Usage guides, social commentary and views on education in Late Modern Scotland

Abstract

This contribution discusses two texts published at the height of Late Modern times (Mitchell 1799 and Anon. 1826), in order to trace the roots of well-established labels occurring in assessments of Scottish usage even to this day. 1 In particular, attention is paid to the qualifiers that the books employ both to stigmatize and to commend forms, so as to outline the kind of ideological stance they conveyed. The two relatively short books are now included in the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing, and will be presented within the framework of that collection as significant instances of books circulating when linguistic self-consciousness affected both upwardly-mobile speakers and well-educated users. Models of correct usage were found to be useful tools for the acquisition or improvement of both social status and prestige-aims which still resonate with users today and the pragmatic value of which is only just beginning to be explored in a new light.

Speech reflections in Late Modern English pauper letters from Dorset

“…However, dialectal evidence in these valuable sources is mediated through or provided by a usually well-educated writer (see also Fairman 2007c: 192; Ruano-García 2023) and does not document spontaneous, unmonitored speech. Similarly, court records as documented in the Old Bailey Corpus can also contain an element of editorial intervention (Dossena 2010: 14; Grund 2023).…”

“…In light of these constraints, Dossena (2010: 5) stresses ‘the importance of studying authentic manuscripts, as it is only when we access original texts and manuscripts that we can go beyond the layers of interpretation added by later editors’. Characterised by features of orality, a fact which has long been recognised (e.g.…”

“…The Late Modern English period was influenced by the prescriptivist movement and the codification of a standard in pronouncing dictionaries and grammars (see Beal 2004 for an overview; Beal 2023; Wiemann 2023), to the extent that ‘all encoders [i.e. those who performed the physical act of writing], even the least schooled ones, normally attempted to imitate “standard” models, especially at the beginning and at the end of the letter’ (Dossena 2010: 19; see also Gardner forthcoming on formulaic language in pauper letters).…”