Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English for accepting this volume into the series Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English. In particular, I would like to thank Docent Anneli Meurman-Solin for her very detailed and informative comments on my Cambridgeshire Dialect Grammar. Without her encouragement this work would not have been completed in 2010. My special thanks are also due to Tuuli Tahko, editorial assistant of the eSeries, for the painstaking work she did in converting my study into HTML, and Jukka Tyrkkö for co-ordinating the series. I also value the patience of Simo Ahava, who helped me in many computer problems and prepared pictures, maps and charts of the Cambridgeshire Dialect Grammar, and Joseph McVeigh who listened to and, when needed, corrected the illustrative examples in the Grammar. But above all, it is a pleasant duty to record my gratitude to my informants, without whose generous co-operation this study would not have been possible.