William Perry's The Royal Standard English Dictionary (1775): a provincial's attempt to ascertain and fix a standard to the pronunciation of the English tongue

This paper examines the role of William Perry (1747-post 1805), an active Scottish schoolteacher and lexicographer, in the prescription of norms for a `correct' pronunciation of standard English, being perfectly in line with the language guardians of the time. Although Perry shares a few characteristics with Thomas Sheridan (1719-1788) and James Buchanan (fl. 1753-1773), as he himself maintains in the Preface to his The Royal Standard English Dictionary, first published in Edinburgh in 1775, he also reveals a certain dissatisfaction with the way `the sounds of words are expressed' by the other two 18th-century scholars. Therefore, the paper examines the `more rational method' proposed in his attempt to better represent the sounds of the English language.