Written code-switching and in-text translationsRiikka Ala-Risku, University of Helsinki

Italy’s intricate sociolinguistic situation reflects its fragmented history and produces various language contact fenomena between standard Italian, based on 14th century Florentine, and numerous regional/local dialects, often mutually unintelligible (Berruto 2005). In spite of the Italianization process, which dialects have been undergoing since the Italian unification in 1861, dialects have resurfaced in narrative (Dardano 2010) and a number of contemporary authors have chosen to use them alongside Italian.

In my doctoral thesis, I examine code-switching in contemporary Italian narrative, a subject that lacks a comprehensive study. In this presentation, my aim is to analyse one peculiar aspect of the literary use of dialects, namely in-text translations (Bandia 1996). These translations represent a fundamental difference between oral and written code-switching: the audience for the former is assumed to be bilingual (at least to some extent), whereas the latter is aimed at a presumably monolingual audience (Callahan 2004: 114). Therefore code-switching writers use different types of in-text translations in order to guarantee the comprehension of potentially obscure elements within the text, that is “have their cake and eat it too” (Delabastita – Grutman 2005: 17). In-text translations constitute a widely used strategy with various forms, which range from highlighted explicit translations or even footnotes and glossaries to literal translations similar to monolingual synonyms or carefully hidden contextual translations. I claim that translations are also used, on one hand, to promote the local identity, especially concerning localized terminology and, on the other, to face the requirements imposed by the editors and the market.

BibliographyBandia, P. 1996. Code-switching and code-mixing in African creative writing: some insights for translation studies. Traduction, terminologie, rédaction, 9(1), 139-151. Berruto, G. 2005. Dialect/standard convergence, mixing, and models of language contact: the case of Italy. Auer, P. – F. Hinskens – P. Kerswill (Eds.) Dialect change, convergence and divergence in European languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 81 – 95.Callahan, L. 2004. Spanish/English Codeswitching in a Written Corpus. Amsterdam: Benjamins.Dardano, M. 2010. Stili provvisori. La lingua della narrativa italiana d’oggi. Roma: Carocci.Delabastita, D. – Grutman, R. 2005. Fictionalising translation and multilingualism. Antwerpen: Hogeschool Antwerpen.

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Constructing the Standard from the Non-standard: Algerian Arabic within French LiteratureKhadija Belfarhi, University of Annaba Algeria

Modern literature paved its doors to non-literature in allowing its language to construct from the standard and non-standard forms texts whose identity is split between two cultures embedded in two different languages. The rejection of the standard is a growing interest in modern writers who find in the idiolect more space for inserting different literary objects. Dialectical writings, however, do not all keep inside the same linguistic system as it is the case, for example, of American writers writing in American vernaculars. There is another less recognised category whose literary representation goes out of the whole linguistic system by inserting idiolectical features in a well-structured way that successfully establishes the integration of the standard form with the non-standard being opposed not only in the linguistic system but too in the degree of formality and status. It is precisely the case of Algerian literature expressed in the French language. There are here two types of integration: the first is “objective” in Bernstein’s view because it keeps inside the standard language with little interference from the idiolect. The book of Nedjma by Kateb Yaccinen, for instance, makes use of rare forms which are purely taken from dialectical Arabic. The second is “constructive” (ibid) as it draws an alterity from the idiolect to the standard language which is linguistically strange to it as the idiolect is Arabic while the standard is French. This is due to the fact that writing becomes transcultural rather than local or interlocal (Shukla & Shukla, 2006) and the challenges of multiculturalism (Watten, 2003) melted radically divergent systems together whereby the case of Algerian Arabic within the French language is a good example. This itinerary channel, which melts the dialect in the standard language, takes the following features:

(1) The surface structure of the text is standard whereas the deep is ideolectical1.(2) Alterity to Dialectal meaning occurs in the intimate descriptions.(3) Alterity to standard meaning occurs in the general descriptions.(4) The dominance of the standard language is the key to its construction2.

In brief, the present proposal discusses the construction of French literary texts from Algerian dialectical Arabic. Illustrations on this itinerancy are taken principally from the novelist Rachid Boujedra’s writings (eg. La répudiation), who is an Algerian writer known for his adherence to the dialectical form of literary texts.

References

Beinstein, C. (1996). Stein’s Identity, Modern Fiction Studies, 42, 3.Boudjedra, R. (2002). La répudiation. Éditions ANEP, Algiers.Shukla, S.B., & Shukla, A. (2006). Migrant voices in literatures in English. Sarup & Sons.Yacine, K. (1966). Le polygone étoilé. Éditions Seuil, Paris.Watten, B. (2003). The constructivist moment: from material text to cultural poetics. Wesleyan

University Press.

1 The idiolect is different from the dialect in terms of the writer’s own choice of some dialectical forms instead of others.2 Kateb Yaccine, 1966.

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At the Crossroads of Languages: The Postcolonial Text and the Promise of TranslationSimona Bertacco, University of Louisville

‘The postcolonial’, as Graham Huggan called it, is generally defined as an interdisciplinary field in which cultural practices are studied alongside the more practical – i.e. historical, political, legal, etc. – aspects of colonization. Yet, as a scholarly field, the postcolonial is almost always studied within the boundaries of one language, one colonial empire, one cultural framework, and one academic discipline. A single-language approach to postcolonial literature is indeed unfaithful to one of the basic features of the postcolonial world – its multilingualism – no matter how careful the research. What happens, then, when we acknowledge hearing variations of standard English in the background when reading a poem, a novel, a play by a ‘postcolonial’ writer? What kind of reading is demanded by a textuality that explicitly toys with several languages or that mixes standard language and dialect?

In my paper I will argue that the challenge facing postcolonial studies today is to become, literally and crucially, a discourse of and on translation. In particular, by scrutinizing the ‘busy borders’ between languages in writers such as Dionne Brand, Brian Friel, Tomson Highway, M. NourbeSe Philip, I will argue for the recognition of the central and creative role of translation in shaping the poetics of postcolonial texts. A translation-oriented approach to the postcolonial text would ground our textual analyses in more complex contexts and, through a comparative perspective, would promote new and fresh engagements with texts, territories and cultures at the crossroads of languages and dialects.

