Publications
The Dialect of our Sussex Ancestors, by Dr Graeme Davis, published March 2016 in Sussex Family Historian (vol. 22 no. 1, article, pp.25-30) accessible at: W.S.R.O. [Lib 15860] & The Keep [LIB/509161]
Preview:Our Sussex ancestors spoke with a Sussex dialect. This is a part of their everyday life we can seek to understand, and additionally, information about their manner of pronouncing names may even help us trace records of them. Today the Sussex dialect is effectively extinct. There are a very few people whose speech retains a Sussex accent (the sound-system of Sussex). The place names around us are full of Sussex words: down (chalk hill), dean (down-land valley), bostal (steep, down-land footpath). A handful of genuine Sussex words may be used in some people's speech. Most Sussex born-and-bred residents today speak not Sussex but Standard English. This Standard English may have a regional twist, but this local identity frequently comes as much from the general South-Eastern Home Counties English of the polo-mint around London as from Sussex. Many in Sussex like to add the occasional Sussex word as an expression of their self-identity as Sussex people. For example twitten (an alleyway between two hedges or walls) has become popular in recent years. It is indeed genuine Sussex, but it had all but died out by the mid nineteenth century and was deliberately revived in 1957, at first by Brighton Council and subsequently elsewhere in Sussex. Many today make a conscious decision to speak not of an alley but rather of a twitten. Save for a very few survivals and revivals, Sussex is dead.