This paper places literary recreations of Lancashire English into the context of enregisterment and the sociolinguistics of spelling. Using the Salamanca Corpus, I examine Lancashire dialect writings published between 1700 and 1900 representative of both dialect literature and literary dialect to determine the repertoire of forms that were circulated in representations of the dialect. More specifically, my aim is to identify the respellings employed to highlight the pronunciation features that may have been noticeable at the time and associated with a Lancashire identity. I argue that the socially meaningful choices made by Lancashire writers can be seen as authenticating practices whereby the dialect was constructed and circulated, having authenticity effects concerning how it was experienced by the audience. The analysis treats respellings as sociolinguistic variables that are quantified to measure the relative salience of the phonological features they represent. It focuses on three of the commonly occurring traits found in the corpus, namely the MOUTH, GOAT, and PRICE diphthongs, showing that such an approach may give insight into their degree of salience, whilst providing a window into how the Lancashire dialect was perceived during this time.
This article explores representations of south-western speech in nineteenth-century dialect writing. It draws on a selection of specimens from the Salamanca Corpus in order to determine what they can tell us about the language of south-western speakers at this time. By focusing on periphrastic do and pronoun exchange, I argue that representations of south-western dialects can be taken as a missing link in the history of these two grammatical features. In fact, the analysis of their distribution and frequency, which this article explores in dialect writing for the first time, shows that they accord with later evidence to an interesting degree. At the same time, the data are placed within the third-wave sociolinguistic models of enregisterment and indexicality so as to show that the conscious representation of these morphosyntactic features reflects contemporary perceptions about their use in south-western dialects while they reveal indexical associations between place, speaker and speech. This article thus seeks to contribute to the history of south-western dialects, while underscoring the validity of dialect writing as a source of Late Modern English speech where the structural and ideological dimensions of dialect intersect.
The longstanding vernacular literary pedigree of the county of Lancashire has made it home to a large body of regional writings comparable only to those of the neighbouring Yorkshire. Both past and present scholarship have acknowledged this fact, arguing that the literary tradition of the dialect may be taken as a source to get some insight into the linguistic history of the county. Research so far concentrated on the linguistic mining of Lancashire literary texts has shown that they provide valuable guidance to approach the language of bygone times, especially in terms of phonology and morphology (see Brunner, 1920; Haworth, 1920, 1927; Whitehall, 1929; Shorrocks, 1988, 1992, 1999; Wagner, 1999; Ruano-García, 2007, 2010b). To my knowledge, there is however little research that has attempted to evaluate the lexicographic potential of these documents, and their contribution to Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary (henceforth EDD), so as to further our understanding of lexical variation in regional Englishes of the Late Modern English period (LModE).
This paper examines Cumbrian lexis in Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (1898–1905), paying special attention to the contribution of William Nicolson’s largely unnoticed Glossarium Brigantinum (1677). The paper relies on quantitative methods of analysis to determine the proportion of words exemplified by means of Nicolson’s data and to evaluate the treatment Wright gave to them. It first presents an overview of the source materials for Wright’s dictionary, with a focus on early and Cumbrian documents. It then describes Nicolson’s glossary and Mackenzie E. C. Walcott’s abridged edition of it issued in 1868, the edition Wright used for the dictionary. Finally, relying on information retrieved from the EDD Online , it presents the results of the analysis. The argument is made that, although Wright referred to the Glossarium Brigantinum as a source for the dialect of Cumberland, the actual use he made of it demonstrates that it also proved useful with regard to Westmoreland.
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