The Dorset dialect is the traditional dialect spoken in Dorset, a county in the West Country of England. Stemming from Old West Saxon, it is preserved in the isolated Blackmore Vale, despite it somewhat falling into disuse throughout the earlier part of the 20th century, when the arrival of the railways brought the customs and language of other parts of the country and in particular, London. The rural dialect is still spoken in some villages however and is kept alive in the poems of William Barnes and Robert Young.

Dorset (or archaically, Dorsetshire) is a county in South West England on the English Channel coast. It borders Devon to the west, Somerset to the north-west, Wiltshire to the north-east, and Hampshire to the east. The Dorset dialect is derivative of the Wessex dialect which is spoken, with regional variations, in Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset and Devon. It was mainly spoken in the Blackmore Vale in North Dorset, not so prevalent in the south of the county and less so in the south-east, which was historically in Hampshire prior to local government re-organisation in 1974.

The Dorset dialect stems from Saxon with heavy Norse influence. The Saxon invaders that landed in Dorset and Hampshire towards the end of the 6th century, hailed from what is now the south of Denmark and the Saxon islands of Heligoland, Busen and Nordstrand. The dialect of the Saxons who settled in what became Wessex was very different from that of Saxons who settled in the east and south-east of England, being heavily influenced by their Jutish neighbours. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that Jutes occupied the area before the Saxons arrived and there are a number of Kentish words entrenched in the Dorset language, 'dwell' for example.

Dorset is a medium-sized county in the South West of England which has a distinct accent and dialect. Some of the distinct features of the accent include: H-dropping, glottalization, rhoticity and accentuated vowel sounds.

A prominent feature in the accent is the use of a t-glottalization, commonly used when it is in the last syllable of a multi-syllable word.

The /ð/ sound is pronounced [d] when it precedes an /r/ and sometimes on other occasions. The voiceless [θ] in words such as think is replaced with the voiced [ð] sound as in the. The voiced [ð] also replaces the 'double d', so ladder becomes la(th)er. The letters ⟨s⟩ and ⟨f⟩, if the first or last letter of a word, are pronounced as [z] and [v] respectively. However, words that are not of Germanic origin or have been adopted from other languages retain their original sound; family, figure, factory, scene, sabbath for example, are not pronounced vamily, vigure, vactory, zene and zabbath. The /v/ becomes a [b] if it appears before an /ən/ sound so eleven sounds like 'elebn'. The 'z' and the 'v' in Dorset are used to distinguish words which, in standard English, sound the same: sea and see, son and sun, foul and fowl become sea and zee, son and zun, and foul and vowl for example.

The liquid consonants /l/ and /r/ are treated differently in the Dorset dialect. When 'r' and 'l' come together, a 'd' or 'e' sound is put between them, so curl and twirl become curel and twirel or as often, curdl and twirdl.

Although the accent has some rhoticity, meaning the letter ⟨r⟩ in words is pronounced, so for example, "hard" is pronounced /hɑːrd/ and not /hɑːd/; the 'r' is omitted when it comes before some open and closed palate letters.^[vague] Therefore words like burst, first, force and verse, are pronounced bu'st, vu'st, fwo'ss and ve'ss. Other consonants are left out when they immediately precede a hard^[vague] consonant in the following word: bit of cheese becomes bit o' cheese but bit of an apple often remains bit ov an apple. This is not always the case though. Sometimes the labiodental fricative is also elided along with following sounds. For example, "all of it" is often spoken as "all o't" and "all of 'em" becomes "all o'm". Similarly "let us" becomes "le's" and "better than that" becomes "better 'n 'at".