issues and to examine what makes the East Midlands an area of itself and what this area includes.