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.
