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In:Contact, Variation, and Change in the History of English
Edited by Simone E. Pfenninger, Olga Timofeeva, Anne-Christine Gardner, Alpo Honkapohja, Marianne Hundt and Daniel Schreier
[Studies in Language Companion Series 159] 2014
► pp. 187–212

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Letters of Artisans and the Labouring Poor (England, c. 1750–1835)

Approaching linguistic diversity in Late Modern English

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 | University of Lausanne
Published online: 11 September 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.159.10lai
Histories of linguistic variability and language standardization in Late Modern England have predominantly focused on the well-educated layers of society. This paper aims at providing a more complete overview of language use during that period by focusing on the lower social ranks. The discussion will be based on the corpus Letters of Artisans and the Labouring Poor (LALP), which contains more than 2,000 letters of application for poor relief from the period c.1750−1835. The first part of the paper describes the corpus in some detail. The second part discusses new research questions that the lower-class material raises; this will be illustrated by two case studies. In the first study, the material will be viewed from the point of view of spelling acquisition and fossilization. The second case study focuses on providing diachronic time depth to some of the current issues discussed in the sociolinguistics of globalization (Blommaert 2010), such as mobility and developing literacies.
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Cited by (6)

Cited by six other publications

Auer, Anita & Raymond Hickey
2025. Ego Documents in the History of English. In The New Cambridge History of the English Language, ► pp. 586 ff. DOI logo
Dossena, Marina
2025. Networks, Coalitions and Language Change. In The New Cambridge History of the English Language, ► pp. 725 ff. DOI logo
Gardner, Anne-Christine
2023. English Pauper Letters in the Eighteenth Century and Beyond. Linguistica 63:1-2 ► pp. 301 ff. DOI logo
Timmis, Ivor
2018. The Pragmatics of Poverty in the Essex Pauper Letters, 1731–1837. Corpus Pragmatics 2:3 ► pp. 243 ff. DOI logo
Voeste, Anja
2018. The self as a source. A peasant farmer’s letters from prison (1848–1852). Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 4:1 ► pp. 97 ff. DOI logo
Włodarczyk, Matylda
2017. Auer, Anita, Daniel Schreier and Richard Watts (eds). 2015.Letter Writing and Language Change. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 18:1 ► pp. 142 ff. DOI logo

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