This text celebrates the rich variety of regional and social dialects of English in all its forms, ancient and modern.

Peter Trudgill is Chair of English Linguistics at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. His interest in dialects extends throughout the English-speaking world and he is author of Accent, Dialect and the School, Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society, and many other books on dialectology. He is editor of the Blackwell series 'Language in Society'.