‘Practised among the common people’: ‘vulgar’ pronunciations in eighteenth-century pronouncing dictionaries

Abstract

In a corpus compiled from the notes in John Walker's pronouncing dictionary (first edition 1791), Trapateau (2016) found that the most frequently occurring evaluative term used was vulgar. In Walker's dictionary, vulgar is defined as ‘plebeian, suiting to the common people, practised among the common people, mean, low, being of the common rate; publick, commonly bruited’ (1791, s.v. vulgar). The frequency of this term in Walker's critical notes suggests that the role of his dictionary was to warn against unacceptable pronunciations as well as to provide an account of acceptable or, to use Walker's second most frequent term, polite ones. In this article, I discuss some of the pronunciations labelled vulgar by Walker and other eighteenth-century authors and argue that, far from dismissing such evidence as prescriptive, we should consider the role played by Walker and his contemporaries in the enregisterment of stigmatised variants and varieties.

Speech reflections in Late Modern English pauper letters from Dorset

“…The Dorset letters are linguistically so unique that Fairman's claim of a supraregional variety, labelled by him an ‘emerging standard’ (2007a: 75) or ‘mainstream English’ (2006: 84; see also Kortmann & Wagner 2010: 290–1) to be found in letters by the labouring poor, rather than evidence of dialect variation, is contradicted by the findings presented in this article. Instead, the new evidence underlines that pauper letters as a data source should be recognised as an important, hitherto missing puzzle piece in historical dialectological research, which Beal (2023) says ‘appears to be the holy grail of language history from below’.…”

“…Yet even here it can be difficult to identify authentic voices relating reflections of speech. The Late Modern English period was influenced by the prescriptivist movement and the codification of a standard in pronouncing dictionaries and grammars (see Beal 2004 for an overview ;Beal 2023;Wiemann 2023), to the extent that 'all encoders [i.e. those who performed the physical act of writing], even the least schooled ones, normally attempted to imitate "standard" models, especially at the beginning and at the end of the letter' (Dossena 2010: 19; see also Gardner forthcoming on formulaic language in pauper letters).…”

Disgusting, obscene and aggravating language: speech descriptors and the sociopragmatic evaluation of speech in theOld Bailey Corpus

“…Cooper 2023;Gardner 2023;Hodson 2017Hodson , 2023Ruano-García 2023), and phonological variation and developments (e.g. Beal, Sen, Yáñez-Bouza & Wallis 2020;Beal 2023;Wiemann 2023). The Old Bailey Corpus, which provides the data for my investigation, has been a popular source for research of Late Modern English speech, in large part because of the assumed proximity of the court materials to the actual voices of speakers from all walks of life, including people of the lower social classes (see Huber 2007).…”