Javier Ruano-García is Associate Professor of the History of the English Language at the University of Salamanca, where he teaches undergraduate courses on English historical linguistics, linguistic variation in Early Modern English, and MA courses on dialect phonology and academic writing. His main research interests lie in the fields of historical language variation, with a focus on regional dialects of the early and late modern English periods, historical sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, and historical dialect lexicography. He has been involved in the compilation of the Salamanca Corpus for the past ten years, taking care of specimens representative of the Lancashire dialect and other varieties of northern English. He is the author of Early Modern Northern English Lexis: A Literary Corpus-Based Study (Peter Lang, 2010) and has edited White Kennett’s Etymological Collections of English Words and Provincial Expressions for Oxford University Press (2018).

ABSTRACT 

This talk seeks to illustrate what dialect writing can tell us about regional dialect variation in Late Modern English. The first part of the seminar will briefly introduce students to the language of dialect writing, while providing some methodological guidance to analyse this kind of historical linguistic evidence. During the second part, I will look at instances of literary dialect and dialect literature (Shorrocks 1996) from the Salamanca Corpus with a twofold purpose. On the one hand, my aim is to show that dialect writing can improve our knowledge of Late Modern English dialect speech by examining its contribution to the record with selected case studies. On the other hand, this presentation explores how third-wave sociolinguistic frameworks such as enregisterment (Agha 2003) and indexicality (Silverstein 2003) productively inform our understanding of regional speech circulated in Late Modern English literary texts. It will be shown that the representation of dialect can be read not only as a reflection of the linguistic perceptions of writers, but also as a set of dynamic indexical associations between place, speaker and speech that allow us to gain deeper insight into the sociolinguistic dynamics of the past.

References

Agha, Asif (2005). Voice, footing, enregisterment. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1): 38–59.

Salamanca Corpus (2011-). Eds. María F. García-Bermejo Giner, Pilar Sánchez-García and Javier Ruano-García. U Salamanca. http://www.thesalamancacorpus.com

Shorrocks, Graham (1996). Non-Standard Dialect Literature and Popular Culture. In: Speech Past and Present. Studies in English Dialectology in Memory of Ossi Ihalainen (eds. J. Klemola et al.), 385-411. Peter Lang.

Silverstein, Michael (2003). Indexical order and the dialectics of sociolinguistic life. Language and Communication 23(3): 193–229.