Dialect Test
The Dialect Test was created by A.J. Ellis in February 1879, and was used in the fieldwork for his work "On Early English Pronunciation". It stands as one of the earliest methods of identifying vowel sounds and features of speech. The aim was to capture the main vowel sounds of an individual dialect by listening to the reading of a short passage. All the categories of West Saxon words and vowels were included in the test so that comparisons could be made with the historic West Saxon speech as well as with various other dialects.
K. M. Petyt
He was one of the first to apply Labovian methods in Britain with his research in 1970-1 on the speech of Bradford, Halifax and Huddersfield. He concluded that the speech detailed in most of dialectology (e.g. A. J. Ellis, the Survey of English Dialects) had virtually disappeared, having found only one speaker out of his sample of 106 speakers who regularly used dialect. However, he found that differences in speech persisted as an indicator of social class, age and gender. This PhD dissertation was later adapted into a book, "Dialect and Accent in Industrial West Yorkshire". The work was criticised by Graham Shorrocks on the grounds that the sociolinguistic methods used were inappropriate for recording the traditional vernacular and that there was an inadequate basis for comparison with earlier dialect studies in West Yorkshire.