We meet professor higgins in Pygmalion (1912) eavesdropping on the impending subject of his sociolinguistic experiment, taking notes on the wretched flower girl’s stretched, strangulated speech. He boasts of placing a man’s accent to within two miles in London, “Sometimes within two streets.”
George Bernard Shaw based the acerbic Higgins in part on the abrasive Henry Sweet, the leading philologist and phonetician of the time. He was one of a cadre of nineteenth-century lexicologists and dialectologists who recorded the demotic before its demise from the threefold threat of factory, railway and schoolhouse.
Yet English dialects had their champions and readership long before they were considered endangered. The botanist and taxonomist John Ray FRS was a pioneer glossarist whose Collection of English Words (1674) was reprinted three times. However, much of this…
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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, December/January 2025