ABSTRACT
So far, I have concentrated on discussing changes in the Standard (English) variety of English during the later modern period, noting for each level of language how developments in this reference variety affect and are affected by the prescriptions and proscriptions of normative writers. In each chapter, there have been references to other regional or national varieties, both within and outside the British Isles, usually as lexicographers, grammarians and orthoepists condemn words, structures and pronunciations that they considered ‘vicious’, ‘barbarous’ or as displaying some ‘marks of disgrace’. Whilst the intention of these works was to discourage or even eradicate the use of dialect, they do provide us with some insights into features of nonstandard English which were particularly salient at the time. In some cases, these normative works provide early evidence of variables which were to become major markers of dialect differences at a later stage, such as the lack of the FOOT-STRUT contrast in northern English varieties noted by Walker (see p. 43). Alongside these normative works we see, from the eighteenth century onwards (and earlier in some cases), various kinds of literary representation of dialect. Some of these are humorous ‘dialogues’ by authors such as John Collier (aka Tim Bobbin), whose Tummus and Meary was first published in 1746 and went into 19 editions. Others, such as the poems of William Barnes, are more serious attempts to capture the language of rural folk at a time when the countryside was under threat from enclosures and industrialization. Apart from this ‘dialect literature’ (i.e. literature written wholly in dialect), we see representations of non-standard varieties in the literary dialect of authors such as Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell and Thomas Hardy. These novelists tended to use Standard English for the authorial voice, but used dialect as a marked variety to represent the speech of certain rural and/or lower-class characters. Other insights into regional dialects can be found in travellers’ tales such as Defoe’s Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–76), tourist guides such as West’s A Guide to the Lakes, and other works such as Marshall’s The Rural Economy of Norfolk (1787). Whilst some of these representations of dialect are at the level of stereotype, they can still provide insights into both the nature of regional variation at this time, and attitudes towards these varieties.
