A Very Corrupt Dialect of the Tongue:  Anglicisation and Scotticisms in nineteenth-century Scottish pauper petitions

The development of late modern Scottish English (1700-1900) is characterized by heavy amounts of prescriptivism. This specifically took the form of a process of anglicisation which pushed the previously high-status Scots language variety into the margins. Scottish linguistic features were proscribed in favour of London-English variants, and numerous studies have attested how the writings of upper- and middle-class Scottish authors took over the higher-prestige anglicised variants at the expense of traditional Scottish forms. How these language ideologies affected the usage of lower-class Scots, though, has long remained underinvestigated, in large part due to an absence of available data. The recent publication of a corpus of lower-class Scottish writing from the nineteenth century—the Corpus of Scottish Pauper Petitions, or ScotPP corpus, which includes pauper petitions written in a variety of Scottish parishes throughout the nineteenth century—offers new possibilities for research...Show moreThe development of late modern Scottish English (1700-1900) is characterized by heavy amounts of prescriptivism. This specifically took the form of a process of anglicisation which pushed the previously high-status Scots language variety into the margins. Scottish linguistic features were proscribed in favour of London-English variants, and numerous studies have attested how the writings of upper- and middle-class Scottish authors took over the higher-prestige anglicised variants at the expense of traditional Scottish forms. How these language ideologies affected the usage of lower-class Scots, though, has long remained underinvestigated, in large part due to an absence of available data. The recent publication of a corpus of lower-class Scottish writing from the nineteenth century—the Corpus of Scottish Pauper Petitions, or ScotPP corpus, which includes pauper petitions written in a variety of Scottish parishes throughout the nineteenth century—offers new possibilities for research into lower-class linguistic developments. Making use of this corpus, the present thesis investigates the occurrence of anglicisation in lower-class written language. I compare the extent to which prescriptivism has affected the ScotPP pauper petitions with the writings of upper- and middle-class Scottish people during this period, drawing on materials the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing (CMSW). By studying both overt and covert Scotticisms, drawing respectively on works by contemporaneous prescriptivists and works by modern linguists, an approach is taken that highlights not only the process of language change from above through standardisation, but also the from below aspect of developments and how they interact and co-occur with the prescriptivism of the era. In doing so, this thesis sheds light on the sociohistorical processes by which anglicisation spread through and affected the language of the nineteenth-century Scottish social classes.Show less

Leiden University Student Repository

Documents

In Collections

A Very Corrupt Dialect of the Tongue: Anglicisation and Scotticisms in nineteenth-century Scottish pauper petitions