Passage 7/8

FionaDouglas — 8 years ago

Some of your visitors will be family groups, and they present a ready-made opportunity for this type of work. However, I think we can make it work meaningfully for other types of visitors too. Children from school groups could be encouraged to go home and ask their parents and grandparents about their usage, and this would usefully connect with the National Curriculum’s interest in language varieties and dialect. Groups of older visitors or special interest groups might welcome the opportunity to reminisce about their own families’ usage, and so on. (See also the point made elsewhere about family tree-type dialect diagrams via the website.) In addition, we know the names of the original people contacted by the Survey of English Dialects. Most were older people living in rural locations, often on farms. We could build in a valuable local heritage element by seeing whether there are any descendants still living in the area, and ask them to give us a sample of their language/dialect as a time and familial comparison. Your local networks and project ambassadors might relish the opportunity to get involved in this sort of work. So, tell us what you think about these opportunities, what you think might work best, and what resourcing we would need to put in place to help you achieve them.