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Robert Burns, stereotypes and stylizationAlex Broadhead,University of Liverpool

Robert Burns’s posthumous role as a stereotypical icon of Scotland is well-documented. His reliance on linguistic stereotypes, however, has been overlooked by literary critics and linguists alike, perhaps as a result of a historical tendency to undervalue the perceivedly ‘inauthentic’ aspects of his language. In this paper, I argue that the significance of Burns’s use of stereotypes might most fruitfully be understood not in terms of misrepresentation or inauthenticity, but rather in terms of the sociolinguistic concept of ‘stylization’ (Coupland 2001, 2007).

In Coupland’s account, stylization is a socially-meaningful form of linguistic variation which ‘brings into play stereotyped semiotic and ideological values associated with other groups, situations or times,’ and which ‘radically mediates understanding of the ideational, identificational and relational meanings of its own utterances’ (2007: 154). Put simply, stylisation projects stereotypical personas, but it also calls them into question. Accordingly, throughout Burns’s work, stereotyping and stylisation are employed in order to invoke as well as to reconfigure different kinds of Ayrshire, Scottish and British identity. On the surface of things, Burns’s use of Scots stereotypes might appear to reflect a desire on his part to pander to the expectations of English readers and to promote a narrow and false image of Scottish culture. But far from reinforcing a univocal image of Scottishness, these features were in Burns’s hands a means by which the regional and national identities he shared with different sections of his readership were reinvented and renewed in startling ways.

The stylistic turn that sociolinguistics has taken since the mid-1990s means that it will not come as a surprise to sociolinguists to discover that their theories are applicable to poetry. More unexpected, perhaps, is the revelation that the self-reflexive, ambivalent and performative forms of linguistic variation associated with late modernity can be observed fully-formed in the writing of an eighteenth-century poet. Burns’s use of stereotypes, I suggest, forces us to rethink the points of continuity between early dialect literature and modern mass media-influenced conversational practice.

Bibliography

Coupland, Nikolas (2001), ‘Dialect stylization in radio talk’, Language in Society, 20, 345-375

---------------------- (2007), Style: Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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‘Them was funny lines’: Corpus Linguistics, Literary Dialect, and Martin McDonaghMeaghan Connell, National University of Ireland, Galway

Since the opening of The Beauty Queen of Leenane in 1996, playwright MartinMcDonagh has attracted a great deal of attention and controversy. Some of this attention has been focused on McDonagh’s choice to represent Irish English dialect in the five plays that he has set in Ireland. To some, the use of certain non-standard features in the dialect of McDonagh’s Irish plays invokes reminiscence of, or even helps to perpetuate, the “Stage Irish” stereotype, a negative view of the Irish people as backwards, unintelligent, and violent. For these critics and audience members, McDonagh’s dialect is more a reflection of the theatrical language of writers like Synge than a representation of actual Irish English speech. The present paper seeks to address some of these issues by examining the dialect of McDonagh’s Irish plays through a linguistics-based lens. In this paper, elements of corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, and literary criticism are employed to analyze McDonagh’s dialect in an attempt to answer questions about the language’s authenticity and function.

By digitizing and collecting the dialogue of McDonagh’s plays in corpus form, I have made it possible to analyze it using the tools of corpus linguistics, just as one would analyze any other language. In treating McDonagh’s dialogue as a linguistic variety in its own right, it then becomes McDonagh English, a sort of ‘daughter language’ of Irish English. I have examined how similar McDonagh English is to – or how divergent it is from – its parent (in the form of the International Corpus of English – Ireland Component) statistically through the frequency of syntactic, lexical, and discourse features believed to be common to both varieties. Using this quantitative analysis of the dialect as a basis, I offer a more qualitative analysis of the literary dialect’s effect on the works themselves, and on critical and public response.

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“It takes a Yorkshireman to talk Yorkshire” : towards a framework for the historical study of enregistermentPaul Cooper, University of Sheffield

In this paper I consider the phenomenon of enregisterment and whether it can be studied in historical contexts. Following Johnstone et al’s definition of enregisterment as an instance where a feature has ‘become associated with a style of speech and can be used to create a context for that style’ (2006:82), I am investigating whether their notions of second and third-order indexicality can be applied to historical texts. I am specifically focussing on a stereotypical feature of the Yorkshire dialect: the phenomenon of Definite Article Reduction; as this feature is, to some extent, enregistered.

The historical context of this paper is the nineteenth century, due to the evolution of a strong interest in dialects in that century (Milroy in Watts & Trudgill (eds) 2002:14); the role that the resulting dialect dictionaries played in enregistering dialect features (Beal 2009:141-145); and the sheer quantity of examples of DAR in nineteenth-century Yorkshire dialect literature (a pilot study showed that around 80% of all definite articles were reduced).

My data for this paper comes from a corpus of dialect literature, literary dialect (Shorrocks 1999), and texts which discuss dialect such as Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (1905) and Hunter’s Hallamshire Glossary (1888). I shall also consider data from contemporary newspapers such as The York Herald (October 25 1889), which mentions ‘the abbreviation...of the definite article’.

I am attempting to answer the following questions: (1) are comments like: ‘The absence of þ or th in the definite article is remarkable in the Sheffield dialect’ (Addy 1888:xviii) and ‘it is said the ghost of a t' is always to be recognised’ (Easther 1883:134) evidence for the nineteenth-century enregisterment of DAR?; (2) do textual representations of DAR highlight the feature’s enregisterment?; (3) is it possible to create a framework for the historical study of enregisterment?

