ABSTRACT
The vast majority of native English speakers around the world differ linguistically from one another relatively little, with more differentiation in their phonetics and phonology than at other linguistic levels. Most English people, for example, betray their geographical origins much more through their accents than through their vocabulary or grammar. This vast majority speaks mainstream varieties of English, standard and non-standard, which resemble one another quite closely, and which are all reasonably readily mutually intelligible. Traditional dialects, on the other hand, are spoken by a minority of the English-speaking population. These dialects differ very considerably from Standard English, from other mainstream varieties and from each other. Traditional dialects are of particular interest to us precisely because they do diverge most markedly at the grammatical level from the already relatively well-known standard and other mainstream varieties of English.
