The USAL-UVA Linguistics Research Seminars (1)

About the event

03/19/2021 16:30

EDIFICIO PLACENTINOS

Organized by Javier Ruano-García (USAL), Laura Filardo-Llamas (UVA)

Categories:: Humanities and sociocultural

Keywords:: dialectology; enregisterment; linguistics; sociolinguistics; Yorkshire

Enregisterment in historical contexts: nineteenth-century Yorkshire dialects

 Paul Cooper (University of Liverpool)

 There has been a relatively stable repertoire of enregistered (Agha 2003) dialect features indexically linked with Yorkshire since at least the nineteenth century (Beal 2009). This repertoire can be observed in dialect literature and literary dialect, dialect dictionaries and glossaries, travel writing, and articles in popular magazines. These sources also include metalinguistic commentary which serves as evidence for third-order indexical awareness (Johnstone et al. 2006) of the social values associated with Yorkshire dialect by historical audiences (Cooper 2013). 

 In this paper I illustrate what nineteenth-century textual material can tell us about historical perceptions of the language features used to represent Yorkshire dialect in writing using the methodological framework for the study of historical enregisterment proposed by Cooper (2013). Moreover, these same historical sources highlight the existence of embedded enregistered repertoires associated with more localised areas in the county. Using a corpus of dialect literature and literary dialect as well as qualitative metacommentary I discuss the systematic differences in written representations of “Yorkshire” dialect from different parts of the county. I argue that the features that are represented and discussed most frequently and consistently are evidence of their enregisterment. That is, they were imbued with specific social values, particularly those relating to specific geographical areas within Yorkshire, to nineteenth-century audiences. I conclude that we can observe both a general “Yorkshire” repertoire as well as distinct repertoires of “Yorkshire” dialect, each corresponding to a different area in the region, which illustrates an awareness of distinct “Yorkshire” dialects in the nineteenth century.

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