The Project

Wirelect - The Warrington dialect

The name
Wirelect is a site dedicated to the Warrington dialect. The name comes from a combination of the word dialect, that is, the form of a language that is used by native speakers from a particular area, and the  town’s famous rugby league team, now called the Warrington Wolves, but known and loved by most as, ”The Wire”.

The idea
The idea to document the Warrington dialect comes from the premise that all forms of spoken language currently in use are at the cutting edge of language evolution. This sounds like a very grand statement, but upon closer inspection it is inevitably true; language is a living entity and like any living entity, it evolves, develops, and changes over time. It is important, then, to periodically document the development of any given language for use not only as a comparison to older forms of that language, but also as a testament to contemporary usage, and moreover as an archive for future generations.

But before we can start to document the dialect, we have to understand exactly what a dialect is. In general use, the terms dialect and accent are often confused. There is, however, a very clear distinction between the two: a dialect is the form of language used in a specific geographical location by the individuals who grew up there, whereas an accent refers to certain sounds produced when speaking any given language. For example, in England we speak of Northern and Southern accents, which encompasses many different dialects, but refer specifically to certain vowel sounds produced by the people living in those areas.

One interesting feature of dialect is its resistance to change. Even if the standard language in use throughout the society is experiencing change at a fairly constant rate, individual dialects tend to change more slowly. They often contain words and phrases that are very old, and that have in fact fallen completely out of use in other dialects and the language in general.


The method
Crowd sourcing is a familiar term nowadays, and it is being put to use more and more by companies, NGOs, and other collectives as the world goes online, and they attempt to tap into the simply colossal knowledge base. The Wirelect site will use the same crowd sourcing principle to amass the data required to document the Warrington dialect.
Crowd sourcing, however, is simply a relatively new term for a very old method; if you want to know what and how people think, ask them! The difference in the internet age is the ease and scale of distribution. In the 1980s and 1990s, a company embarking on market research would have to invest large sums of money in producing questionnaires, distributing them, collecting and collating them, and finally interpreting the results. Not only has the advent of the internet, and in particular social media, made market research significantly easier to carry out and track, but it has provided individual citizens with the opportunity to influence and affect other individuals and to contribute to the collective knowledge of a society in real time. Also, word spreads quickly online as people can send a link to their friends who in turn send it to their friends and so on; this is the essence of crowd sourcing.



The data to be collected
The aim of the project is to collect the following specific data on the Warrington dialect:

Words and phrases - any and all words used by speakers of the Warrington dialect (it is important to amass as many words and phrases as possible)