Dictionary of Surrey English: A New Edition of "A Glossary of Surrey Words by Granville Leveson Gower

by Graeme Davis

The dialect of the English county of Surrey was recorded towards the end of the Victorian age by the antiquarian Granville Leveson Gower in a volume for the English Dialect Society. This present Dictionary makes available a new edition of his work, along with materials setting out the characteristics, history and current position of Surrey English. Today little remains of the traditional Surrey dialect, though those familiar with the county will nonetheless find echoes of it in the speech of many present inhabitants. In recent years the dialect has influenced the speech patterns of the Home Counties, and the new southern English standard has been influential worldwide. Surrey English has its place as one of the many distinctive forms of English worldwide, with its own unique words and forms of expression which are part of the rich heritage of the English language.

186 pages, Paperback

First published August 10, 2007

About the author

Dr. Graeme J. Davis (born 1965) is an English linguist at the University of Buckingham. He holds a PhD in Anglo-Saxon from the University of St Andrews. He has lectured at the Manchester Metropolitan University, University of Northumbria and the Open University.

He is tutor for the University of Buckingham’s Stonehenge MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) and is editor of The Buckingham Journal of Language and Linguistics, which has developed from earlier journals edited by Dr. Davis, including Journal of Language and Linguistics and Lingua et Linguistica. He is series editor of two Peter Lang monograph series, Contemporary Studies in Descriptive Linguistics and Studies in Historical Linguistics. He is also academic advisor to the Fara Heim project for academic research around the history and archaeology of Hudson Bay and the Canadian Arctic.

His research interests include the mediaeval Germanic languages and cultures of the North Atlantic region. His book Contemporary Studies in Old English and Old Icelandic was supported by a British Academy research grant and by the University of Iceland. The Early English Settlement of Orkney and Shetland examines the cultural and linguistic background of the Northern Isles, while Vikings in America sets out the story of the Norse discovery and settlement of North America. Lexicographic work includes Dictionary of Surrey English, while the discipline of surname study has been developed in Research Your Surname and Your Family Tree. An author of more than two dozen books and dozens of articles, Dr. Davis has produced both primary research and popular accounts which seek to make scholarship accessible to a wide audience.