ABSTRACT
Thus today we are, for the most part, Englishmen not speaking English and not understood by English ears.
The earliest recorded use of the word “dialect,” referring to a manner of speaking, dates from 1577, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.2 John Bullokar’s An English Expositor (1616), an early precursor of the OED, was the first vernacular dictionary to include the term:
Dialect, a difference of some words, or pronunciation in any language: as in England the Dialect or manner of speech in the North, is different from that in the South, and the Western dialect differing from them both…. So every country hath commonly in divers parts thereof some difference of language, which is called the Dialect of that place.3