ReferencesAddy, S. O. (1888). A Glossary of Words used in the Neighbourhood of Sheffield including a Selection of local names, and some Notices of Folk-lore, Games and Customs. London: Published for the English Dialect Society by Trubner & Co. Ludgate Hill.Beal, J. C. (2009) ‘Enregisterment, Commodification, and Historical Context: “Geordie” versus “Sheffieldish”’. American Speech 84 (2): 138-156.Easther, Alfred (1883). A Glossary of the Dialect of Almondbury and Huddersfield. London: Published for the English Dialect Society by Truber & Co, Ludgate Hill.Hunter, Joseph (1888). The Hallamshire Glossary. William Pickering.Johnstone, B, Andrus, J, and Danielson, A. E. (2006). ‘Mobility, Indexicality and the Enregisterment of “Pittsburghese”. Journal of English Linguistics 34 (2): 77-104.Milroy, J. 2002. ‘The Legitimate Language’ in Watts and Trudgill (eds). Alternative Histories of English. pp 6-27. Routledge.

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Morris M.C.F. (1892). Yorkshire Folk-Talk with characteristics of those who speak it in the North and East Ridings. London: Henry Frowde.Shorrocks, G (1999) ‘Working-Class Literature in Working-Class Language: The North of England’ in Hoenselaars, T and Buning, M (eds). English Literature and Other Languages. pp.87-96. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Wright, Joseph (1905). The English Dialect Dictionary. Published by Henry Frowde, Amen Corner, E.C.http://newspapers.bl.uk/blcs/ - accessed 10/11/2010 16:50 (York Herald acquired here)

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Dialect as Style and Authorial Identity in Indonesian Teen LiteratureDwi Noverini Djenar, University of Sydney

Dialect, in the general sociolinguistic sense, is understood as the speech characteristics linked to a social group at a particular time and place. Research in this area is hitherto concerned with examining dialect boundaries, contact, and change over time. Recent advances in sociolinguistics have illuminated the fact that the complexity of modern life brings with it a challenge for the view that associates one dialect with one particular place. Within these advances, dialects are considered as ‘social styles’ which serve as resources that speakers draw to make personal and interpersonal meanings (Coupland 2007: 2). This paper is theoretically situated within this framework.

The purpose of the paper is to analyse the relation between linguistic style and authorial identity in Indonesian teen literature. Teen literature or ‘teenlit’ is a sub-genre of popular adolescent literature, introduced to the Indonesian audience at the beginning of the last decade, initially through works translated from English. Since the publication of the first Indonesian teenlit in 2001, this sub-genre has captured a wide youth readership, particularly in urban areas, and has been instrumental in encouraging adolescents to read and write fiction. A key characteristic of the teenlit style is its abundant use, both in narration and dialogue, of the Jakartan variety of informal Indonesian – the most prominent among colloquial varieties because of its association with middle-class urban youth and a modern lifestyle, and the influence of mass media. Though this colloquial variety is strongly associated with speakers from the capital city, its use has spread to other urban areas and is pervasively used in artefacts of popular culture (e.g., popular written texts, including online publications, radio and television broadcasts, and films). Teenlit novels are written by authors from different regions who use Jakartan Indonesian to represent the speech styles of urban youth. The multiplicity of geographical locations and media in which this colloquial variety is employed makes it appropriate to analyse the language in teenlit in terms of style rather than dialect.

This paper examines inter-author and intra-author variation (the term ‘intra-author’ is adapted from ‘intra-speaker’ in variationist linguistics (see Schilling-Estes 2002: 375)) in four teenlit novels. Focusing the analysis on person-reference (first and second persons) and negative marking, I argue that an author’s choice of linguistic forms reflects not only their knowledge of how urban youth speak and how to represent that social style in fiction, but also, their authorial identity. Self-orientation towards ‘serious’ literature and observance of the normative expectation in which standard Indonesian is considered the proper language of narration bears on the way that Jakartan Indonesian is employed in a novel. To this end, it can be said that knowledge of language varieties serves as a resource to create personal meanings – meanings that are then communicated interpersonally to readers of the novels.

ReferencesCoupland, Nikolas. 2007. Style: Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schilling-Estes, N. 2002. Investigating stylistic variation. In Chambers, J.K., Trudgill, P. and Schilling-Estes, N., eds. The Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

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'It's literary, is that': Right dislocation in 19th to 21st century fiction Mercedes Durham, University of Aberdeen

Reverse right dislocation, as found, for example, in Dickens’ Dombey and Son, ‘He is a blunt old blade is Josh’, is a type of right dislocation whereby the dislocated subject noun phrase is preceded by an auxiliary verb, a modal verb or do. This makes it rather different from the more common form of right dislocation where the verb is not repeated ('He is a blunt old blade, Josh'). The reverse right dislocation form is first attested in Dickens and is found many other Victorian authors, as well as in a number of contemporary authors (for example, Margaret Atwood, William Boyd and Neil Gaiman).

Although it is likely that the feature was previously more geographically widespread, contemporary sociolinguistic research has shown it to be a predominantly oral Northern English feature, which raises the question why these modern day authors are using it. In some instances, old and new, the feature is indeed used for dialectal effect or as a verbal tic, but not always, so what purpose does this dialectal feature serve in otherwise Standard English contexts? By comparing Victorian and modern authors, this paper will assess whether these modern authors are, knowingly or unknowingly, echoing the way the reverse right dislocation was used by the earlier authors or whether it serves new functions.

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“Barbarous Patois” or “Artistic Truth”: Dialect, Authenticity, and Stigma in James Kay-Shuttleworth’s Scarsdale Frank Emmett, Independent Scholar

Son of a Lancashire textile manufacturer, James Kay-Shuttleworth (1804-1877), the social reformer who rose to prominence as a Manchester physician in the cholera of 1832 when he wrote The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes…in Manchester, is best known as a pioneer of the statistical movement and founder of state education in Britain. In literary circles, he is known for facilitating the meeting of Mrs. Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë. The latter dismissively said that he was 9/10 utilitarian and 1/10 artistic: “this tithe of his nature seems…at war with all the rest.” Yet his 1860 novel, Scarsdale, or Life on the Lancashire and Yorkshire Border Thirty Years Ago, is a complex attempt to fuse the regional and the utopian using what his Lancashire contemporaries (including Samuel Bamford and the folklorist John Harland) considered authentic East Lancashire dialect--which the London press dismissed as “barbarous patois”. This paper considers two aspects of Kay-Shuttleworth’s rendition of dialect. First, we look at his dialect “credentials”; how he handles the perennial dilemma of how much dialect speech to infuse; and how orthographically-challenging to be, without alienating a targeted national readership. Secondly, we examine his ambivalence about dialect as a stigma of class, a vehicle for social rupture, or a benign manifestation of regional “colour” in a safe and ordered mid-Victorian society. The ambivalence was personal as well as philosophical: he was mocked by the aristocratic Lord North, his wife’s guardian, for “the occasional homission of his ‘H”s”, but courted for his skill as a storyteller giving voice to his Lancashire characters. This ambivalence makes his novel and its context a rich and fascinating nexus for exploring the insecurities about dialect that cut through the apparent embrace of regional and class modes of discourse in an age of national hubris.

