Did you have your tea, dinner or supper last night? Was it before it that you were clammish, clemmed, starving, hungry, leary or just plain clammish?

Are you still hanging out in Yorkshire? Is it possible to be in Somerset? Is it in Cambridgeshire? Hoying in Durham? Is it possible to be in Cheshire? Is it possible to Pelting in Northamptonshire? Is Yarking in Leicestershire? Are you going to throw now?

How do you pronounce it?

Researchers from the University of Leeds are interested in answers to all questions as they embark on a heritage project to help explore and preserve England's dialects.

The archive of English life and language was gathered by fieldworkers at the university in the 1950s and 1960s. The most famous and complete survey of dialects in England remains.

Through the launch of The Great Big Dialect Hunt, the university said it was making its extensive library of English dialects accessible to the public. Researchers will be looking for new phrases and expressions to bring the archive into the 21st century.

A fieldworker talking to a man in North Yorkshire for the original survey.

A fieldworker talking to a man in North Yorkshire for the original survey. Photograph: University of Leeds

The project is not trying to repeat the scale of the original survey, which involved fieldworkers going out to interview people over the age of 65 in more than 300 mostly rural communities.

A fabulously rich snapshot of how people in England lived and talked is the result of the results.

If you want a map of what a cowhouse was called across England, they are in the archive. There are 50 variations of scraps, from scratch and scratching to cratchings.

Yorkshire man describes 'mischief night' in archive of English dialects – audio

Some words may be out of date. Do you give someone a piggyback or a pick-a-pack?

If you are from East Anglia, would you describe a lop-sided shelf as being slightly on the D, and would you refer to more than two of it as a couple of three?

The audio sound map of England allows people to hear how people talk in different areas.

People playing wallops, or nine-pins

People playing wallops, or nine-pins. Photograph: Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture

She said the new project could be described as a mini-survey and that it was not limited to older voices. It doesn't matter where you are from, how long you have lived there, or if you think you have a dialect.

People will be able to add their own words and voices to the archive. People can go to the museums to add dialects.

The National Lottery Heritage Fund gave over $500,000 to digitise the notebooks, photographs, word maps and audio recordings from the original fieldwork.

We would like to share what we have but we are also interested in the dialects people have now because they are not something preserved in aspic.

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Since the 18th century, the death of dialects has been predicted, but Douglas said they were still here, thriving and evolving.

She said that hearing someone with a strong accent transports you. It makes you think, oh wow, I'm home, or these people are like me.

A lot of it is about the sense of belonging, the sense of roots, and the sense of being in a digital world.