In Your Words: Dialect and Heritage Project
This University of Leeds led project is bringing our dialect heritage out of the archives and into the community.
Supported by a National Lottery Heritage Grant awarded to the University in 2019, the project will enable the sharing of material from Leeds University Library Special Collections and the Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture.
The School of English at the University of Leeds is leading on the project, working with five partner museums:
- Avoncroft Museum of Historic Buildings
- Dales Countryside Museum
- Ryedale Folk Museum
- Museum of East Anglian Life
- Weald & Downland Living Museum
The extensive archives will be made more accessible to the public through links with Museum collections, special events and community activities. Researchers will continue the work of the Survey of English Dialects and the Leeds Institute of Dialect and Folk Life Studies by updating the most comprehensive survey ever undertaken of the dialects of England.
How are we involved?
The Dialect and Heritage project is a wonderful opportunity to share the amazingly rich dialect recordings and fascinating associated archive material held at Leeds University, with the communities from which they were collected. We hope to link recordings with our own collections and bring the objects we hold to life through the voices of those who once used them. By capturing a snapshot of family dialect today, we also hope to see how much or how little has changed in the last century. We can’t wait to share and gather material through community based events, shows and on site activities.
See also
- The University of Leeds Dialect and Heritage project page
- The Dialect and Heritage twitter feed – for updates on the project
- The Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture website