Assessing non-standard texts from previous centuries of necessity involves examining the notion of ‘standard’ which existed before the present. The modern notion of standard English is an eighteenth-century development which builds on formal usage prior to that. The prescriptivism which arose at this time led to the social marginalisation of dialects and their literature. Works written in dialect or containing dialect can be examined in an attempt to reconstruct vernacular features for different regions at various times. Here the central question is how reliable are the written representations which have been handed down. There are a number of criteria for classifying and evaluating earlier texts. Rendering these explicit helps to prepare the ground for later linguistic analysis.
The concept of ‘non-standard’ remains somewhat fuzzy during the Early Modern English period. Language change and especially ongoing standardization can make it difficult to pin down an individual feature at any given time as clearly non-standard. Contemporary views of ‘good’ language, which we also discuss here, need to be taken into account and may lead to a more socially restricted idea of standard and thus a wider area of non-standard. Regionally restricted uses, both with regard to the lexicon and pronunciation, are investigated with the help of (comparing) sources like Ray’s dialect dictionary (1674) and the Corpus of English Dialogues, and shown to be relatively rare in writing. Socio-stylistic variation or evidence for non-standard forms, including lower-class, uneducated, and emotive uses (often called ‘vulgar’ or ‘low’ by contemporaries), is investigated with the help of metacomments, pauper letters and the treatment of taboo usage. Two case-studies on demonstrative them and non-standard third-person subject-verb concord show the features to be very rare in the Corpus of English Dialogues and to occur predominantly in authentic spoken contexts and with lower-ranking speakers. We argue that rarity is an indicator for non-standard status, but also that the status of these features is different from that of modern sociolinguistic markers.
In this chapter I will look at some aspects of the treatment of non-standard and regional varieties in historical dictionaries, especially the OED. I will examine closely the spelling forms found in a series of passages written by non-professional, naïve writers, and the challenges for interpretation, presentation, and labelling which such data pose for a historical dictionary. My main focus will thus be quite narrow, but I hope that this detailed approach will raise issues and challenges which resonate with those faced by other researchers in this area.
Northern English is an important variety of British English, which has tended to be neglected in textbooks on the history of English. The chapter describes Northern English from the Early Modern period (1500–1900), based on evidence from a wide range of vernacular texts and styles. The first section of the chapter gives an overview of the foundations of Northern English. The second surveys the main types of texts used as data, and discusses also issues of reliability and limitation. In the third section salient features of ‘common core’ Northern English from this period are described, and also noteworthy regional variants, on the levels of phonology, morphology, syntaxt, lexis and discourse. Degrees of resilience or recessiveness are indicated, and particular innovations. The chapter as a whole seeks to confirm the distinctiveness of Northern English north of the Humber; and more generally the richness of vernacular literature as a source of data about dialect speech, much of it as yet under-explored.
This chapter deals with written evidence of regional varieties of language representing the middle and southern parts of England. ‘Southern English’ is here taken in a very wide sense, basically equivalent to ‘non-Northern’ and thus constituting a companion piece to the previous chapter. For two reasons, the chapter focuses on data from the nineteenth century: the written evidence is richer and, above all, reliable and detailed contemporary linguistic data collections and descriptions are available, notably the English Dialect Dictionary. Extensive use has also been made of data from the Survey of English Dialects. With regard to linguistic levels, special attention is given to phonological representation. Finally, the significance of genre, motivation and awareness is discussed.
The speech-forms in use at the extreme ends of the Anglo-Saxon dialect continuum eventually acquired the status of national languages in the kingdoms of Scotland and England; and though the Scottish form lost this status in the aftermath of the Union of the Crowns, the substantial differences which still existed between spoken Scots and English were often reflected, albeit crudely and unsystematically, in texts purporting to represent Scottish speech. Later, the differences came to be examined in a more careful and scholarly fashion. Though Scots was never a fully autonomous form, it has been recognised from at least the sixteenth century as integral to Scotland’s cultural identity.
A number of dramatic texts are scrutinised here for the linguistic analysis of Irish English in the early modern period. A broad range of different plays by authors from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries are examined to determine if the non-standard spellings contained in these texts could have reflected genuine features of spoken Irish English at the time of writing. The analysis shows that some of the features which the textual record reveals have disappeared entirely while others have been confined to specific varieties in certain phonotactic environments while yet others persist in general Irish English today. The texts considered are furthermore useful when determining the earliest attestations for known features of Irish English.
The history of Northern Irish English is rather episodic because studies of written Ulster English tend to be case studies of particular writers, texts or text types, and only a small number of linguistic features have been examined. This chapter surveys work done on this variety of English based on literary and letter data, commentaries and folklore collections. There is a brief discussion of ways of systematically approaching texts and principles to be applied in studying written texts. Recent and ongoing developments using synchronic and diachronic corpora containing written texts from the region are also discussed.
This chapter analyzes the role of literary dialect in attempts to establish a distinctly American language and especially to authorize and enforce a preferred standard. The roles of gender, race, and linguistic diversity are key considerations to the analysis in light of popular nineteenth-century assumptions that conflated ideas about a preferred national language variety with developing ideologies about national identity. This chapter outlines the ways that these assumptions found voice in the national discourse, including via the deployment of literary dialect, which both documented and participated in that discourse.
The study of Canadian English has, for the most part, relied on synchronic data and description. Via the apparent-time method and earlier linguistic studies, evidence is available for the most part of the twentieth century. This paper provides possible pathways towards examining pre-twentieth century evidence for Canadian English. Using principles of sociohistorical research, the paper offers an outline of how to make the best use of existing data by combining evidence from both literary and authentic written sources. As a test case, central focus is given to the reconstruction of a pivotal Canadian feature, the low-back vowel merger. Texts are used, in conjunction with secondary materials, such as Canadian informants in linguistic atlas data, accounts of settlement history and anecdotal evidence, to show the possibilities and limitations of written evidence in historical phonetics and phonology. As a test case, the approach, which is complemented by a rudimentary sketch of sources across the country, is intended to be easily transferrable to other linguistic levels.
In research on Creoles, historical written texts have in recent decades been fruitfully employed to shed light on the diachronic development of these languages and the nature of Creole genesis. They have so far been much less frequently used to derive social information about these communities and to improve our understanding of the sociolinguistics and stylistic structure of these languages. This paper surveys linguistic research on early written texts in the anglophone Caribbean and takes a critical look at the theories and methods employed to study these texts. It emphases the sociolinguistic value of the texts and provides some exemplary analyses of early Creole documents.
The early formation phase of St Helenian English saw input of a standard-like variety of English, non-standard Southern English as well as of restructured varieties of English and other languages (Portuguese, French, Malagasy). This chapter analyses some of the earliest records available, the St Helena Consultations, compiled between 1682 and 1723. It aims at documenting the presence and function of these varieties on the island and retraces their importance for the evolution of a local variety on St Helena.
This article examines two early sources for nineteenth century South African English, Jeremiah Goldswain’s Chronicle and the Journal of Thomas Shone. Their writings provide evidence for the vernacular of the 1820s settlers and can be considered as representing different stages on the non-standard continuum due to their different social backgrounds. While Goldswain represents the prototypical semi-literate writer whose non-standard orthography offers insights into the settlers’ sociolect (e.g. /h/-dropping, hypercorrect /h/), Shone’s writing is to be found nearer to the standard end with only occasional examples of phonologically significant spellings. However, their use of non-standard grammatical features is remarkably similar. A detailed analysis of was/were variation reveals that the same linguistic constraints are in operation.
In his A Letter from Sydney of 1829, Edward Wakefield described the language he encountered in the new colony as “peculiar” (in other words, it was distinctive). This paper aims at contributing to our understanding of the linguistic processes that were going on at that time, particularly the survival techniques of those features that went on to thrive in the new variety. It will draw on evidence from nineteenth century New South Wales. While no recordings of this speech are available and reliable written evidence is scarce, we are lucky to have a collection of ‘verbatim’ vernacular texts from this period (Corbyn 1854). These texts give us a rare glimpse of the linguistic input from the Englishes that were around during that decisive period, particularly with respect to the phonological level. While it is clear that a range of accent types would have always existed in the colony, we do not know much about the characteristics of these early forms, nor indeed do we know much about the manner in which they later evolved and differentiated.
This chapter considers the written evidence of New Zealand pronunciation provided in 1887 by Samuel McBurney a self-taught phonetician, and the evidence from complaints about pronunciation in the early New Zealand School Inspectors’ Reports, and the literary journal The Triad. This written evidence has been compared with data of spoken New Zealand English obtained from recordings collected in the 1940s of old New Zealanders born in the 1850s–1890s. Some features present in the recordings were commented on in the written accounts; others were not commented on. This enables us to establish which features were the result of innovation, and which were conservative, and which had reached a level of public awareness at the time. The comparison of written and spoken data shows that the written reports reliably reflect the spoken data.
