RYEDALE Folk Museum is taking part in a new project to carry out one of the most comprehensive surveys of England’s dialect thanks to £530,500 of lottery funding.

The University of Leeds’ Dialect and Heritage Project has been awarded the grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund to open up the extensive Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture (LAVC) to the public.

The archive includes the ground-breaking work of the Survey of English Dialects, carried out by nine field workers in the 1950s, and is held in the University of Leeds library’s special collections.

The survey will now be updated and made available online for the first time, with the help of volunteers recruited and trained as oral history along dialect field workers and transcribers.

Through a series of local community outreach events and working with five partner museums from across the country, including Ryedale Folk Museum, the Dialect and Heritage Project will invite people to get involved as a volunteer or by sharing their dialect – regardless of location, background, age or gender.

Researchers are also looking for descendants of the people who took part in the original Survey of English Dialects, which ran from 1946-1978, or with connections to the Institute of Dialect and Folk Life Studies, which was in operation between 1963 and 1983.

From January, a year will be spent digitising the notebooks, photographs, word maps and audio recordings from the original fieldwork.

Further extensive fieldwork will then be undertaken from 2021-23, making new oral history recordings – some of them including descendants of the original survey interviewees.

Jennifer Smith, director of Ryedale Folk Museum, said: “We are delighted to be a part of this project along with the University of Leeds and thrilled that the National Lottery Heritage Fund have endorsed our work with this money.

“Words, dialect and language are all part of our heritage and identity. We all have funny ‘family’ words that have been past down to us or things we say because of where we come from. Ask yourself, do you call it a ‘spelk’, ‘spell’, ‘shive’, ‘spill’ or ‘splinter’?

“We can’t wait to get going with this project and work to understand this intriguing part of our cultural history.”

For more information, go to library.leeds.ac.uk/info/1607/projects/181/dialect_and_heritage