author
Joseph Wright
1855–1930
Rising from poverty in Yorkshire to a professorship at Oxford, this self-taught scholar became one of the great champions of English dialects. His work helped preserve the sound and texture of regional speech that might otherwise have been lost.
1 Audiobook
A Middle High German Primer Third Edition
by Joseph Wright
About the author
Born in 1855 near Bradford, Joseph Wright was an English philologist and dialectologist who built an extraordinary academic career from very modest beginnings. Reliable sources describe him as largely self-educated in his early years before he went on to study languages seriously and eventually join the University of Oxford.
He is best remembered for editing the monumental English Dialect Dictionary and for writing important grammars and primers on Gothic, Old English, Middle English, and German. His scholarship combined deep technical knowledge with a lasting interest in the way ordinary people actually spoke.
Wright later became Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford and was widely respected for both his learning and his life story. He died in 1930, leaving behind a body of work that still matters to readers interested in language history, dialect, and the roots of English.