Assessing non-standard texts from previous centuries of necessity involves examining the notion of ‘standard’ which existed before the present. The modern notion of standard English is an eighteenth-century development which builds on formal usage prior to that. The prescriptivism which arose at this time led to the social marginalisation of dialects and their literature. Works written in dialect or containing dialect can be examined in an attempt to reconstruct vernacular features for different regions at various times. Here the central question is how reliable are the written representations which have been handed down. There are a number of criteria for classifying and evaluating earlier texts. Rendering these explicit helps to prepare the ground for later linguistic analysis.
The concept of ‘non-standard’ remains somewhat fuzzy during the Early Modern English period. Language change and especially ongoing standardization can make it difficult to pin down an individual feature at any given time as clearly non-standard. Contemporary views of ‘good’ language, which we also discuss here, need to be taken into account and may lead to a more socially restricted idea of standard and thus a wider area of non-standard. Regionally restricted uses, both with regard to the lexicon and pronunciation, are investigated with the help of (comparing) sources like Ray’s dialect dictionary (1674) and the Corpus of English Dialogues, and shown to be relatively rare in writing. Socio-stylistic variation or evidence for non-standard forms, including lower-class, uneducated, and emotive uses (often called ‘vulgar’ or ‘low’ by contemporaries), is investigated with the help of metacomments, pauper letters and the treatment of taboo usage. Two case-studies on demonstrative them and non-standard third-person subject-verb concord show the features to be very rare in the Corpus of English Dialogues and to occur predominantly in authentic spoken contexts and with lower-ranking speakers. We argue that rarity is an indicator for non-standard status, but also that the status of these features is different from that of modern sociolinguistic markers.
In this chapter I will look at some aspects of the treatment of non-standard and regional varieties in historical dictionaries, especially the OED. I will examine closely the spelling forms found in a series of passages written by non-professional, naïve writers, and the challenges for interpretation, presentation, and labelling which such data pose for a historical dictionary. My main focus will thus be quite narrow, but I hope that this detailed approach will raise issues and challenges which resonate with those faced by other researchers in this area.
Northern English is an important variety of British English, which has tended to be neglected in textbooks on the history of English. The chapter describes Northern English from the Early Modern period (1500–1900), based on evidence from a wide range of vernacular texts and styles. The first section of the chapter gives an overview of the foundations of Northern English. The second surveys the main types of texts used as data, and discusses also issues of reliability and limitation. In the third section salient features of ‘common core’ Northern English from this period are described, and also noteworthy regional variants, on the levels of phonology, morphology, syntaxt, lexis and discourse. Degrees of resilience or recessiveness are indicated, and particular innovations. The chapter as a whole seeks to confirm the distinctiveness of Northern English north of the Humber; and more generally the richness of vernacular literature as a source of data about dialect speech, much of it as yet under-explored.
This chapter deals with written evidence of regional varieties of language representing the middle and southern parts of England. ‘Southern English’ is here taken in a very wide sense, basically equivalent to ‘non-Northern’ and thus constituting a companion piece to the previous chapter. For two reasons, the chapter focuses on data from the nineteenth century: the written evidence is richer and, above all, reliable and detailed contemporary linguistic data collections and descriptions are available, notably the English Dialect Dictionary. Extensive use has also been made of data from the Survey of English Dialects. With regard to linguistic levels, special attention is given to phonological representation. Finally, the significance of genre, motivation and awareness is discussed.
The speech-forms in use at the extreme ends of the Anglo-Saxon dialect continuum eventually acquired the status of national languages in the kingdoms of Scotland and England; and though the Scottish form lost this status in the aftermath of the Union of the Crowns, the substantial differences which still existed between spoken Scots and English were often reflected, albeit crudely and unsystematically, in texts purporting to represent Scottish speech. Later, the differences came to be examined in a more careful and scholarly fashion. Though Scots was never a fully autonomous form, it has been recognised from at least the sixteenth century as integral to Scotland’s cultural identity.
A number of dramatic texts are scrutinised here for the linguistic analysis of Irish English in the early modern period. A broad range of different plays by authors from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries are examined to determine if the non-standard spellings contained in these texts could have reflected genuine features of spoken Irish English at the time of writing. The analysis shows that some of the features which the textual record reveals have disappeared entirely while others have been confined to specific varieties in certain phonotactic environments while yet others persist in general Irish English today. The texts considered are furthermore useful when determining the earliest attestations for known features of Irish English.
