Harold Orton


Harold Orton was a Dialectologist and Professor of English Language and Medieval Literature at the University of Leeds.

Biography

Orton was born in Byers Green, Co Durham on 23 October 1898 and educated at King James I Grammar School, Bishop Auckland and at the University of Durham. He left university in 1917 to enrol in the Durham Light Infantry in which he was commissioned as a Lieutenant. He was wounded severely in 1918, never regaining full use of his right arm, and was invalided out of the army in 1919.
Orton died in Leeds on 7 March 1975 following a stroke.

Academic Career

After leaving the army, Orton went to Merton College, Oxford, where he studied under Henry Cecil Kennedy Wyld and Joseph Wright, author of the English Dialect Dictionary. He then spent several years on the staff of Uppsala University in Sweden until 1928 when he was appointed to a lectureship at King's College, Newcastle. Between 1928 and 1939, he surveyed the dialects of 35 sites in Northumberland and north Durham, which became known as the Orton Corpus. This was not published until 1998, edited by Kurt Rydland. He became Head of the Department of English Language at the University of Sheffield in 1939 but secondment to the British Council interrupted that work until the end of the war.
In 1946 he was appointed Professor of English Language and Medieval Literature at the University of Leeds, succeeding Bruce Dickins, where he taught until his retirement as Emeritus Professor in 1964.
Orton was Visiting Professor at the Universities of Kansas, Iowa and Tennessee and at Belmont University, Nashville.
Orton is best remembered as co-founder of the Survey of English Dialects. He developed the questionnaire for the survey together with Eugen Dieth. His pupil David Parry went on to apply the same principles used for the SED to Welsh English, founding the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects at Swansea University in 1968.
Many who met Orton said that he had a driving passion for his subject. In the early part of his career, he was nicknamed "the phonetic fanatic". During the Survey of English Dialects, he worked even on Christmas Day
An overview of Orton's career was published by Craig Fees in 1991 as the first part in a series on dialect and folk studies. In the same year, Fees wrote a strongly-worded defence of Orton against those who had criticised his work.