Book contents
- Standardising English
- Standardising English
- Copyright page
- Contents
- List of Figures, Maps and Tables
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Part I Norms and Margins: Ideology and Concepts
- Part II Norms and Margins: A Historical Perspective
- 4 Norms and Rules in the History of Grammar: French and English Handbooks in the Seventeenth Century
- 5 The End of Toleration? Language on the Margins in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language
- 6 Eighteenth-Century Pronouncing Dictionaries: Reflecting Usage or Setting Their Own Standard?
- 7 Setting a Standard: Authors and Sources in the OED
- 8 Conflicting Linguistic Norms in the Letters of Virginian Soldiers during the American Civil War
- 9 Correcting English: Josephine Turck Baker (1873–1942) and the Early American Usage Guide Tradition
- Part III Norms and Margins: Moving into the Twenty-First Century
- Author Index
- Subject Index
- References
8 - Conflicting Linguistic Norms in the Letters of Virginian Soldiers during the American Civil War
from Part II - Norms and Margins: A Historical Perspective
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 March 2018
Book contents
- Standardising English
- Standardising English
- Copyright page
- Contents
- List of Figures, Maps and Tables
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Part I Norms and Margins: Ideology and Concepts
- Part II Norms and Margins: A Historical Perspective
- 4 Norms and Rules in the History of Grammar: French and English Handbooks in the Seventeenth Century
- 5 The End of Toleration? Language on the Margins in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language
- 6 Eighteenth-Century Pronouncing Dictionaries: Reflecting Usage or Setting Their Own Standard?
- 7 Setting a Standard: Authors and Sources in the OED
- 8 Conflicting Linguistic Norms in the Letters of Virginian Soldiers during the American Civil War
- 9 Correcting English: Josephine Turck Baker (1873–1942) and the Early American Usage Guide Tradition
- Part III Norms and Margins: Moving into the Twenty-First Century
- Author Index
- Subject Index
- References
Summary
Throughout the Civil War, thousands of low ranking soldiers, usually semiliterate and far from mastering written conventions, wrote to inquire after their families and give news from the front.The corpus of this study is composed of 354 of these letters, written by 76 privates, corporals and sergeants from Virginia (1861-1865). The letters reveal the soldiers were aware that their vernacular speech was not in line with academic conventions, and there is a constant tension between the academic prescriptive norm and non-standard variations. . Three norms influenced the soldiers' writings: a secular one – based on regional vernacular ; a religious one – similar to the rhetoric used in sermons and the Bible; an academic norm which these soldiers only partially grasped. To these can be added a fourth one: the linguistic norm of traditional lyrical ballads. The rather sporadic use of non-standard forms in these letters suggests that prescriptive norms had an impact on the soldiers’ writing, and that certain linguistic forms, generally considered to be representative of Southern American English and frequently used in oral contexts, had already become socially stigmatized at this time
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Standardising EnglishNorms and Margins in the History of the English Language, pp. 144 - 170Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2018
References
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. (2016). New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=ain%27t.Google Scholar
Ancestry 1997–2016. http://home.ancestry.com.Google Scholar
Austin, F. O. (1973). Epistolary conventions in the Clift family correspondence. English Studies, 54, 9–22, 129–140.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bailey, G. (1997). When did Southern American English begin? In Schneider, E. W., eds., Englishes around the World, Vol I: General Studies, British Isles, North America: Studies in Honour of Mansfield Gorlach, 2 vols, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 255–275.Google Scholar
Bailey, G. and Thomas, E. (1998). Some aspects of African-American Vernacular English phonology. In Mufwene, S et al., eds., African American English: Structure, History, and Use, London: Routledge, pp. 85–109.Google Scholar
Botkin, B. A. (1949). A Treasury of Southern Folklore: Stories, Ballads, Traditions, and Folkways of the People of the South, New York: Crown Publishers.Google Scholar
Butterworth, H. (1875). The Story of the Hymns, or Hymns that Have a History: An Account of the Origin of Hymns of Personal Religious Experience, New York: American Tract Society.Google Scholar
Dobson, E. J. (1968). Phonology. Vol II of English Pronunciation 1500–1700, 2nd edn, Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Edwards, W. F. (2008). African American Vernacular English: Phonology. In Schneider, E. W., ed., Varieties of English: The Americas and the Caribbean, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 181–191.Google Scholar
Fasold, R. W. (1981). The relationship between black and white English in the South. American Speech, 56, 163–189.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
