Javier Ruano-García

This book is the first critical edition of White Kennett's Etymologicon Anglicanum (British Library, MS Lansdowne 1033), a long forgotten etymological compilation of the late 1690s with a substantial amount of regional dialect material. The work drew the attention of dialect lexicographers of the nineteenth century, such as Joseph Wright, and serves as documentary evidence for the OED.

This new scholarly edition of Kennett's glossary is divided into two parts. The first includes a detailed introduction that situates Kennett in the context of his time and of historical antiquarian scholarship. Javier Ruano-García also describes the manuscript and Kennett's method, paying close attention to the regional dialect element and its lasting lexicographical impact. Part II contains the annotated edition of the text with a substantial commentary on its dialect material. The edition also offers a critical apparatus that records Kennett's many alterations to the glossary so that readers are able to see him at work and make sense of the process of compilation.

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.

This paper places literary texts including northern English traits into the context of enregisterment. It investigates the repertoire of forms used in literary representations of the North, laying special emphasis on phonological and spelling traits. For this purpose, I shall undertake a corpus-based analysis of northern forms found in early modern drama and broadside ballads included in the Salamanca Corpus. My aim is to identify the most common traits of these representations, arguing that, although the rationale behind the use of northernisms in drama and ballads is not exact, the recurrent linguistic patterns common to both text types may point to the enregisterment of some features.

This paper places theatrical performances of the Lancashire dialect into the context of enregisterment, dialect stylisation, and the sociolinguistics of performance. I examine a selection of plays represented in Manchester and London in the late nineteenth century, including pantomimes, drolleries, comic sketches, and melodramas. The Lancashire dialect is analysed here to determine, on the one hand, the repertoire of linguistic features that were voiced on stage. On the other, I aim to ascertain whether such a repertoire varied on account of the target audience and the fact that the text of the performance was aimed for publication. The argument is made that stylisation of the Lancashire dialect in the nineteenth-century theatre shows variation as regards the set of enregistered features, which were drawn from more or less localised inventories that different audiences linked with social types that took different forms.

This paper examines Horae Subsecivae (Bodl. MS Eng. lang. d. 66), an unprinted glossary of the late eighteenth century that was conceived as an addition to Franciscus Junius’s Etymologicum Anglicanum (1743). Although the manuscript drew the attention of some dialect lexicographers and antiquarians of the nineteenth century, it has remained largely ignored in recent times despite its important contribution to the dialect record of the West Country. In fact, it appears that no other compilation of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries was chiefly concerned with West Country words, most of which went unnoticed by the renowned contemporary glossaries of Francis Grose (1787) and William Humphrey Marshall (1789, 1796). My aim is to uncover Horae Subsecivae, describing its peculiarities and lexicographical method, whilst showing its significant impact on the history of West Country dialects and our knowledge of eighteenth-century lexical dialect variation more generally.

This paper examines the contribution of Horae Subsecivae to Joseph Wright's (1855–1930) English Dialect Dictionary (1896–1905) (EDD). Horae Subsecivae (‘spare hours’) is an obscure manuscript glossary that was possibly compiled by Robert Wight of Wotton-under-Edge in c.1777–78, and is now preserved amongst Wright's papers at the Bodleian Library as Bodl. MS Eng. lang. d. 66. Even though it has received little scholarly attention, Horae Subsecivae has a substantial dialect element, with a large number of words cited from Devonshire, Dorset, Cornwall, Gloucestershire, Somerset, Wiltshire and Worcestershire. The manuscript went largely unnoticed by 18th- and 19th-century collections, and remains virtually unknown today perhaps owing to its extensive use of Latin, but it drew the attention of Joseph Wright, who employed it frequently to represent some western dialects. Drawing on the electronic version of the EDD (EDD Online; Markus, 2019a), the paper is situated within forensic dictionary analysis (Coleman & Ogilvie, 2009), which ‘uses evidence-based methodologies to interrogate the dictionaries themselves about decision-making processes involved in their compilation’ (1). In this framework, I combine archival material with quantitative and qualitative approaches to the data retrieved from EDD Online in order to ascertain the proportion of words that are cited from the manuscript, and to assess the treatment they are given. Attention is paid to their function in the context of the dictionary, labels, the western dialects about which the manuscript provides more extensive information, as well as the entries in which it is cited as the only source for words, ascriptions and senses. This paper highlights the outstanding contribution of Horae Subsecivae to the EDD, while stressing that it notably improves our knowledge of lexical variation in the dialects of the South West and the lower West Midlands. They can only benefit from further inspection as they ‘are neither as easily found nor as well researched as those of the north’ (Melchers, 2010: 82).