The history of Northern Irish English is rather episodic because studies of written Ulster English tend to be case studies of particular writers, texts or text types, and only a small number of linguistic features have been examined. This chapter surveys work done on this variety of English based on literary and letter data, commentaries and folklore collections. There is a brief discussion of ways of systematically approaching texts and principles to be applied in studying written texts. Recent and ongoing developments using synchronic and diachronic corpora containing written texts from the region are also discussed.
This chapter analyzes the role of literary dialect in attempts to establish a distinctly American language and especially to authorize and enforce a preferred standard. The roles of gender, race, and linguistic diversity are key considerations to the analysis in light of popular nineteenth-century assumptions that conflated ideas about a preferred national language variety with developing ideologies about national identity. This chapter outlines the ways that these assumptions found voice in the national discourse, including via the deployment of literary dialect, which both documented and participated in that discourse.
The study of Canadian English has, for the most part, relied on synchronic data and description. Via the apparent-time method and earlier linguistic studies, evidence is available for the most part of the twentieth century. This paper provides possible pathways towards examining pre-twentieth century evidence for Canadian English. Using principles of sociohistorical research, the paper offers an outline of how to make the best use of existing data by combining evidence from both literary and authentic written sources. As a test case, central focus is given to the reconstruction of a pivotal Canadian feature, the low-back vowel merger. Texts are used, in conjunction with secondary materials, such as Canadian informants in linguistic atlas data, accounts of settlement history and anecdotal evidence, to show the possibilities and limitations of written evidence in historical phonetics and phonology. As a test case, the approach, which is complemented by a rudimentary sketch of sources across the country, is intended to be easily transferrable to other linguistic levels.
In research on Creoles, historical written texts have in recent decades been fruitfully employed to shed light on the diachronic development of these languages and the nature of Creole genesis. They have so far been much less frequently used to derive social information about these communities and to improve our understanding of the sociolinguistics and stylistic structure of these languages. This paper surveys linguistic research on early written texts in the anglophone Caribbean and takes a critical look at the theories and methods employed to study these texts. It emphases the sociolinguistic value of the texts and provides some exemplary analyses of early Creole documents.
The early formation phase of St Helenian English saw input of a standard-like variety of English, non-standard Southern English as well as of restructured varieties of English and other languages (Portuguese, French, Malagasy). This chapter analyses some of the earliest records available, the St Helena Consultations, compiled between 1682 and 1723. It aims at documenting the presence and function of these varieties on the island and retraces their importance for the evolution of a local variety on St Helena.
This article examines two early sources for nineteenth century South African English, Jeremiah Goldswain’s Chronicle and the Journal of Thomas Shone. Their writings provide evidence for the vernacular of the 1820s settlers and can be considered as representing different stages on the non-standard continuum due to their different social backgrounds. While Goldswain represents the prototypical semi-literate writer whose non-standard orthography offers insights into the settlers’ sociolect (e.g. /h/-dropping, hypercorrect /h/), Shone’s writing is to be found nearer to the standard end with only occasional examples of phonologically significant spellings. However, their use of non-standard grammatical features is remarkably similar. A detailed analysis of was/were variation reveals that the same linguistic constraints are in operation.
In his A Letter from Sydney of 1829, Edward Wakefield described the language he encountered in the new colony as “peculiar” (in other words, it was distinctive). This paper aims at contributing to our understanding of the linguistic processes that were going on at that time, particularly the survival techniques of those features that went on to thrive in the new variety. It will draw on evidence from nineteenth century New South Wales. While no recordings of this speech are available and reliable written evidence is scarce, we are lucky to have a collection of ‘verbatim’ vernacular texts from this period (Corbyn 1854). These texts give us a rare glimpse of the linguistic input from the Englishes that were around during that decisive period, particularly with respect to the phonological level. While it is clear that a range of accent types would have always existed in the colony, we do not know much about the characteristics of these early forms, nor indeed do we know much about the manner in which they later evolved and differentiated.
This chapter considers the written evidence of New Zealand pronunciation provided in 1887 by Samuel McBurney a self-taught phonetician, and the evidence from complaints about pronunciation in the early New Zealand School Inspectors’ Reports, and the literary journal The Triad. This written evidence has been compared with data of spoken New Zealand English obtained from recordings collected in the 1940s of old New Zealanders born in the 1850s–1890s. Some features present in the recordings were commented on in the written accounts; others were not commented on. This enables us to establish which features were the result of innovation, and which were conservative, and which had reached a level of public awareness at the time. The comparison of written and spoken data shows that the written reports reliably reflect the spoken data.