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Dialect Code-Switching in the Poetry and Prose of Tom Hague/Totley TomHugh Escott, University of Sheffield

In this paper I will attempt to apply the linguistic framework of code-switching to the representations of the Sheffield and RP dialects usage in the work of Sheffield miner poet and writer Tom Hague. Tom Hague (1915-1998?), also known as Totley Tom, was a politically active dialect poet and writer from Sheffield who frequently used representations of his own Sheffield dialect in his poetic and prose writing. The cultural perceptions of those who perform dialect code-switching, as well as attempts by a speaker to wholly change their dialect use, are explored regularly in Hague’s collection of stories and poems Tales of a Yorkshire Miner published in 1976. Hague regularly switches between writing using dialectal respellings and standardised written English; portraying speakers who switch and also creating a narrative voice which extensively code-switches throughout the collection. What this paper will explore is whether it is possible to map linguistic ideas about code-switching and its cultural values onto a literary collection when the dynamics of ‘real’ language speech acts and the orthographic representation of language are complex and distinct from one another.Hague ascribes certain cultural values to those who undertake this switching process with their speech acts and these values are not only consistent throughout his collection but are also consistent with the cultural values of his community. This paper will explore: if it is workable to view a literary collection using the linguistic methodology of code-switching, when the collection includes works: written in standard, that represent dialect and that are written wholly in dialect; the cultural values ascribed to code-switching and dialect usage in Hague’s collection and how these values apply to his performance of his regional dialect; and how Hague’s representations of his dialect work as literary performances or approximations of speech and therefore how they relate to ‘real’ speech.

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From realism to defamiliarization: the reliability of literary sources for the study of Zimbabwean EnglishSusan Fitzmaurice, University of Sheffield

There are three – one to ride front, middle and back of the convoy that won’t drive Rhodesia dry and thinks Rhodesia is Super. They’re dressed in camouflage to match the soldiers poking up out of the top hatches of the great swivelling gun turrets. Dell reckons one of those’d turn a Terr to roadkill in a second. Then he makes rut-tut-tut noises and jerks spasmodically as he empties the magazine of his imaginary mounted gun in a wide arc, turning Terrs to roadkill in seconds. (Lauren Liebenberg, 2008, The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam, p. 119)

SisiDudzai was fired because my mother came home unexpectedly and found her dancing to Bhutsu mutandarikwa, sweating and dancing, as my mother said, like one possessed, stomping on the living room floor, clapping herself on in encouragement, head thrown back in abandonment, whistling like she was out herding cows. (Petina Gappah, 2009, An Elegy for Easterly, p. 159.

Bada nepakati, Shingi instruct me. With both hands me I hold the loaf that he buy from supermarket. I pull and tear it in half. Shingi grin in nervous way and he look at them people around us. The bus is full and everyone on the bus point they eyes at me. (Brian Chikwava, 2009, Harare North, p. 136).

These quotations are taken from recent fiction in English written by Zimbabweans. In different ways, using different strategies, they represent narrative voices situated in the place they recall, represent or remember. In the first extract, Liebenberg’s child narrator captures the cadences of rural white Rhodesian children growing up during the civil war in the 1970s. In the second, Gappah’s child narrator tells the story of her mother’s treatment of the young rural housemaids in the homes of middle-class Africans after the end of the civil war. In the third, Chikwava’s unreliable narrator experiences life as an undocumented migrant in London (‘Harare North’ on account of the large number of Zimbabwean refugees) after a violent past as a ‘Green Bomber’ in post-independent Zimbabwe. In this essay, I examine the extent to which literary constructions of English in colonial and post-colonial Zimbabwe can be regarded as reliable reflections of the dialectal variation that ranges across races and class in the country. It is arguable that the first two excerpts reflect an attempt to capture the local flavour of the English used by the child narrators; one that is embedded in particularly recognisable milieus, and as such is credibly realistic. The third is palpably different in structure; the unnamed narrator’s language serves to defamiliarize the variety of English constructed and in so doing creates a particularly alienating voice. However, when compared with oral narratives and with the language used in recent memoir, Chikwava’s narrator’s idiolect insists on a more careful consideration as linguistic as well as literary representation of English spoken in Zimbabwe. I examine a range of recent literary and non-literary texts as reliable sources for the description of English in Zimbabwe (likely concluding that none is entirely reliable; instead of being realistic, most are nostalgic; others in their oddness may well be more realistic).

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“Out backward” or outstanding?: Dialect in God’s Own Country (2008) by Ross RaisinDr. Robin Gilbank, Northwest University, Xi’an, P.R. China

God’s Own Country is one of the few works of contemporary mainstream British literature to appropriate English regional dialect as a narrative medium. Telling the story of Sam Marsdyke, a rural outsider living on the North York Moors, the book makes heavy use of non-standard English as a means of laying bare the protagonist’s frenzied subjectivity. On its publication the novel received mostly enthusiastic reviews. Justine Jordan praised how it ‘lovingly records an increasingly marginalized way of life’ and J.M. Coetzee described the work as ‘both chilling in its effect and convincing in its execution’. Few reviewers took Raisin to task on the in-authenticity of the North Yorkshire dialect. As he himself has admitted, it is a ‘playful’ mixture of archaic colloquialisms Raisin gleaned from Arthur Kellett’s The Yorkshire Dictionary of Dialect, Tradition and Folklore (1994) interlarded with obscenities and slang.

