The Survey of English Dialects was undertaken between 1950 and 1961 under the direction of Professor Harold Orton of the English department of the University of Leeds. It aimed to collect the full range of speech in England and Wales before local differences were to disappear. Standardisation of the English language was expected with the post-war increase in social mobility and the spread of the mass media. The project originated in discussions between Professor Orton and Professor Eugen Dieth of the University of Zurich about the desirability of producing a linguistic atlas of England in 1946, and a questionnaire containing 1,300 questions was devised between 1947 and 1952.
   313 localities were selected from across of England, the Isle of Man and some areas of Wales close to the English border. Priority was given to rural areas with a history of a stable population. When selecting speakers, priority was given to men, to the elderly and to those who worked in the main industry of the area, for these were all seen as traits that were connected to use of local dialect. One field worker gathering material claimed they'd to dress in old clothes to gain the confidence of elderly villagers. Most of the recordings see locals discussing their local industry, but one of the richest dialects found in the survery, that at Skelmanthorpe in West Yorkshire, discussed a sighting of a ghost.
   The survey seems to have been more urban-focused in Yorkshire; recordings from Leeds, Sheffield and York were all taken whilst the sites Wibsey and Thornhill are suburbs of Bradford and Dewsbury respectively rather than rural villages. Most sites were small villages, but there are some that were close to urban centres. A recording was taken from Hackney in East London. Nowhere within a ten-mile radius of Manchester was surveyed.
   404,000 items of information were gathered, and these were published as thirteen volumes of "basic material" beginning in 1962. The process took many years, and was prone to funding difficulties on more than one occasion.
   The basic material had been written using specialised phonetic shorthand unintelligible to the general reader: in 1975 a more accessible book, A Word Geography of England was published. Harold Orton died soon after in March, 1975. The Linguistic Atlas of England was published in 1978, edited by Orton, John Widdowson and Clive Upton Two further publications have been produced from the survey's material, Survey of English Dialect: The Dictionary and Grammar (1993) and An Atlas of English Dialects (1996), both co-authored by Upton and Widdowson.
   A large amount of "incidental material" from the survey wasn't published. This is preserved at the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture, part of the School of English of the University of Leeds.

Bibliography (selection)

• McDavid, Raven I., Jr. (1981). "Review of The Linguistic Atlas of England, by Harold Orton, Stewart Sanderson and John Widdowson." American Speech 56, 219–234.
• Fischer, Andreas and Daniel Ammann (1991). An Index to Dialect Maps of Great Britain. Varieties of English Around the World. General Series 10. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
• Kolb, Eduard (1966). Phonological Atlas of the Northern Region: The Six Northern Counties, North Lincolnshire and the Isle of Man. Bern: Francke.
• Meier, Hans Heinrich (1964). "Review of Introduction by Harold Orton and The Basic Material, Volume I by Harold Orton and Wilfrid J. Halliday." English Studies 45, 240–245.
• Orton, Harold (1971). Editorial Problems of an English Dialect Atlas. In: Burghardt, Lorraine H. (ed.): Dialectology: Problems and Perspectives. Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee, 79-115.
• Orton, Harold and Eugen Dieth (1952). A Questionnaire for a Linguistic Atlas of England. Leeds: Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society.
• Orton, Harold and Nathalia Wright (1974). A Word Geography of England. New York: Seminar Press.
• Orton, Harold et al. (1962-71). Survey of English Dialects: Basic Materials. Introduction and 4 vols. (each in 3 parts). Leeds: E. J. Arnold & Son.
• Upton, Clive, David Parry and J. D. A. Widdowson (1994). Survey of English Dialects: The Dictionary and Grammar. London and New York: Routledge.
• Upton, Clive and J. D. A. Widdowson (2006). An Atlas of English Dialects. 2nd ed. London and New York: Routledge.
• Viereck, Wolfgang (1990). The Computer Developed Linguistic Atlas of England. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
• Viereck,Wolfgang and Heinrich Ramisch (1997). The Computer Developed Linguistic Atlas of England 2. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Sites for the survey

Wales

Flintshire