Census of Urban and Rural Language in England and Wales
A comprehensive sociolinguistic survey documenting dialect variation across England and Wales in the 21st century
CURLEW represents a 21st-century successor of the landmark dialect surveys conducted in the 1950s and 1960s – the Survey of English Dialects (SED) and Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects (SAWD).
Our goal is a complete census of English and Welsh dialects, updated for the 21st century. We are recording speakers from all walks of life-urban and rural, young and old — to show how people really speak today.
Following the successful model of the Swiss Dialäktatlas, CURLEW employs ambitious and demographically diverse fieldwork to generate dialectological datasets addressing theoretical and applied questions about language variation and change.
This comprehensive approach captures speech patterns across age groups, urban and rural settings, and diverse social backgrounds-creating a major resource for decades of linguistic research.
Comprehensive mapping of dialects across England and Wales, from urban centers to rural communities
Capturing speech across all age groups, genders, social classes, and ethnic backgrounds
Contemporary approaches reflecting current theoretical frameworks and methodological developments
CURLEW addresses critical gaps in our understanding of contemporary English dialectology through systematic, theoretically-informed research
Systematically record phonological, lexical, and morphosyntactic variation across dialects in England and Wales
Identify patterns of language change in progress and understand their social, geographic, and linguistic conditioning
Create comprehensive, accessible datasets for current and future generations of linguistic researchers
Generate empirical evidence to address fundamental questions about language variation and change
Combining traditional dialectological approaches with contemporary sociolinguistic methods to ensure comprehensive and theoretically rigorous data collection
Four investigators bringing unique and complementary skills to ensure the feasibility and successful execution of this project.
Dialectology of English, University of Bern
Expert in empirical investigations of variability in English, with extensive work on phonological, morphosyntactic and lexical variation. Led development of the English Dialects App (EDA) with over 50,000 users.
36 completed PhD supervisions • 14 research grants
Large-scale Dialect Surveys, University of Bern
Led the SNSF-Eccellenza project on Language Variation and Change in German-speaking Switzerland (2019-2024), serving as the model for CURLEW. Collected data from 1,000+ speakers across 127 localities.
9 doctoral students and 11 major grants
Forensic Speech Science, University of York
Over 30 years of empirical research on variation in English. Expertise in socially structured variation in consonants and vowels, forensic phonetics, and speaker comparison protocols.
35 PhD supervisions • 10 major research grants
Morphosyntactic Variation, University of Oxford
Expert in morphosyntactic variation and change, leading the Tweetolectology project with a 1.2-billion-word corpus of English. Specialist in geospatial diffusion of morphosyntactic variants using GIS and geospatial statistics.
13 doctoral students • 7 major research grants
CURLEW is funded through the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)’s International Co-Investigator Scheme, fostering partnerships between researchers in Switzerland, the United Kingdom and other countries.
Following the successful model of historical UK-Swiss collaboration (Harold Orton at Leeds, Eugen Dieth at Zürich) that produced the Survey of English Dialects, we continue this tradition of international excellence in dialectological research.
SNSF Collaborative Project Funding
International Co-Investigator Scheme with UK AHRC and ESRC
For inquiries about the CURLEW project, please write to us at curlew@unibe.ch