This paper will use the invented dialect as one point of departure for demonstrating that the book is affected by a fissure which has always touched “regional novels”, stretching back into the nineteenth century. That is the tension between competing modes of realism and naturalism. Raisin uses the vernacular as a means of cementing the veracity of his creation. However, rather than simply celebrating that media as a rich, albeit bastardized, variety of English the novelist veers close to tarring it as a relict from an atrophied culture.

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Linguistic Style-Shifting in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary BartonTaryn Hakala, University of Michigan

This paper draws on recent scholarship in sociolinguistics to examine more closely the use of dialect in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848). I show that, in addition to constructing her characters through their dialogue, Gaskell represents her characters as fashioning themselves linguistically. I argue that the linguistic style-shifting of the novel’s eponymous heroine is directly related to the cross-class conflict and gender dynamics at play in the novel.

Critics have commented on Gaskell’s interest in and extensive use of dialect, but what they fail to notice is how in Mary Barton dialect indexes positive and non-comic attributes, such as wit, wisdom, virtue, respectability, and loyalty. To illustrate this latter quality, for example, Gaskell represents her heroine as using Lancashire dialect terms at times when Mary’s allegiance to her working-class Manchester community is especially important to her—often when it is at risk. This use of dialect also reflects the local prestige associated with it, which largely goes unnoticed by outsiders.

Indeed, some critics of Mary Barton seem to ignore entirely the paradox that dialect could signal virtue for Gaskell. These critics read the speech of the novel’s heroine as Standard English and Gaskell as conceding to “novel-convention.”3 On the contrary, Gaskell does not bow to novel-convention; she breaks it and instead creates a fictional community of speakers whose voices vary, but all exhibit markers of the Lancashire dialect.

3 For example, Kathleen Tillotson in Novels of the Eighteen-Forties and Raymond Chapman in Forms of Speech in Victorian Fiction.

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Men’s Language, Women’s DialectNadia Hamdi, University of Sheffield

The Diglossia of the Arabic language has allowed for a distinctive use of dialect to signify social status, personal attitudes and even political stance. While the vernacular was widely used by prominent Arab male thinkers and writers like Najib Mahfouth (1911), Ihsan Abdel Quddous (1919), Yusif Idris (1927), and Abdul Rahman Al Sharqawi (1950), women writers only grasped hold of this feature of the language decades later. The Arab woman writer’s struggle for recognition has been long and challenging, but her mastery of the dichotomy of the Arabic language was swift. This paper examines the use of the vernacular in the writings of Arab women authors and their employment of both standard and colloquial Arabic to distinguish themselves and their authorship. Such authors as Ghada el-Samman (1942), Hanan al-Shaykh (1945), Ahdaf Soueif (1950) and Ahlam Mosteghanemi (1953), used dialect to make a point as strong as that of the novel itself. This paper will take an in depth look at extracts from different novels by these women and analyse the use of dialect, it will especially differentiate between the dialects used by female; both educated and uneducated and male characters. The paper will show that while female characters use language to express modes of empathy, compassion and wisdom, the dialects they use show power and strength; whereas male characters, with their coarse voices and rough appearance convey an air of ignorance and bareness; their threats are futile and the only power they seem to posses is that of their physical strength. This is not to say that the portrayal of male characters was all negative, but that their use of language betrayed some of them and gave away their unjustified arrogance.

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Social Influences and Dialect in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy and William BarnesHeather Hawkins, Nottingham Trent University

In this paper I propose that comparison of the poetry of Thomas Hardy and William Barnes provides insight into the formation of dialect in literature. I discuss whether Barnes’s extensive philological research influenced his decision to write poetry in his native Dorset dialect, rather than standard English. Conversely, I examine Hardy’s position as a poet, with philological interests, wrote in a combination of standard English and dialect, often within the same poem. I will examine two poems by each poet to establish whether their use of dialect increases or decreases over time. Biographical evidence will also indicate whether broader nineteenth-century socio-economic factors such as class, education and migrancy affected the representation of dialect in their poetry. My approach raises critical responses to the use of dialect by both poets. I cite reviews of the period which empathise with Barnes’s nostalgic representation of the rural poor, expressed in dialect compared to the less enthusiastic responses to his few attempts to write in standard English. In contrast, Hardy’s linguistically hybrid poetry was derided by the majority of Victorian critics, often accusing him of metrical ineptitude and a clumsy handling of language. Combined with Hardy’s choice of subject matter, such as agnosticism and cultural subjugation, I argue that Hardy’s linguistic hybridity is subversive as it proposes the equality of rural culture with the culturally dominant, middle class, urban centre in nineteenth-century England. Thus dialect Hardy’s poetry resists relegation to a regionalist nostalgic rural past and contributes to a vibrant, modern present.

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Indexing Bob Cranky: Social Meaning and the Voices of Pitmen and Keelmen in Early Nineteenth-Century Tyneside Dialect SongRod Hermeston, University of Leeds

This paper examines the complex social meanings (or indexical relations) conveyed through Tyneside dialect spoken by pitmen and keelmen in early nineteenth-century Tyneside dialect songs.

I focus on the popular pitman character, Bob Cranky. Pieces about this figure and many other items about pitmen and keelmen emerge from a song culture enjoyed by an initial audience of clerks, tradesmen and shopkeepers. Harker has seen Cranky, an exuberant, tough, hard-working but simple-minded and violent drunkard as a subject of satire, and claims that such songs could not appeal to a 'working man'. However, Colls has argued that pitmen and keelmen found in the Cranky type a source of 'self-celebration'. More recently Wales has argued that the Cranky figure helps to create and confirm a community's self image. The Tyneside dialect in the songs is said frequently to carry the weight of communal values and of regional / working-class solidarity and identity.

Pitmen and keelmen are most closely associated in the material with the dialect, and with swearing and malapropisms. Employing a notion of 'dialogism', I argue that the meaning of the songs and the indexical relations of the dialect as spoken by pitmen or keelmen depends on the attitudes of audiences towards the behaviour of these characters, and nineteenth-century discourses of 'respectability' and 'correct' language. Bob and his speech may be the subject of satirical mockery, self-celebration or a mixture of these, depending on the attitudes and knowledge of a range of audiences from clerks and shopkeepers to pitmen and keelmen.

