Author Ryan Starkey accompanies the map with a great article:
I’ve spent the last few years pooling together every study, survey, map, and database I can find, and then subjecting my image to several rounds of peer feedback. […] The end result is an image which is, to my knowledge, the most detailed map of British dialects ever made.
He also discusses “Why this map is wrong, and always will be”, and just how difficult it is to create a precise map of dialect regions.
Why is there so much dialect diversity in the U.K.? Because the longer a language is in a region, the more it tends to diversify. This is partly why, for example, there is a much larger variety of dialects spoken in the Eastern U.S. than the Western U.S.
This is the perfect book to read if you want to know more about the history of dialect diversity in English, because the entire focus of the book is to show that English is not just
one unified language (hence the plural “stories” in the title). It’s one of my favorite popular language books.
