The paper deals with the analysis of functional and semantic properties of the perfect in the dialects of the British variety of Present-Day English retrieved from the partial sample of the Freiburg Corpus of English Dialects. Both full forms and shortened ones can be found in the same contexts in which the perfect is used in the standard language. Apart from such context the paper provides instances of the use of the perfect which unequivocally illustrate its preterit meaning. This usage of the perfect has its own pragmatic-discourse peculiarities, and namely, partial loss of aspectual properties of the perfect makes it possible to employ the perfect for creation of vivid, lively depiction of the past events. Other wide-spread instances include those forms of the perfect without the auxiliary verb which possess a habitual meaning. Such contexts can be accounted for by the shift of the experiential meaning of the perfect to the sphere of the preterit and attrition of its pragmatic component.