English By-leids

BY-LEIDS
No thede in the English speaking world has more by-leids than Great Britian.If we understand a by-leid to be a way of speaking and writing that is only of one’s own land-stretch or greater abode and kithish kind. By-leids give selfhood to folk who own them. If you wish to tell everyone where you are from, you can wave a flag, wear a name-slip on your coat, or merely speak in your own thede’s or shire’s tung. Speech tells us who we are: for we are the words we speak.

A by-leid is also that kind of tung which is spoken in a shire, hamlet and thorpe, and has its own wordstock, speechlinglore( sounds) and stavecraft (framework). By-leidly words are, from time to time, taken into a land’s foremost tung as kithy speech. In the past, the take-in was slow, mostly in times of bale or ill-hap, such as wartime, when folks throughout the kithdom had to mix and work side -by-side for safety sake. Nevertheless many by-leid words and sayings have become embedded in the everyday wordstock, and passed into the speech of the mother tung, as well as its booklore, writings  and scopery. . More fully than slang and much more fully than kithish speech, the words and the sounds of many by-leids have been taken down. After the lede’s foremost tung -- the mother tung-- many by-leids of Britian, and other lands where English is spoken have been written down and given some heed. The nearness of byleid speakers with their own words and speech ways affords a ready word-pit for making  the mother tung richer; but mostly there are few pitmen. Although many by-leid words and sayings have been have been gathered together in  wordbooks; in  the past this has often happened only when there were some few speakers of the by-leid left. In England there have been scops who have written in a by-leid, such as William Barnes in that of Dorset. Today with English spoken in many lands around the world, there is less need to seek out words from by-leids, there are so many other wells