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‘Tummus and Meary’ (1746). A prototype for the role of the Vernacular in Regional FictionBrian Hollingworth

There will be a preliminary discussion about the author ‘Tim Bobbin’ (John Collier) and the continuing popularity of the text in Lancashire and beyond over the next century. This will be followed by a consideration of the nature of this popularity with particular reference to Samuel Bamford (1854) and H.M.I. Wylie (1893).

Then particular features of the text will be examined in the light of Collier’s use and presentation of the vernacular, and of the vernacular speaker. How does this relate to recurrent issues in the presentation of the vernacular and vernacular speaker which are to be found in later regional texts?

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Dialects within Literary Discourse: the representation of NewYorkese in e.e. cummings' poeticsEva Maria Gomez Jimenez, Universidad de Granada

The term “dialect” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary – in relation to modern language–, as “A variety of speech differing from the standard or literary ‘language’; a provincial method of speech, as in ‘speakers of dialect’.” Keeping this in mind, I propose an approach to literature representation of dialects through the poems of Edward Estlin Cummings (1894-1962), who included throughout all his production phonetic spellings that represented particular dialects in some of his poems. This way, he gave voice to Newyorkese, Irish, colloquial expressions and slang, among some others. Within all these varieties, Cummings gave prominence to Newyorkese, which indicates the very good disposition the author showed towards this city and its inhabitants.

The aim of this paper is to offer a brief and general approach to Newyorkese as the main dialectical variety in Cummings’ poetry. After giving some information about this dialect, I will concentrate on Cummings’ employment of it, showing some examples, explaining the procedures the author followed and trying to summarize the purposes and effects that this representation has in Cummings’ poetic discourse.

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Literary dialect and dialect literature: A Welsh overviewDr Christine Jones, University of Wales Trinity Saint David

The paper analyses the function of dialect in literary theory in a Welsh context. It begins with a discussion on the differences between literary dialect and dialect literature, with examples of each from Welsh literature. Comparative references are also made to other literatures, especially English literature.

Following on from this general discussion, the paper then looks more closely at the social importance of language, citing examples from eminent Welsh authors such as Kate Roberts and Daniel Owen. The background to these authors’ works is briefly mentioned and the role of dialect within them discussed.

Examples include the series of short stories Te yn y Grug by Kate Roberts which shows clearly how language is used in a suggestive and subtle manner to differentiate between social groups in society. Another of her works, the novel Y Byw sy’n Cysgu, uses dialect variation to stress, amongst other things, the differences between the old fashioned world of the country folk and the new modern culture of the town dwellers. Daniel Owen on the other hand, frequently called the Welsh Dickens, demonstrates how the naivety and innocence often linked to dialect, can also be used with great effect in novels to create comic characters.

The emphasis on humour in dialect literature can however sometimes, in the eyes of certain critics, weaken the literary worth of various works. The paper concludes with a discussion on this and other, sometimes negative, reflections of Welsh dialect literature. The closing paragraphs argue nevertheless that dialectologists can have a wider and more fruitful contribution to make to our appreciation of Welsh literature than has been previously assumed.

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Dinner and a (Minstrel) Show: Speech Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Altern in Moby-DickTyleen Kelly, University of California- Berkeley

It is not surprising that Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851)—a work saturated with Elizabethan theatre—should additionally yield signs of minstrelsy. In the chapter “Stubb’s Supper”, aged and crippled Fleece, the ship’s African-American cook, is summoned by second mate Stubb for the latter’s entertainment while he eats. What ensues is an improvised sermon given by the cook to a shiver of sharks at the mercurial promptings of the second mate. While commonly considered an occasion of comic relief, the scene conversely skirts a menacing tension in language and staging. Running parallel to that conflict is the freedom Fleece can access in choosing sources, words, and performance style in his speech, while concurrently restricted by professional and racial hierarchies emphasized by Melville’s portrayal of that speech in conventional dialect on the page.

Questions of verbal origin, authenticity, and free speech are meaningfully complicated in this scene, as opinions of Fleece’s agency differ between character, writer, and reader. I argue that Fleece improvises what can be interpreted as a ‘stump speech’ in the minstrel style of the mid-1800s. This consisted of a white male actor in blackface making a speech in African-American vernacular English (or rather a parody of it) that was humourously corrupt in meaning, ostensibly due to the speaker’s inaccurate knowledge of the subject or the English language—or both. Stubb’s direction for Fleece to sermonize to frenzily-feeding sharks sets the stage for such analysis, and the complex collaboration that transpires between them echoes other problems of racial discourse explored in the book.

American Minstrelsy is one of the fascinating points of contact between Melville’s contemporary theatre and Moby-Dick. These overlapping expressions of racial freedom and restriction develop in concert with the novel’s overarching involvement in the mystery of human liberty and limitation.

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This is not sarcasm believe me yours sincerely: James Kelman, Ken Saro-Wiwa and Amos TutuolaIain Lambert, Kyorin University, Tokyo

Much of the critical focus to date on James Kelman's fiction has centred on its supposed difficulty for speakers of Standard English due to the use of an urban variety of Scots, or on superficial features such as the use of expletives. The issue of intelligibility came to a head with the publication in 2001 of Translated Accounts. The novel was regarded with suspicion at the time as it not only moved away from Glasgow as location but also abandoned the use of the Glasgow dialect of Scots in favour of a unique interlanguage, forcing readers and critics alike to examine the linguistic aspect of Kelman’s writing much more closely, and in this respect it has set a blueprint for Kelman’s subsequent work.

In examining the language of Translated Accounts this paper will draw on the examples of Nigerian writers in English for whom Kelman has expressed an admiration, such as Amos Tutuola and Ken Saro-Wiwa, and the theory of interlanguage first proposed by Selinker, in an attempt to uncover the genesis of the novel’s achievement. Both Tutuola, with My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and Saro-Wiwa, with Sozaboy, found considerable acclaim abroad for their respective linguistic experiments and, in terms of language at least, it is possible to talk of these two writers, with their explicit and material postcolonial struggles, as influences on Kelman as much as are Kafka or Beckett.

