The distinction between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ dialects

Another often-used notion in dialectology we would like to question is the separation of dialects into two distinct categories, the ‘Traditional’ and the ‘Modern’. This artificially tidy categorization is not only questionable given the fact of constant language change. It is even more debatable in the light of the fact that, as will be explained below, much of our knowledge of recent distributions of dialect features over wide sweeps of territory in the British Isles continues to be based on surveys now considered to have focused on the ‘traditional’, in the sense that their target was the essentially rural speech of comparatively static communities. (No community is ever wholly static or isolated, of course: there will always be incomers and external contacts, however few these might be in particular communities at certain times.) Nevertheless, the bipartite distinction does have some undoubted merit as an idealization: it reminds us that urbanization and geographical and social mobility have resulted in some accelerated and often quite dramatic changes in speech in recent years. Perhaps it reminds us, too, that language should be seen in its continuous historical (diachronic) as well as its ‘snapshot-in-time’ (synchronic) dimension, that there was a ‘then’ to contrast with the ‘now’. However, we would be wrong to suppose that there is a straightforward, clear-cut distinction between the way English was spoken in the rural communities of half a century ago and as it is in the towns and cities of today, or that change is happening to language now as it has not happened before. Across time there are periods of comparatively rapid and of slower alteration in speech, but language is constantly changing. (And, indeed, the mechanisms of language change occupy the research attention of very many dialectologists today, just as ascertaining the facts of its progress absorbed the efforts of dialect researchers of previous generations.) Furthermore, since human society is in essence the same as it was in the past, a greater understanding of the facts of and reasons for that change today informs our understanding of developments both in the past and into the future.