Volume 10, Issue 1

Throughout the nineteenth century, Senegal was the site of some of the most extensive French experiments with alphabetic print literacy in African languages, especially Wolof. Before the advent of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), authors such as Jean Dard, Jacques-François Roger, Aloïs Kobès, David Boilat, Louis Faidherbe, and Louis Descemet experimented with Latin-scripted orthographies for representing the sounds of Wolof. This article focuses on the contributions of Boilat and Descemet, both members of prominent multilingual métis families in Saint-Louis and native speakers of Wolof. Even as they expressed deference to their predecessors, Boilat and Decemet asserted their intuitions as native speakers, challenging dominant colonial “scripts” by authoring their own texts and proposing their own orthographies. I read their nineteenth-century analyses of Wolof as important, if understudied, contributions to the history of phonetics by situating their works within the politics of colonial alphabet schemes.

In the eighteenth century, a period dominated by linguistic correctness, propriety and etiquette, appropriate forms of address are a customary feature in correspondence and a key means by which individuals are able to construct their social identity in light of their relationships with others. In this context, and framed within the fields of historical sociolinguistics and historical sociopragmatics, this paper explores the role of direct address as a socially-governed linguistic practice and as an index of politeness, and the focus lies in intra-speaker variation in the use of personal names and honorifics in the opening, body and subscription parts of the letter. The study is based on a set of 170 private letters written by Mary Hamilton (1756–1816), courtier, diarist and a member of the Bluestocking circle, and the analysis considers notions traditionally connected with pragmatic language use such as distance, power and politeness, bearing in mind other content-dependent factors as well. Overall, the research presented here aims to contribute to a growing body of literature which understands ego-documents as providing a window onto language and society.

This paper studies on multilingual administrative writing in Sweden during the early modern era of emerging national language ideology within the domain of court writing. The source material for this study consists of lower-court records from Finnish-speaking areas of the Swedish realm c. 1620–1700. The court system in Sweden was reformed in 1614 with the establishment of appellate courts that scrutinized the sentences passed by lower courts. Court records were written in Swedish, the official language of administrative writing of the period, but certain segments, notably represented speech, could be rendered in Finnish. This required textual mediation between the prescribed Swedish language of the court protocol, and the non-standard spoken Finnish in the courtrooms. The aim is to examine the embedding strategies, retention patterns, and textual mediation in the multilingual writing of 17th-century Finnish court scribes. The results show that Finnish is retained for especially pertinent or untranslatable witness statements. At the end of the 17th century, the use of parallel Swedish translations and clarifications to Finnish items increased. It is argued that this increase is due to the imposition of autocracy in 1680 and a concomitant push towards monolingual Swedish uniformity within the entire realm.

Using a cohort sequential quantitative design and evaluative features drawn from Systemic Functional Grammar, this study investigates diachronic variation in linguists’ use of evaluation to perform scholarly identities in English academic writing. More specifically, it focuses on the use of statements, commands, modality, comment assessment, and positive and negative lexis, in early and late career papers from 30 linguists born between 1905 and 1960. These linguists were grouped into three cohorts based on year of birth and studied in terms of variation along developmental and cross-generational timescales. Within the developmental timescale, scholars were found to use more evaluation in early career writing than in late career writing. Cohort-specific developmental changes are identified in the frequency of modality and comment assessment. Developmental and cohort-specific trends are found to occur within the backdrop of an overall decrease in the use of evaluative language within the discipline. Results point to a complex diachronic model of academic identity enactment in writing, whereby evaluative features pattern in similar or different ways depending on the timescale considered.

The anglicisation of Scottish writing, a development in which the features of the previously high-status Scots language variety became marginalised and proscribed in favour of prestige Standard English variants, is typically dated by scholars to the sixteenth through eighteenth century. The effect of anglicisation on upper- and middle-class Scottish authors’ written language has been attested in numerous studies; however, how the metalinguistic ideologies of the time affected the language of the Scottish lower classes has long remained underinvestigated. This study makes use of the recent publication of a corpus of lower-class Scottish writing from the nineteenth century – the Corpus of Scottish Pauper Petitions – to investigate the effect of prescriptivism on lower-class Scottish writing as documented in nineteenth-century pauper petitions. The materials are placed side-by-side with the writings of upper- and middle-class Scottish people during this period, taken from the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing. This study, which investigates both overt and covert Scotticisms by drawing respectively on usage guides by contemporaneous prescriptivists and works by modern linguists, takes a ‘from below’ approach to Scotland’s linguistic history and represents a new step in our understanding of the development of historical Scottish writing.