Cover not available
Part of
Earlier North American Englishes
Edited by Merja Kytö and Lucia Siebers
[Varieties of English Around the World G66] 2022
► pp. 149–182

Enregisterment processes of American English in nineteenth-century U.S. newspapers

| University of Kiel

The question of when and how American English emerged as a distinct variety of English has recently been addressed again within more general discussions of the emergence and evolution of new varieties of English (Schneider 2007; Kretzschmar 2014, 2015). I argue in this chapter that these discussions would benefit from a clear and consistent differentiation between the emergence of varieties as discourse constructs (‘discursive varieties’) and as distinct structural systems (‘structural varieties’). I propose using the theoretical framework of ‘enregisterment’ (Agha 2003, 2007) to investigate the discursive dimension and I show how enregisterment processes can be studied systematically by providing a case study of metadiscursive activities linking five linguistic forms to stereotypic indexical values in nineteenth-century U.S. newspaper articles.

Keywords: emergence of American English, enregisterment, indexicality, discursive variety, nineteenth-century U.S. newspapers
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Enregisterment as a theoretical framework for studying the emergence of American English
  • 3.Aims and methodology
    • 3.1Nineteenth-century U.S. newspapers as a source for enregisterment processes
    • 3.2Linguistic forms, search terms and databases
    • 3.3Research questions and methodological approach
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Frequency and temporal and regional distribution of articles
    • 4.2The establishment and transmission of indexical links
      • 4.2.1/h/-dropping and ‑insertion
      • 4.2.2 bath-vowel, non-rhoticity, /r/-realization and twousers
    • 4.3Frequency of articles linking forms to social personae and characterological figures
  • 5.Interpretation
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 July 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/veaw.g66.07pau
References (47)

List of data bases

Nineteenth-Century U.S. Newspapers (NCNP)
. Gale. [URL] (23 January 2022)
America’s Historical Newspapers (AHN)
. Readex. [URL] (23 January 2022)

List of newspaper articles cited

A City Boarder
1894 In Omaha World Herald, 16.09.1894 (AHN).Google Scholar
All sorts
1882 In Daily Evening Bulletin, 01.03.1882 (NCNP).Google Scholar
Hogg at Farmersville
1892 In The Galveston Daily News, 20.10.1892 (NCNP).Google Scholar
Orthoepy
1856 In The Boston Daily Atlas, 22.07.1856 (NCNP).Google Scholar
Stunned
. How a Montana Girl Paralyzed a New York Dude 1889 In Milwaukee Daily Journal, 29.06.1889 (NCNP).Google Scholar
The American Language
1882 In Tucson Daily Citizen, 25.07.1882 (AHN).Google Scholar
The Big Cricket Game
. Oxford and Cambridge Score Heavily in Their First Inning 1895 In Philadelphia Inquirer, 14.09.1895 (AHN).Google Scholar
The Girls in Gotham
1882 In The Daily Republican-Sentinel, 19.11.1882 (NCNP).Google Scholar
The Hex-Hasperating Hinglish
1873 In Cincinnati Daily Gazette, 18.10.1873 (AHN).Google Scholar
Trees and Trees
1897 In The Philadelphia Inquirer, 19.09.1897 (AHN).Google Scholar
W. H. D.
1889 A Letter from London. Royal Agricultural Show. Never before Equaled in Britain. In Sun, 16.07.1889 (AHN).Google Scholar

