Volume 2, Issue 1 -

In Puerto Rico, the defense of Spanish and discussions of bilingualism have been conditioned by the island’s local politics and its relationships with the United States. Previous research has looked at how identity politics and specific political players produced arguments in favor or against various language proposals. Yet, questions regarding the complex ideological nature of the language debate in Puerto Rico remain to be examined with greater focalization and critical scrutiny. To this end and employing an interdisciplinary approach to issues of language and linguistic representation, I explore the ideological complexity of bilingualism in Puerto Rico during several decades from the perspective of the politics of language and by taking into account the phenomenon of symbolic violence. I argue that particular metaphors of language exemplify the link between symbolic and material violence in the context of this society’s struggles for political self-determination.

This article investigates what nineteenth-century novels can tell us about the speech of the lower orders, using the “Dialect in British Fiction 1800–1836” database to focus specifically on how the speech of servants is represented. Recent work on enregisterment has led to a resurgence of interest in literary representations of dialect in relation to specific linguistic features and varieties. I argue that a sustained engagement with literary texts has the potential to illuminate wider cultural constructs of language variation, and that to accomplish this, attention must be paid to issues of genre as well as a range of stylistic features including speech representation, metalanguage and characterisation. The article concludes that, while novels are able to tell us little about how servants really spoke, they are a rich source of information about the attitudes and assumptions that underpinned cultural concepts such as “talking like a servant”.

This paper examines intra-speaker variation in historical writing. Its purpose is to show that lower-class people were able to consciously switch between language forms of conceptual orality and distance in their texts. To test this hypothesis, the article focuses on code-switching phenomena in autobiographic writing by patients from the Southern German psychiatric hospitals in Irsee and Kaufbeuren (1852–1931). The corpus of this paper consists of c. 98,300 tokens by 22 writers, of whom 11 use code-switching. First, I develop a method to distinguish code-switching from code-mixing phenomena in written texts by combining structural with functional approaches. In the article’s empirical part, I analyse the writers’ different communicative repertoires and the structures and functions of code-switching. Writers use linguistic variants of both conceptual orality and distance for code-switching. Thereby, they often use dialect, regional, or Southern German language forms that are outside of their regular linguistic repertoires. This leads to a re-evaluation of diatopically marked variants as not necessarily reflecting a writer’s lack of standard competence, but on the contrary being his or her deliberate linguistic choices.

This paper relates diachronic change in discourse strategies of the Viking-age historical writing to political changes of the period and to communities of practice that produce these histories and chronicles. It examines the labels and stereotypes applied to the Vikings and establishes their sources and evolution by applying a fourfold chronological division of historical sources from around 800 to 1200 (based on the political developments within Anglo-Saxon history and on the manuscript history of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ). The data for the study come from both Old English and Anglo-Latin chronicles. The results are interpreted in terms of critical discourse analysis. It is demonstrated that the chroniclers employ strategies of dissimilation exploiting the notion of illegitimacy and criminality of the Viking outgroup. These strategies change over time, depending on the political situation (raiding vs. settlement vs. reconquest period) and communities of practice involved in the maintenance and dissemination of a particular political discourse.