ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the signalling of social otherness in Punch magazine through the use of non-standard orthography, semi-phonetic spelling, and typographic shifts. Building on the concepts of “orthographic aesthetics” (Jaffe 2000) and “zone of social meaning” (Sebba 2007), we use a corpus of 550 issues of Punch, published between the 1840s and 1920s, to discover how often and in what ways both foreign languages and dialects of English were featured in the periodical. The results show that the decision to use visually salient shifts in the written code to mark voices that deviate from the presumed standard was frequently motivated by humour and the desire to highlight a specific speaker’s membership of a distinct social group that was typically defined by nationality, ethnicity, regional background, or class.
