Talk Dialect White Paper

Posted On 01/11/2025

By Nikki Wordsmith
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Talk Dialect White Paper
9am 1st November 2025
Nikki Wordsmith

The Vision

To record, preserve, and revitalise England’s dialect languages that are used in every front room, classroom and pub of this country.

Executive Summary

Talk Dialect is a national initiative to collect, preserve, and revitalise the dialects of England for the benefit of the public and future generations to come.

For the first time, England will have one central digital dialect community and resource in one time and place.

By everyone, for everyone, for ever.

The method for collecting all these dialect words, phrases, slang and nicknames etc will be uniquely fun and uniquely informative.

Talk Dialect got its spark from the Nikki Wordsmith Alphabetical Compilation blogs, existing dialect glossaries, community encounters, kind conversations with generous individuals and collective goodwill.

Talk Dialect is an open, collaborative community collecting words old and new and turning them into live word maps in real time.

You can see the new nationwide project at talkdialect.co.uk

Everyday people will power this project at local, regional and national level, with the support of The Talk Dialect Team, gently and respectfully guided by myself.

All together we will pick up from where all the other excellent scholars, dialect projects and enthusiastic language have got us to as of this date 1st November 2025.

We ambitiously hope our work will push forward the amazing dialect language work for generations to come.

And that’s just for starters…

We look forward to talking with you, working with you and building this unique living language resource by everyone, for everyone for ever.

The Backstory

Back in 2022, I began working as a carer for a couple who came from Cumberland — definitely not Cumbria!

As I had done my GCSEs at Trinity School in Carlisle we had a lot of good chats about the local Cumberland dialect words and phrases.

Such as, often when I would come into the house the wife would laugh and say, ‘It can‘t be much fun for you to come here and listen to two auld fogies twining on.’

And from out of many more comments like this, first Alphabetical Compilation blog emerged…

The Evidence For Our Dialects Disappearing

Research has often resulted in the classic linguistis melodrama that dialects are dying out.

Yet the BBC discovered with their Voices Project, England’s, that yes some of our dialects are indeed declining. But the also discovered that they are also evolving too.

For the dying out side of the dialect story , this much is true on the old books dictionary data. Urbanisations, social mobility and the media itself have been levelling out the old dialect body of words.

However, this is not the full story. England’s rich tapestry of regional dialects, city dialects, home dialects and work dialects to name but a few, are being born every day.

It is Talk Dialect’s humble take that dialects are not dying out so much as aliving in.

And we are setting the country a magnificent goal of trying to collect 1 million unique headterms to prove this.

The beating heart of Talk Dialect is to be a clarion call to record AND revitalise our closest communications – our idolects and our sociolects – or in other more down to earh words: our own way of talking to each other.

Key categories where we are looking for the new words to add to 80k collect by Joseph Wright in 1898 include:

• Dialects.
• Phrases.
• Sayings.
• Slang.
• Nicknames.
• Poems.
• Literature.

We must act now and act quickly so we have a policy of old people first.

This isn’t total extinction — yet — but a shift toward a more standardized “Estuary English” or Received Pronunciation (RP)-influenced speech, driven by urbanization, media, education, and migration.

British National Corpus (BNC) and its 2010s extension, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (adapted for UK data), quantify dialect markers.

A 2020 study in Journal of Sociolinguistics analyzed BNC data: traditional dialect grammar e.g. “I were” instead of “I was” in Yorkshire dropped from 15% prevalence in 1960s recordings to under 3% in 2010s youth speech.

Urbanization: The Office for National Statistics (ONS) reports 83% of England’s population urban in 2021 (up from 70% in 1961), means more mixing of dialects.

A 2017 UCL study on London speech found “Multicultural London English” blending Scouse, Brummie, and immigrant influences, diluting pure forms — e.g. glottal stops (t-dropping) now universal among 18–24-year-olds, per ONS accent surveys.

Population mobility: Post-Brexit migration and remote work have spread “neutral” speech. The 2023 English Dialects App (University of Essex) crowdsourced data from 10,000 users, showing 55% of responses from under-35s lacking region-specific vocabulary, compared to 20% from over-55s.

So there are downward trends. Important to remember that the mechanism of dialects is more to change than disappear.

What’s Causing The Dialect Decrease?

On the one hand, some drivers of this dialect decrease is connected to a shrinking data pool and negative social mobility.

Papers from organizations like The Sutton Trust discuss how accents and dialects can lead to prejudice and hinder opportunities, advocating for greater acceptance of accent diversity.

Also other white papers in this area suggest automatic speech recognition technology is more limited with dialects. These systems often operate on a “default” accent assumption, making other dialects less visible or less accurate.

On the other hand however, there are also education and cognitive benefits to communicating in dialect.

Research, such as that highlighted by The Conversation, suggests that being bi-dialectal (speaking two dialects) can have cognitive advantages similar to bilingualism.