This article explores the contribution of Angelina Parker to the making of the English Dialect Dictionary. Relying on EDD Online (Markus 2019a), the aim is to analyze the impact of Parker on the Oxfordshire element of the dictionary by scrutinizing the entries where Wright relied on her first-hand knowledge of the dialect for ascriptions, definitions, and senses. The article is framed within forensic dictionary analysis (Coleman and Ogilvie 2009) and takes a quantitative and qualitative approach to the data retrieved from EDD Online, with particular reference to the entries that include Parker's initials and those in which Wright quoted from the manuscript words she sent to him (now Bodl. MS Eng. lang. d. 69–74). The findings indicate that Wright reproduced faithfully from Parker's material, which he employed for citation purposes, and relied on her as the sole authority for a significant number of words, senses, and examples of the Oxfordshire distribution of an item. A connoisseur of the Oxfordshire dialect, Parker undertook her own lexicographical projects and collaborated with other dialectologists, including Alexander John Ellis and Thomas Hallam. This article seeks to cast further light on the role of correspondents in the English Dialect Dictionary, while giving Parker a deserved place in the histories of English dialectology, the Oxfordshire dialect, and women's lexicography more generally.

This paper explores the other side of standardization by looking at one of the early modern regional varieties of English that remained outside the “consensus dialect” (Wright, 2000: 6). Drawing on Agha’s (2003) framework of enregisterment, I examine a selection of literary representations of the ‘northern’ dialect that are now included in The Salamanca Corpus (García-Bermejo Giner et al., 2011–), as well as contemporary lexicographical evidence on northern words. My aim is to provide a window into contemporary ideas that saw and constructed the North as the ‘other’, whilst showing, as a result, that such views were immediately relevant to how the dialect and their speakers were imagined and represented alongside the emerging standard. To do so, I undertake a twofold quantitative and qualitative analysis of the evidence to identify the repertoire of forms that were associated with the dialect and the values attributed to such forms.

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 paper takes a preliminary approach to the colonial element of Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (1896-1905). Drawing on the electronic version of the dictionary that has recently been launched, it examines the entries which refer to the colonial usage of words documented in British dialects, considering the links that Wright made with Australia, Canada, Newfoundland, and New Zealand, as well as the isolated evidence recorded on items used in South Africa and the West Indies. The aim is twofold. Firstly, lexicographical, as this paper explores the role of the colonial material by ascertaining the proportion of words that are cited from the colonies, and analysing the treatment they are given: attention is paid to their lexicographical function, labels, and the evidence provided to support their inclusion. Secondly, I argue that, despite the narrow coverage of Australian, Canadian, Newfoundland and New Zealand Englishes, the data may add to our understanding of the lexical links between British varieties of English and colonial speech of the late 1800s.

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).

Over the past few years, there has been a growing scholarly interest in the processes whereby varieties of English are constructed and publicly circulated as (relatively) stable sets of linguistic features that index sociocultural values. This has been largely prompted by Asif Agha’s groundbreaking framework of enregisterment, which, as is known, he defines as “the processes through which a linguistic repertoire becomes differentiable within a language as a socially recognized register of forms” (2003: 231-2). Whilst modern varieties of English have received a considerable amount of scholarly attention in light of Agha’s framework—especially visible in Johnstone’s extensive study of Pittsburghese (see Johnstone 2006, 2011, 2013; Johnstone et al. 2006)—, little research  has been conducted in order to explore the enregisterment of older varieties of English: Picone (2013) and Paulsen (2016), for example, have examined these processes in the US, whereas Beal (2009, 2012a, 2012b, 2016), Ruano-García (2012), Cooper (2013), and Beal and Cooper (2015) have addressed the enregisterment of northern varieties of British English during the Early / Late Modern periods. They have considered different types of discourse, namely dictionaries, newspapers, and especially dialect writing, which, because it relies consciously on regional speech forms, Clark (2013: 261) highlights, “may not only be an intentional act, but an act of enregisterment”.
This paper takes a preliminary approach to the enregisterment of the Lancashire dialect in the Late Modern English period. Drawing on The Salamanca Corpus, I look at Lancashire dialect writings published between 1700-1900 and undertake a quantitative analysis of the data to determine, firstly, the repertoire of forms that were circulated in representations of the dialect and the values they indexed; that is, to explore how the Lancashire dialect was enregistered in Late Modern England, for which purpose Silverstein’s framework of indexicality is likewise taken into consideration (see Silverstein 2003). Secondly, the paper attempts to ascertain whether some of the features associated with the dialect lost saliency over this period (i.e., were deregistered—see Cooper 2017), pointing at changing attitudes towards and perceptions about the dialect. In doing so, this paper may contribute to recent research on enregisterment in historical contexts, as well as on the Lancashire dialect in particular, which has not been thus far explored through the lens of Agha’s pioneering framework.