Northern English

This chapter looks at Northern English lexis and spelling through the evidence provided by literary representations of the North written between 1500–1700 and 1800–1900. It provides a diachronic overview of the lexical and spelling information given by a group of texts included in the Salamanca Corpus. We argue that these kinds of artefacts are valuable repositories of data that add to the lexical record of Northern English, and at the same time that the spellings used in literary representations of Northern English give historical insight into processes like the northern lack of rounding or oo-fronting.