Keeping in Touch

Emigrant letters across the English-speaking world

Editor

Raymond Hickey | University of Duisburg and Essen

Hardbound – Available

ISBN 9789027204479 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027261885 | EUR 99.00 | USD 149.00

The current volume presents a number of chapters which look at informal vernacular letters, written mostly by emigrants to the former colonies of Britain, who settled at these locations in the past few centuries, with a focus on letters from the nineteenth century. Such documents often show features for varieties of English which do not necessarily appear in later sources or which are not attested with the same range or in the same set of grammatical contexts. This has to do with the vernacular nature of the letters, i.e. they were written by speakers who had a lower level of education and whose speech, and hence their written form of language, does not appear to have been guided by considerations of standardness and conformity to external norms of language. Furthermore, the writers of the emigrant letters, examined in the current volume, were very unlikely to have known of, still less have used, manuals of letter writing. Emigrant letters thus provide a valuable source of data in tracing the possible development of features in varieties of English in the USA, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 10] 2019. x, 289 pp.

Publishing status: Available
Published online on 12 November 2019

https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.10

Table of Contents

Preface

List of contributors | pp. ix–x

Chapter 1. Mining emigrant correspondence for linguistic insights

Raymond Hickey | pp. 1–24

Part I. The language of emigrant correspondence

Chapter 2. Wisconsin immigrant letters: German transfer to Wisconsin English

Angela Bagwell, Samantha Litty and Mike Olson | pp. 27–41

Chapter 3. ‘I hope you will excuse my bad writing’: Shall vs. will in the 1830s Petworth Emigration to Canada Corpus (PECC)

Stefan Dollinger | pp. 43–66

Chapter 4. Singular, plural, or collective? Grammatical flexibility and the definition of identity in the correspondence of nineteenth-century Scottish emigrants

Marina Dossena | pp. 67–84

Part II. The language of the Irish emigrant experience

Chapter 5. Homesickness, recollections and reunions: Topics and emotions in a corpus of female Irish emigrant correspondence

Emma Moreton and Chris Culy | pp. 87–118

Chapter 6. ‘I have not time to say more at present’: Negating lexical have in Irish English

Kevin McCafferty | pp. 119–138

Chapter 7. ‘Matt & Mrs Connor is with me now. They are only beginning to learn the work of the camp’: Irish emigrants writing from Argentina

Carolina P. Amador-Moreno | pp. 139–162

Chapter 8. Grammatical variation in nineteenth-century Irish Australian letters

Raymond Hickey | pp. 163–184

Chapter 9. ‘[S]eas may divide and oceans roll between but Friends is Friends whatever intervene’: Emigrant letters in New Zealand

Dania Jovanna Bonness | pp. 185–209

Part III. Vernacular correspondence: Widening the scope

Chapter 10. ‘[T]his is all answer soon’: African American vernacular letters from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Lucia Siebers | pp. 213–237

Chapter 11. Morphosyntactic features in earlier African American English: A qualitative assessment of semi-literate letters

Alexander Kautzsch | pp. 239–260

Chapter 12. Memoirs from Central America: A linguistic analysis of personal recollections of West Indian laborers in the construction of the Panama Canal

Stephanie Hackert | pp. 261–285

Index

“In a nutshell, each part of the book has unequivocal key points, which proceeds in an orderly way to lead readers to explore the English language variation in emigrant correspondence”

Tianhao Lou, Shejiang University, in Language in Society 50.3 (2021).

Cited by (11)

Cited by 11 other publications

Order by:

Corrigan, Karen P.

2024. English in Ireland. In Language in Britain and Ireland, ► pp. 178 ff.

Crombez, Yasmin, Wim Vandenbussche & Rik Vosters

2024. Exploring past and present layers of multilingualism in Flemish-emigrant writing. In Investigating West Germanic Languages [Studies in Germanic Linguistics, 8], ► pp. 276 ff.

Ávila-Ledesma, Nancy E.

2024. “I Thought you had Forgotten me”: A Corpus-Pragmatic Examination of the Mental Verb Think in Irish Emigrants’ Letters. Corpus Pragmatics 8:1 ► pp. 77 ff.

Haataja, Daniel & Leena Niiranen

2023. Letters to the Paulaharjus from Ruija: The emergence of two writing cultures in Finnish among Kvens in the early twentieth century. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 46:2 ► pp. 215 ff.

McCafferty, Kevin & Carolina P. Amador-Moreno

2023. Emigrant Letters from Ireland. In The Oxford Handbook of Irish English, ► pp. 314 ff.

Ávila-Ledesma, Nancy E. & Carolina P. Amador-Moreno

2023. ‘The seas was like mountains’: intra-writer variation and social mobility in Irish emigrant letters. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 9:2 ► pp. 243 ff.

Drinka, Bridget & Whitney Chappell

2021. New perspectives on Spanish socio-historical linguistics. In Spanish Socio-Historical Linguistics [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics, 12], ► pp. 2 ff.

Kostadinova, Viktorija, Marco Wiemann, Gea Dreschler, Sune Gregersen, Beáta Gyuris, Ai Zhong, Maggie Scott, Lieselotte Anderwald, Beke Hansen, Sven Leuckert, Tihana Kraš, Shawnea Sum Pok Ting, Ida Parise Alessia Cogo, Elisabeth Reber & Furzeen Ahmed

2021. I English Language. The Year's Work in English Studies 100:1 ► pp. 1 ff.

Hickey, Raymond

2020. Review of Amador Moreno, Carolina P. 2019. Orality in Written Texts: Using Historical Corpora to Investigate Irish English (1700−1900). London: Routledge. ISBN: 978-1-138-80234-6. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315754321. Research in Corpus Linguistics 8 ► pp. 201 ff.

[no author supplied]

2021. Publications Received. Language in Society 50:1 ► pp. 169 ff.

[no author supplied]

2024. English. In Language in Britain and Ireland, ► pp. 9 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 26 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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