Anita Auer

This talk introduces the ongoing research project “The Language of the Labouring Poor in Late Modern England”, which aims at determining the role of the social stratification variable in language variation and change in the period c. 1795-1834. In order to do so, a corpus of c. 2000 petitions that were written under the Old Poor Law in England will be systematically investigated (morpho-syntax, orthography, phonological reflections in spelling) and the findings will be compared to language use across the social strata (letters written by the elite and middling sort).

In the first part of this talk, some general background information including details from social and educational history will be provided. The second part of the talk will focus on pauper petitions as a source for historical sociolinguistic research. More precisely, the (un)reliability of meta-linguistic social data retrieved from the petitions will be discussed, and based on that, the types of linguistic studies that are possible. In general, the paper provides a critical overview of what kinds of research questions can be answered with the help of the pauper petitions corpus.