Description

Under the heading of The Varieties of English Speech an article of mine appeared in The Quarterly Review of July, 1907. The favourable reception accorded to it at the time prompted me to embark forthwith on a larger work dealing with the same subject. Many books both scientific and popular have been written concerning dialect speech and lore, but nearly all of them are special investigations of some particular dialect. I have taken a bolder flight than this. I have not given a detailed account of any one dialect, but I have surveyed them all, and have gathered words, phrases, names, superstitions, and popular customs, here and there, wherever I found something that appealed to me, and that I felt would appeal to others as well as myself. It was impossible to make any one category exhaustive, for such was the mass of material open to me for selection, I might say I was fairly betwattled and baffounded. The only thing to be done was to make my selections fairly representative of the whole.