Shaping the other in the standardization of English: the case of the ‘Northern’ dialect.
-
-
[1] Universidad de Salamanca
Universidad de Salamanca
Salamanca, España
-
- Localización: IJES: international journal of English studies, ISSN 1578-7044, ISSN-e 1989-6131, Vol. 20, Nº. 2, 2020 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Standardisation and change in Early Modern English: empirical approaches), págs. 185-205
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
-
Resumen
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.
