The Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database

The Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP) is designed for the study of eighteenth-century English phonology, allowing users to investigate the social, regional and lexical distribution of phonological variants in eighteenth-century English. It serves as a source bank for quantitative and qualitative studies, thereby meeting the demands of the growing research community in historical phonology and dialectology in particular (e.g. Honeybone & Salmons 2014) and in Late Modern English in general (e.g. Mugglestone 2003, Hickey 2010).

The database incorporates data from key sources (e.g. pronouncing dictionaries) published in the second half of the eighteenth century in the form of IPA transcriptions. We have annotated as many of the approximately 1,700 individual keywords used to exemplify John Wells' Standard Lexical Sets of vocalic variants as can be found in the selected sources, to which we have added supplementary sets of consonantal variants.