The Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP) is an online database designed for the study of eighteenth-century English phonology, which will allow users to investigate the social, regional and lexical distribution of phonological variants in eighteenth-century English. It will serve as a source bank for quantitative and qualitative studies, thereby meeting the demands of the growing research community in historical phonology and dialectology (e.g. Honeybone & Salmons 2015), and in Late Modern English in general (e.g. Mugglestone 2003, Hickey 2010).
The database incorporates data from pronouncing dictionaries published in the second half of the eighteenth century in the form of IPA transcriptions. We have annotated as many of the example words used to illustrate John Wells’ (1982) Standard Lexical Sets of vocalic variants as can be found in the selected sources, to which we have added supplementary sets of consonantal variants. This totals 1,959 example words for each of the 11 dictionaries consulted to date, including 1,395 example words for vowel sets across 27 different lexical sets and 564 items across 6 consonant lexical sets.
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Project Team
- Professor Joan Beal (Principal Investigator – University Sheffield)
- Dr Nuria Yáñez-Bouza (Compiler and Database Manager – Universidade de Vigo)
- Dr Ranjan Sen (Co-Investigator – University Sheffield)
- Dr Christine Wallis (Research Associate – University of Sheffield)
- Ryan Bloor (Developer – The Digital Humanities Institute)
- Michael Pidd (Director – The Digital Humanities Institute)