PREFACE following Grammar is an attempt to investigate a modern yorkshire dialect on a scientific plan. It ha been a huge task and has presented many difficulties, all of which I do not pretend to have solved. The basis for my investigation has been the Yorkshire dialect of the fourteenth century, not Old English for in spite of many modern dialect grammarians, no Northern English dialect is derived from Old West Saxon. I have been able to illustrate its development phonetically by Brokesbys Letter to Ray pub. 1691, and by Marshalls Provincialism of East Yorkshire Rural Economy, p. 303 et seq., pub. 1788 and diplomatically by the Yorkshire Dialogues of X673 and 1684, George Newton Browns York Min Screen j1833, reprinted by W. W. Skeat in his Nine Specimens of English Dialects 1895, and by the dialect poems of John Castillo 1792-1845. The result is, I think, a clear proof of the antiquity of the bulk of the dialect, although, as in all modern English dialects, the vocabulary is blended with words borrowed both from the fashionable apken language Standard English at various periods, and from adjacent dialects. The dialect offers many interesting instances of local sound- changes, and I believe the phonology will be of value to all who are interested in the development of the English language. My chief difficulty in the work was to bridge the gap between Rolles phonology and the dialect of the eighteenth century. Rolle and Marshall are fairly clear, but there is no exact guide , to the sound-values of the vowels in. the seventeenth century , dialogues. Harder still is it to fix the changes which the dialect underwent in Ehe fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the absence of dialect grammarians-and it is obvious that the old- time schoolmaster lacked both the will and the need Go teach the correct pronunciation of dialects-all description of vowel- development must be largely hypothetical. When the phonology of modern English dialects haa been sufficiently well worked for a comparative grammar of the various groups to be made, our knowledge of the pronunciation of early Modern English, and its dialects, will necessarily be immensely increased. But I do not think this the be-all and end-all of a philological work on an English dialect. A dialect is interesting in itself, and for its peculiar word-forms. An Englishman need not despise the purer and more historical dialects of his tongue, any more than the Greeks despised their own various dialects. I quote from an article on Classical Education in Modern Yorkshire by Professor Rhya Roberts Times Educ. Supt., 7 Jan. 1913. To present an interesting living English dialect, to reveal some of its philological riddles, to trace its ancestry, and, if possible, to create an interest in dialect literature, is the aim of this book. In conclusion the author gratefully records his debt to his teacher Professor Moorman, to Professor Dibelius of the Kolonial Institut at Hamburg for his friendly inculcation of German thoroughness, and last but not least to Professor Wyld of verpool, who, as External Examiner to the University of Leeds, read the original MS., and has since read the proofs of Part I, and made several valuable corrections.