An English dictionary publisher is rooting out obscure local dialect words in the UK.

Linguists at Collins, an imprint of HarperCollins, are surveying words from seven of Britain's regions, hoping to discover which have completely died out and which are still in use.

Lexicographers are working from a list of two dozen words believed to have disappeared entirely from the English language. They include "wassuck" (pronounced wa-zuhk), a word for "idiot" from the West Midlands, "brawk," a Norfolk expression for "burp," and "hippetyclinch," meaning "limp," from Northumbria, in the north-east of England.

Words fortunate enough to be still in use will be added to the publisher's database, the Collins Corpus. Some words may appear in future editions of the Collins English Dictionary if there is enough evidence of widespread use.

"As we have become more and more mobile, both socially and geographically, so local dialect words associated with particular places have been losing out to words with a wider currency," said David Britain, a linguist at the University of Essex.

"Although new words are being coined all the time, many of these older traditional dialect words may soon be gone forever."

Elaine Higgleton, of Collins, pointed out the unique challenge of the survey, observing that local dialect words "tend not to penetrate written language - both online and in print – which makes their usage very hard to monitor."

Higgleton told The Times that there was no intention of bringing extinct words back into use, but where there was "proof of life," words would be considered for inclusion in the dictionary.

The publisher is encouraging Britons to sign up to the social networking website Twitter and share their own knowledge of local language via the official account, @localwords.

15 November 2009

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