German, G. (2011). Appalachian and African American lyrical traditions as measures of sociolinguistic gradation and linguistic change. In Banks, David, ed., Aspects linguistiques du texte poétique, Paris: L'Harmattan, pp. 135–157.Google Scholar
Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History. (2011). I take up my pen – Complete transcripts from the exhibition. www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/american-civil-war/interactives/i-take-my-pen-letters-from-civil-war/transcripts.Google Scholar
Gilley, D. H. (1999). The Civil War Letters of Daniel Haywood Gilley, Company F, 16th Virginia Regiment, Williamsburg, VA: J. K. Gilley.Google Scholar
Houston, A. C. (1985). Continuity and Change in English Morphology: The Variable (ING), PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar
Kautzsch, A. (2000). Liberian letters and Virginian narratives: negation patterns in two new sources of earlier African American English. American Speech, 75, 34–53.Google Scholar
Labov, W. (1966). The Social Stratification of English in New York City, Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Labov, W. (1972). Language in the Inner City: Studies in Black English Vernacular, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Labov, W., Cohen, P., Robins, C. and Lewis, J. (1969). A Study of the Non-Standard English of Negro and Puerto Rican Speakers in New York City. Final report, Cooperative Research Project 3288, 2 vols, Philadelphia: U.S. Regional Survey.Google Scholar
Le Dû, J. and Le Berre, Y. (1995). Le double jeu de la langue. In Eloy, J.-M., eds., La qualité de la langue? Le cas du français, Paris: Champion, pp. 251–268.Google Scholar
Le Pore, G. (1997–2016). Russell County, Virginia in the Civil War. http://russellvets.org/letters/letters.html.Google Scholar
Lucke, J. R. (1949). A Study of the Virginia Dialect and its Origin in England, PhD dissertation, University of Virginia.Google Scholar
Monaghan, C. (2002). Webster to McGuffey: A sketch of American literacy textbooks. History of Reading News. 25 (2), 1–8. http://historyliteracy.org/scripts/search_display.php?Article_ID=182.Google Scholar
Montgomery, M. (2009). Historical and comparative perspectives on a-prefixing in the English of Appalachia. American Speech, 84, 5–22.Google Scholar
Murray, L. (1824). An English Grammar: Comprehending the Principles and Rules of the Language. Illustrated by Appropriate Exercises, and a Key to the Exercises, 5th edn, 2 vols, High-Ousegate: Thomas Wilson and Sons.Google Scholar
Penhallurick, R. (2008). Welsh English: Phonology. In Kortman, B. and Upton, C., eds., Varieties of English: The British Isles, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 105–121.Google Scholar
Read, W. (1934). Southern speech. In Couch, W. T., ed., Culture in the South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, pp. 594–615.Google Scholar
Rissanen, M. (1999). Syntax. In Laas, R., eds., The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol III: 1476–1776, 6 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 187–331.Google Scholar
Ritchie, J. (1967). Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians as Sung by Jean Ritchie, 2nd edn, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.Google Scholar
Sharp, C. (1932). English Folksongs from the Southern Appalachians, ed. Karpeles, M., Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Shuy, R., Wolfram, W. and Rilley, W. (1967). Linguistic Correlates of Social Stratification in Detroit Speech. Cooperative Research Project 6–1347. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.Google Scholar
Summerlin, N. J. (1972). A Dialect Study: Affective Parameters in the Deletion and Substitution of Consonants on the Deep South, unpublished PhD dissertation, Florida State University.Google Scholar
Sundby, B., Bjørge, A. K. and Haugland, K. E. (1991). A Dictionary of English Normative Grammar, 1700–1800, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
University of Virginia Library. (1997–2003). The Valley of the Shadow. http://valley.lib.virginia.edu/VoS/personalpapers/browse/aboutpersonalpapers.html.Google Scholar
University of Virginia Library. (2007). 1850 Virginia Census: Total white adults who cannot read and write. http://mapserver.lib.virginia.edu/php/county.php.Google Scholar
University of Virginia Library. (2007). 1860 Virginia Census. http://mapserver.lib.virginia.edu/php/start.php?year=V1860.Google Scholar
Webster, N. (1839). An Improved Grammar of the English Language, 2nd edn, New Haven: Sidney Babcock.Google Scholar
Wolfram, W. (1969). A Sociolinguistic Description of Detroit Negro Speech, Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Wolfram, W. (1980). A-prefixing in Appalachian English. In Labov, W., ed., Locating Language in Time and Space, New York: Academic Press, pp. 107–142.Google Scholar
Wolfram, W. (2008). Rural and ethnic varieties in the Southeast: Morphology and syntax. In Schneider, E. W., ed., Varieties of English: The Americas and the Caribbean, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 468–491.Google Scholar
Wolfram, W. and Christian, D. (1976). Appalachian Speech, Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics.Google Scholar
Wolfram, W. and Schilling-Estes, N. (2006). American English, 2nd edn, Victoria: Blackwell Publishing.Google Scholar