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New Data and New Contexts: Toward a Descriptive Approach to Literary DialectPhilip Leigh, University of Texas at Austin

My work poses a number of questions about how the literary boundaries that dialect representations inscribe within and between texts can be put into conversations with the socio-political boundaries these texts have drawn, mirrored, or subverted in their own time and in our current critical moment. Proponents of computational and corpus-driven quantitative studies of literary dialects have argued that better data collection methods start better “discussions about how literary dialect functions inside and outside the texts in which it appears” (Minnick 2004). To that end, my work experiments with a descriptive computational approach to literary dialect texts that eschews conventional strategies for benchmarking between nonstandard written features and nonstandard spoken features. I focus instead on revealing the distributions and characteristics of standard and nonstandard orthographies as they behave on the page. I analyze three late-nineteenth-century American texts, often grouped as examples of “plantation fiction”: Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings by Joel Chandler Harris, The Conjure Woman by Charles W. Chesnutt, and In Ole Virginia by Thomas Nelson Page. Using XML/TEI markup for digital versions of each text, I am able to set the “standardization ratios” and Type-to-Token ratios for each text’s standard narration against the same ratios in the nonstandard dialogue put in the mouths of African American characters. These data allow the first comparative, descriptive, and quantitative treatment of three dialect texts that are frequently compared qualitatively based on the racial politics of each author. While I avoid making any earth-shattering claims based on my quantitative results, I do suggest that refining a descriptive methodology for dialect texts opens up exciting opportunities for scholars interested in rethinking how literary structures interact with cultural and political phenomena.

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Scottish anti-imperial form: metaphor of vernacular and social (im)mobility in James Kelman’s Disaffection (1989)Alice Lin, National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan, ROC This interdisciplinary conference aims to investigate the diverse ways in which the literary text can be explored through the perspectives of dialect with the spirits of regionalism or nationalism. This fuels my concern with the dynamic relationship between social reality and emotional space in the social accounts of the Scottish cultural aspects of Glasgow life shown in James Kelman’s Disaffection. This novel describes the domestic conflicts with family and with the living community, social situation, cultural discomfort, and political dismissal, hardened by the bitter struggle for existence. I would like to address the ambiguities of Kelman generation’s understanding the historical indignation and the contingent passions as shown through the experiences of the Scottish urban educational worker. Such generation of historical reader as Kelman endeavors to find the longing for Scottish evolution by drawing a relatively objective distance from his provocative but poignant teacher character’s life difficulties in this novel, on the one hand; on the other hand, he paves the way for the emergence of Scottish retrospection through the developmental (dialectical and progressive, but subjective introspection) historical model (understanding the present through its relationship to the past, and the past through its relationship to the present), rather than hopelessly confronting with the dilutedness of cultural education.

I will mainly examine this “cultural memory” from the philosophy (particularly Louis Althusser’s idea about the politics of culture) and sociological theory of the modern (particularly Raymond Williams’s view about class culture and the collective), while distinguishing Kelman’s “anti-hero”, Patrick Doyle, as possessed with the guttural inflections of Scottish working-class dialect, and with his potential ideological danger in substituting the present with his past family background’s working-class culture. There is, therefore, a conflict within Patrick between the intellectual and social development that formal educational apparatus can offer him, and more emotional and intuitive side of him, which draws him back to a tragic transfer of his work place.

The central argument of my paper is twofold, contending that James Kelman’s historical indignation is revealed through the cultural discomfort in educational apparatus experienced by his characters (besides Patrick, also his colleague Alison, and his brother Gavin), and however that Kelman interrogates the “temporal” significance of the psychological state when it comes to the human search for cultural revolution. The diverting linguistic style emblemizes a challenging subject. Kelman’s purpose, I suggest, in this novel is to postulate a belief that the individual’s inferiorized speech pattern may be endangered by a blind social perception, and that this inferiorization may then point to either the degradation, even obliteration of cultural values, or the hyperbolic self-inflation. Both cases cause the internal turmoil of cultural identity.

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Translating Dialect – Translating IdeologySimo K. Määttä, University of Eastern Finland

For the literary translator, dialect is certainly one of the most challenging features of the source text. While some scholars have considered the translation of dialect to be an impossible task, others have proposed different solutions to the problem. Thus, some scholars suggest that the translator should choose “the most suitable” dialect in the target language to render the dialectal features of the source text. However, translating dialect by dialect can distort certain ideological dimensions of the text. Thus, other scholars have suggested that the best way of translating dialect is to preserve the function of the dialect in the source text without trying to translate it as such.

This paper examines the ideological function of dialect in literature and the ways in which this function can be translated. Examples are drawn from the French translations of James Baldwin’s and William Faulkner’s novels, the English translations of Mehdi Charef’s novels in French, and the Finnish and English translations of the Swedish novelists Susanna Alakoski, Mikael Niemi, and Marjaneh Bakhtin.

The goal is to determine, first, whether it is actually possible to determine the ideological function of dialect and how this can be done. Second, the paper analyzes whether translations under scrutiny succeed in rendering this ideological function and what are the methods used. Finally, the paper examines what kind of new ideological functions the translation of dialect can reify in the target text.

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The Intersection of Non-standard Dialect Representation and Point of View in Sheila Quigley’s Bad Moon Rising: Contemporary Regional Crime Fiction as ResistanceSusan Mandala, University of Sunderland

Crime fiction and, consequently, its analysis have generally concerned themselves with the character of the detective, the motivations of the criminal, and the nature of the crime. In this paper I argue that Sheila Quigley’s Bad Moon Rising, a crime novel set in the Northeast of England, offers something relatively unusual in the genre. Her detective, Lorraine Hunt, is not the focus. She is not marginalised by gender, ethnicity, or addiction; she is not a maverick fighter against institutional injustice; and neither is she in danger of becoming what she hunts. Similarly, the criminal and his crimes, while brutal, are arguably incidental to the narrative. Largely stereotypic, they offer no complex dissection of either the killer’s psychology or the causes of his crimes. As I will show here, what distinguishes Bad Moon Rising is its focus on and stylistic representation of the members of the speech community in which the crimes take place, the residents of a run-down council estate in the Northeast of England. Drawing on recent work by Gregoriou (2003) and Giaimo (2010), I offer in this paper an analysis of non-standard dialect representation and point of view manipulations that demonstrates how Bad Moon Rising recruits reader sympathy for its protagonists, and, in so doing, works to challenge a number of damaging stereotypes currently circulating about the urban poor.