Secondary sources

Agha, A.
2003 The social life of cultural value. Language & Communication 23: 231–273. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2007 Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bauman, R.
2005 Anecdote. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, D. Herman, M. Jahn & M.-L. Ryan (eds), 22. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Beal, J. C.
2009 Enregisterment, commodification and historical context: “Geordie” versus “Sheffieldish”. American Speech 84(2): 138–156. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Becker, R. A., Wilks, A. R., Brownrigg, R., Minka, T. P. & Deckmyn, A.
2016  Maps: Draw Geographical Maps. R package version 3.1.1. [URL] (23 January 2022)
Bonfiglio, T. P.
2002 Race and the Rise of Standard American. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cooper, P. S.
2013 Enregisterment in Historical Contexts: A Framework. PhD dissertation, University of Sheffield.
Copeland, D.
2002 America, 1750–1820. In Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America 1760–1820, H. Barker & S. Burrows (eds), 140–158. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
DeSante, C. & Sparks, D.
2012 US state maps using map_data(). is.R(), 11.12.2012, [URL] (23 January 2022)
Fisher, J. H.
2001 British and American, continuity and divergence. In The Cambridge History of the English Language. Volume VI: English in North America, J. Algeo (ed.), 59–85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gal, S. & Irvine, J. T.
1995 The boundaries of languages and disciplines: How ideologies construct difference. Social Research 62 (4): 967–1001.Google Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K.
1964 The users and uses of language. In The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching, M. A. K. Halliday, A. McIntosh & P. Strevens (eds), 75–110. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Hodson, J.
2017 ‘I expect that I prefer them horses considerable beyond the horizon’: American English in British fiction 1800–1836. In Dialect and Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century, J. Hodson (ed.), 33–50. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Johnstone, B., Andrus, J. & Danielson, A. E.
2006 Mobility, indexicality, and the enregisterment of “Pittsburghese”. Journal of English Linguistics 34 (2): 77–104. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Krapp, G. P.
1925 The English Language in America: Volume 1. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing.Google Scholar
Kretzschmar, W. A.
2014 Emergence of “new varieties” in speech as a complex system. In The Evolution of Englishes: The Dynamic Model and beyond, S. Buschfeld, T. Hoffmann, M. Huber & A. Kautzsch (eds), 142–159. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015a Complex systems in the history of American English. In Developments in English: Expanding Electronic Evidence, I. Taavitsainen, M. Kytö, C. Claridge & J. Smith (eds), 251–264. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
2015b Language and Complex Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Le Page, R. B. & Tabouret-Keller, A.
1985 Acts of Identity: Creole-Based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Milroy, J. & Milroy, L.
2012 Authority in Language: Investigating Standard English. 4th edn. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Milroy, L.
2004 Language ideologies and linguistic change. In Sociolinguistic Variation: Critical Reflections, C. Fought (ed.), 161–177. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Minnick, L. C.
2010 Dialect literature and English in the USA: Standardization and national linguistic identity. In Varieties of English in Writing: The Written Word as Linguistic Evidence, R. Hickey (ed.), 163–195. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mugglestone, L.
2003 ‘Talking Proper’: The Rise of Accent as a Social Symbol. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Nicolaisen, W. F.
2011 Anecdote. In Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music, and Art, C. T. McCormick & K. K. White (eds), 73–75. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.Google Scholar
Nord, D. P.
2001 Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and their Readers. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Picone, M. D.
2016 Eye dialect and pronunciation respelling in the USA. In The Routledge Handbook of the English Writing System, V. Cook & D. Ryan (eds), 331–346. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Reid, T. B. W.
1956 Linguistics, structuralism and philology. Archivum Linguisticum 8 (1): 28–37.Google Scholar
Schneider, E. W.
2007 Postcolonial English: Varieties around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Silverstein, M.
2003 Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language & Communication 23: 193–229. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Simpson, D.
1986 The Politics of American English, 1776–1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Thomas, E. R. & Bailey, G.
2015 Segmental phonology of African American English. In The Oxford Handbook of African American Language, S. Lanehart (ed.), 403–419. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Trudgill, P.
2004 New-Dialect Formation: The Inevitability of Colonial Englishes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Venezky, R. L.
2001 Spelling. In The Cambridge History of the English Language: Volume 6: English in North America, J. Algeo (ed.), 340–357. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wickham, H.
2009 Ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis. New York: Springer. DOI logo
Cited by (1)

Cited by 1 other publications

Gerwin, Johanna
2023. Between Nottin’ Ill Gite and Bleckfriars – the enregisterment of Cockney in the 19th century. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 9:1 ► pp. 31 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 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.