Hodson, J.L. (2016) Talking like a servant: what nineteenth century novels can tell us about the social history of the language. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics, 2 (1). ISSN 2199-2908
Abstract
This article investigates what nineteenth-century novels can tell us about the speech of the lower orders, using the “Dialect in British Fiction 1800– 1836” database to focus specifically on how the speech of servants is represented. Recent work on enregisterment has led to a resurgence of interest in literary representations of dialect in relation to specific linguistic features and varieties. I argue that a sustained engagement with literary texts has the potential to illuminate wider cultural constructs of language variation, and that to accomplish this, attention must be paid to issues of genre as well as a range of stylistic features including speech representation, metalanguage and characterisation. The article concludes that, while novels are able to tell us little about how servants really spoke, they are a rich source of information about the attitudes and assumptions that underpinned cultural concepts such as “talking like a servant”.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2016 Hodson. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. You may not use the material for commercial purposes. |
Keywords: | dialect; literature; enregisterment; metalanguage; folklinguistic |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Sheffield) > School of English (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number ARTS AND HUMANITIES RESEARCH COUNCIL (AHRC) AH/F019157/1 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 22 Apr 2016 15:04 |
Last Modified: | 22 Apr 2016 15:07 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/jhsl-2016-0002 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | De Gruyter |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1515/jhsl-2016-0002 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:96246 |