Background

Many of the most salient social, regional and national variants in present-day English phonology, such as the North-South divide in the pronunciation of words like strut in British English, presence/absence of /r/ in words like car, and the pronunciation of words like bath with long or short vowels stem from innovations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The latter century in particular was also a time in which the social value of pronunciation became salient. Yet more attention has been paid to the grammar of this period than to its pronunciation, largely due to the greater access to written data provided by electronic corpora of Late Modern English texts. Beal (1999) and Jones (2006) draw on information provided by pronouncing dictionaries and other orthoepistic works for their accounts of Late Modern English pronunciation. However, these primary sources are not easily accessible due to the variety of notation systems used. This project involves the construction of a searchable database which will allow users to investigate the social, regional and lexical distribution of phonological variants in eighteenth-century English.