In conclusion: The mechanisms driving the downward trajectory of dialect use are clearly complex. But we must remember it is only a tenth of the story.

The Talk Dialect Project Risks

One thing is blindingly obvious with a project of this nature — time is against us.

The evidence demonstrates this on the current dataset.

And if you listen around in your own local community, the older people who speak in dialect are the last of a kind who talk like this each other and in everyday use.

Talk Dialect respectfully acknowledges this last and ultimate limitation of the project.

We urge everyone to talk to their grandparents and ask them for their favourite dialect words, family sayings and local phrases today

What The Talk Dialect Project Does

While evidence points to decline, dialects aren’t vanishing entirely — they’re hybridising and live in places where time has, if not quite stood still, maybe just fallen asleep for a while.

Places like Devon farms, rural Cumbrian villages and other wonderful old couples who chat with their carers and share exquisite old terms and phrases that resonate through the years.

On top of these time capsule people and pocket places of well-preserved dialect, there are also revitalisation efforts, like my neighbouring Euxton Dialect Society.

Tony, from Euxton Dialect Society kindly donated their glossary to me for the Alphabetical Compilation of Lancashire Dialect, Words and Slang. Many of these dialect organisations exist across the country.

Also close to home was Manchester Voices a 2021 research project led by Professor Rob Drummond of MMU. This project explored accents, dialects and identities that make up Greater Manchester.

Going further back, there are also the BBC’s dialect archives which preserve recordings.

Global interest via YouTube also sustains some awareness.

If urban dominance suggests further erosion we must at least try to counter this.

Good policy, funding streams and proactive people like us pulling together on the Talk Dialect project should help.

With creativity, determination and luck we will reach the dialect parts of England that have never been reached before.

What Talk Dialect Will Do

• Preserve every type of regional voice from Carlisle to St Ives to Thanet to Clacton-on-Sea to Marshall Meadows through city and county.
• Keep dialects alive through public participation and digital permanence.
• Build a global model for linguistic heritage, starting in England.

How It Works

1. Central Platform
   A single landing page at talkdialect.co.uk links to 39 dedicated wiki pages—one per historic county, our urban areas and how we speak as individuals, in groups now and from the past. There is also a third part of how dictionaries are actually used that is very rarely discussed let alone put alongside each other to help the reader fully understand how language used.
2. Community Leaderboards
   Users upload:
   • Dialect words, slang, catchphrases.
   • Audio pronunciations linked out to social media posts.
   • Attributed entries (e.g., “Mi gran said ‘gradely’ – Keith, Hesketh Bank”).
3. Online (and Onchain forthcoming)
   Entries are stored digitally and on blockchain for immutability and transparency, including a digital currency $TALKDIALECT to be minted to incentivise people to participate and offer community rewards for Web 3.0 future-proofing.
4. 2026: Mass Upload
   With public input + AI, we are ever optimistic of making our gains 25k of terms each to reach our 1 million unique headterms goal.
5. 2027: Talk Dialect Bus Tour
   Talk Dialect will reach you. We are fund-raising to build a bespoke bus especially for reaching far out places in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and we will meet and chat and collect words and stories from beautiful people all over these 4,400 islands.
6. To be discovered…

Dialect Examples

Real Life Lancashire Entries:

Gradely (proper/great) – “Mi fathers gett’n a gradely tractor.” – Keith Sutton, Hesketh Bank 

Blackpool Illuminations (too many lights/traffic) – “It’s like Blackpool Illuminations in ‘ere!” – Ann Smith, Adlington 

Put wood inth’ole (shut the door) – “Put wood inth’ole, it’s cowd!” – John Thorpe, Adlington

Sample Yorkshire Dialect Entries:

Nowt (nothing) – “There’s nowt so queer as folk.” 

Laikin’ (playing) – “Them bairns are laikin’ in t’beck.” 

Tarra (goodbye) – “Tarra, love—mind how tha goes.” 

Sample Cornish Dialect Entries:

• Dreckly (soon, eventually) – “I’ll do it dreckly, my ‘ansum.” 
• Emmet (tourist) – “The emmets are swarmin’ the harbour again.” 
• Proper job (well done) – “That’s a proper job, me lover—pasty’s perfect.”

Future Goals

• Link each wiki to Wikipedia for global access. (Pitch to be confirmed.)
• Expand to Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and the 200+ other countries around the world.
• Thus, create the world’s first open, living atlas of dialect language heritage.

Why It Matters

Dialects are not relics — they are identity, memory, and connection.

Talk Dialect ensures the languages of our ancestors don’t just survive in books, but live in real people in real time in real life. Not just as voices, online and onchain.

An extra bonus of this project is we are hoping it will create stepping stone from Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary for people to talk more dialect than ever before and for generations to come.

Join us. Add your family’s words and sayings.

Let’s get our country talking together again, better than ever.

talkdialect.co.uk | Launching 23rd April 2026

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