ABSTRACT
Lexis and lexicology have long been the Cinderella of dialectology. In the popular imagination, any conscious notion of dialect is defined by its sounds. Academic study, too, has concentrated largely on morphology and pronunciation at the expense of lexis. The BBC’s Voices project was an inclusive one; its field researchers collected local vocabularies as well as phonologies. It returned highly valuable data on the extent to which regional lexis still exists – a notion that has long attracted even more pessimism than that expressed over the health of locally individualized sounds. Moreover, beyond the findings on the volume of ‘nonstandard’ vocabulary used in modern Britain, the word maps produced by Voices inform in less predictable ways: from them we can make some speculations about the catalysts for regional variation and notably about the subjects around which that variation collects. For like slang, dialect’s closest neighbour, regional vocabulary can be seen to favour particular areas of discourse, and its themes are illuminating.
