Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1901365 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-10
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 186 pages

Customer Reviews

Dictionary of Surrey English
Language is a precious possession, deserving of careful conservation. In his work on the dialect of Surrey, Granville Leveson Gower (GLG) preserves a form of English spoken at the end of the nineteenth century by some inhabitants of the southern English county of Surrey.
With the passage of more than a century much of the distinctive language of Surrey which GLG records has been lost, with his work providing one of the few surviving records. Within Surrey itself just a faint echo of the language recorded by GLG may remain. Surrey as a county has struggled to maintain its identity, as a result of the ravages of boundary changes, along with the incursions of London's suburban growth, though there are still people living in Surrey today who will recognize in their own speech some of the forms which can reasonably be called Surrey dialect and which have been recorded by GLG.
As a curious contrast to the general decline of dialects, a few Surrey linguistic forms recorded by GLG have sprung from the confines of a county to become commonplace in the standard English of the early twenty-first century. Surrey is one of the sources of the new, global English.
Today there is a place for a dialect dictionary as a part of our total store of knowledge about the English language. The worldwide importance of English means that no dialect of English should be neglected, and it is high time that a Surrey dialect dictionary should be available in print.