In:Patterns of Change in 18th-century English: A sociolinguistic approach
Edited by Terttu Nevalainen, Minna Palander-Collin and Tanja Säily
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 8] 2018
► pp. 77–95
Get fulltext
Chapter 6“Ungenteel” and “rude”? On the use of thou in the eighteenth century
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.
Published online: 6 September 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.8.06nev
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.8.06nev
Article outline
- 6.1Introduction
- 6.2A short history of the rise and fall of thou
- 6.2.1The pre-eighteenth-century use of thou
- 6.2.2Eighteenth-century grammars on the use of thou
- 6.3 Thou in eighteenth-century letters
- 6.4
Thou on closer view
- 6.4.1The contextual use of thou
- 6.4.2The most prolific “thouer”: Ignatius Sancho in focus
- 6.5The use of thou in CEECE
- 6.5.1The influence of social and linguistic norms
- 6.5.2A marker of status and intimacy – and of interpersonal identity?
- 6.6Conclusions
Acknowledgments Notes
Cited by (4)
Cited by four other publications
Hanna, Kirsten
Nevalainen, Terttu & Tanja Säily
Nurmi, Arja
Sotoca Fernández, David
2025. “If this be Irish gratitude, I could wish myself a Frenchman”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 26:3 ► pp. 354 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 8 march 2026. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.