In this chapter, I detail data-collection methods and procedures, fieldwork experiences and corpus compilation. I also introduce the communities and the individuals as well as provide many lively examples of the fascinating features of the dialects.

A well-known fact of historical linguistics and sociolinguistics is that certain dialects tend to be more conservative than others. Crucially for the sociolinguist, the dialectologist and the historical linguist, they do not participate in ongoing linguistic change at the same rate as others. This may simply be due to their geographical separation from the mainstream, but it can also be due to some combination of social and/or cultural separation as well. Meillet (1967) observed that ‘very often it is sufficient to arrange facts geographically to understand their history’. Although synchronic dialects cannot exactly replicate varieties of English as they were spoken in earlier days, they provide at least a partial ‘snapshot’ of earlier stages in the history of the language.