The Dialects of British English in Fictional Texts

Donatella Montini, Irene Ranzato, Donatella Montini, Irene Ranzato

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000392258
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Linguistica

This collection brings together perspectives on regional and social varieties of British English in fictional dialogue across works spanning various literary genres, showcasing authorial and translation innovation while also reflecting on their impact on the representation of sociolinguistic polarities.

The volume explores the ways in which different varieties of British English, including Welsh, Scots, and Received Pronunciation, are portrayed across a range of texts, including novels, films, newspapers, television series, and plays. Building on metadiscourse which highlighted the growing importance of accent as an emblem of social stance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the chapters in this book examine how popular textual forms create and reinforce links between accent and social persona, and accent and individual idiolect. A look at these themes, as explored through the lens of audiovisual translation and the challenges of dubbing, sheds further light on the creative resources authors and translators draw on in representing sociolinguistic realities through accent.

This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in dialectology, audiovisual translation, literary translation, and media studies.

Part I

Voices on Page

1 Scots as the Language of the Uncanny

The Case of Nineteenth-Century Gothic Narratives*

Marina Dossena

1.1 Introduction

The relationship between Gothic narrative and folk lore has always been intriguing; not only are themes often related (for instance, ghostly apparitions feature prominently both in Gothic stories and in folk narratives), but language can also be shown to work in interestingly similar ways in both contexts, not least when socially and geographically marked varieties are involved. In this contribution, I intend to discuss a few texts authored by some of the most important names in the Scottish literature of Late Modern times, in order to outline the ways in which linguistic choices, especially in relation to the co-existence of Scots and English in the same texts, contribute to the definition of the genre characteristics of the texts themselves. More specifically, I aim to draw attention to the importance of Scots as a language in which Gothic stories are not only narrated, but also introduced, thus preparing the reader for a shift in the narrative.¹ After an overview of how Scots and English are found to occur in folk tales and other genres pertaining to popular culture, such as ballads, I will present a few case studies drawn from the literary works of five among the most important authors to have shaped Scottish culture between the end of the eighteenth and the end of the nineteenth centuries: Robert Fergusson, Robert Burns, Walter Scott, James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson. My analysis will focus on how Scots is employed to frame the narrative and outline both characters and contexts, and how this contributes to the definition of what is “uncanny” while being presented (paradoxically) as quite familiar from the linguistic point of view.²

1.2 Scots and Scots-English Code-Mixing in Popular Culture

Language has often been shown to play an unobtrusive and yet powerful role in the definition of both characters and stories, not least through the use of carefully selected labels and naming strategies (see Nevala et al. 2017 and Dossena 2019). In addition, the choice of specific linguistic forms, either in a different language or in a different variety, can convey meaning; for instance, in Alexander MacKenzie’s account of the Highland Clearances, occasional sentences in Gaelic, typically interjections of woe or cries for mercy, promptly translated by the editor, function as powerful authenticating devices (see Dossena 2001). However, in contexts where folk lore, magic and Gothic atmospheres are seen to influence one another, linguistic choices can be employed for stylistic effects that go beyond genre characteristics and have a sociolinguistic value on account of how they help define a specific cultural context and outline the protagonists’ profiles.

In Scottish Gothic narrative, the wavering along the Scots-English cline results in a register that is particularly suited to representations of the “uncanny.” Indeed, as Davison and Germanà (2017–18, 2) point out, “The word ‘uncanny’ captures the in-between-ness that Scottish writers – especially those employing the Gothic – suggest is central to what might be called the ‘Scottish condition’ in the wake of the Act of Union,” when the contrasting trends of anglicization on one hand and antiquarianism on the other were particularly intense (Dossena 2005, 56–115). Within this framework, uses of Scots appear to take on ideological overtones that associate “Gothic” contexts with an ancestral, pre-rational past, while uses of English are associated with a more modern and “enlightened” world.

A similar ambivalence is observed in popular culture, such as in songs, jokes, or story-telling, where the use of socially and/or geographically marked varieties may function as both an authenticating device and as a distancing one: in the former case, language is a tool employed for self-identification; in the latter case, instead, it places recipients outside the network of the protagonists of the texts under discussion, which may also result in a certain degree of emphasis placed on how distant standard-language speakers can be from the “dialect” speakers in terms of education or indeed civilization.

The Salamanca Corpus,³ compiled by García-Bermejo Giner et al., includes instances of both cases. A Collection of Songs, Comic, Satirical, and Descriptive, Chiefly in the Newcastle Dialect, and Illustrative of the Language and Manners of the Common People on the Banks of the Tyne and Neighbourhood, published anonymously in 1827, is meant to offer representations of a geographically marked variety through texts in which spelling represents phonological renditions. On the other hand, Howard Pease’s The White-faced Priest and Other Northumbrian Episodes, published in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1896, is a text in which dialect occurs with much less density. While Pease also includes a glossary (a feature that had been typical of books offering both dialect literature and literary dialect since the eighteenth century), both texts provide introductory comments on linguistic representation, thus drawing attention to specific features of the language or indeed to the difficulty of conveying its specificity:

A few words on what is called the Newcastle Dialect must suffice. This being a border town, was, before the union of the two kingdoms, subject to continual incursions from the Scotch; and after the union great numbers of them settled here. The historians of the town tell us that most of our keelmen were originally from Scotland. This accounts for our dialect and ...