References

Giaimo, G. 2010. ‘Talking back through “talking Blac”: African American English and agency in Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress’. Language and Literature 19 (3): 235-247.

Gregoriou, G. 2003. ‘Criminally minded: The stylistics of justification in contemporary American crime fiction’. Style 37 (2): 144-59.

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The Aesthetics of Austro-Bavarian Dialect in Literature, Drama and Music of the 17th and 18th centuriesChristian Neuhuber, Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

Informal ways of e-communication have recently brought an unexpected renaissance to dialect usage in writing. So it is once again a focus of research interest in Austria and Bavaria. Dialect literature, however, is still unpopular among academic researchers. Obviously, the understanding of dialect art is still dominantly influenced by only one variety, the naive retrospective regional literature (Heimatdichtung) as it evolved in the 19th century. But dialect usage as an artistic phenomenon is manifold and can perform an impressive range of functions.

In the Austro-Bavarian linguistic area dialect poetry reached its first peak of development as early as the 18th century when specific social-pragmatic and sociolinguistic settings aided its emergence as an artistic form. In these days dialect art achieved a complete autonomy within the elite’s culture with many different and stunning forms of expression in literature, music and theatre. Vernacular no longer was limited to satire of peasants, but was also used for socio-critical or realistic purposes, for agitation or education, it dominated the famous ‘Wiener Volkstheater’ and the baroque cloister culture. This dialect art, like no other genre, polarised the views of the contemporary art criticism. It was loved by emperors like Franz Stephan I. and despised by the theorists like Joseph von Sonnenfels, it was cultivated both by the great masters like Mozart and unknown laypersons. But above all this interaction of dialect, music and acting was a genuine form of expression of a very prolific cultural area, shaping its specific identity. Nevertheless, the reduction of dialect art to an autochthonous vehicle of expression for ordinary people together with the effective undermining of the former prestige have caused this ‘dialect culture’ to fall into almost complete oblivion.

In my paper I would like to briefly outline the principle questions of our project ‘Dialect cultures’. This 3-year-project at the University of Graz (Austria) aims to provide a complete view of the functions and aesthetic possibilities of Austro-Bavarian dialect art before 1800 as well as its historical significance.

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Literary Dialect and the Linguistic Reconstruction of Nineteenth-Century LouisianaMichael D. Picone, University of Alabama

The literary movement of American "local colorists" became prominent in large part due to Northern interest in Southern lifeways in the aftermath of the Civil War. The use of literary dialect to portray local speechways was an important feature of this emerging literature. With the partial exception of the work of William Evans on the writings of George Washington Cable, virtually all analysis of Southern literary dialect is Anglocentric in its focus. However, the works of local-color authors of Louisiana figured among the most popular (and innovative) of the nineteenth-century, and, to a very large degree, French-English codemixing and the French-accented English dialect found in these works were crucial elements in the rise to popularity of the entire genre. Taking into consideration Dennis Preston's cautions about the limitations of literary dialect, it is nevertheless instructive to glean the works of authors such as George Washington Cable, Kate Chopin, and Grace King for possible clues regarding the proper reconstruction of French, Creole, and English dialects in Louisiana in the nineteenth century, as well as the nature and extent of codemixing. A less well known tradition of local-color Louisiana literature also exists in the French language, and in fact predates and inspires the English thread. Comparing the literary dialect of English-dominant authors with that of Alfred Mercier and other Francophone authors allows for cross-checking of some of the same linguistic traits against the background of a different orthographic and stylistic tradition.

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Northern Cadences: narrative voices in the work of Alan SillitoeDr. Jeremy Scott, University of Kent

This paper will approach two of Alan Sillitoe’s most famous novels, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1958) via a comparative exploration of the texts’ representations of Northern English demotic. Both texts enact Bakhtin’s notion of novelistic dialogism and find much expressive capital in the tension between discourses: between the ‘oral’ and the ‘written’. Indeed, it could be argued that much of Sillitoe’s work functions as a direct challenge to dominant notions of the literary. The narrative discourse attempts to trace a conduit between the quotidian experience of the Northern English working classes represented and the demotic oral language which they speak. His technique also explores the link between language and ‘sensibility’; i.e. verbal articulacy need not be a limit to expression of a character’s ipseity. In contrast to the more radical techniques of novelists like James Kelman and Irvine Welsh, all instances of phonetically-rendered demotic remain imprisoned by what Joyce called ‘perverted commas’ – as direct speech. However, the diegetic narrative discourse itself is redolent of registers rooted in 1950s English working class life. The texts also contain different methods of representing their protagonists’ consciousness through their own idiolect. In Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, this is evidenced by the use of the second person ‘you’, which functions simultaneously as a representation of Seaton’s consciousness using the oral register which he might choose to articulate it, and as a dialogic ‘sideways glance’ at the reader and assumed shared experience. The second is more redolent of internal monologue, using the first-person form (as seen in the homodiegetic narration of the second novel); crucially, though, it remains in Standard English, if explicitly orientated towards oral register.

This is a novelistic discourse which refuses to ‘normalise’ itself to accord with the conventions of ‘classic realism’, and as such prefigures the ambitions of many of the contemporary writers who incline their narrative voices towards the oral – asserting the right of a character’s dialect/idiolect to constitute the principal register of the narrative. The paper will demonstrate this thesis through the ideas of Bakhtin, and through an analytical taxonomy derived from literary stylistics.

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“I’ll never trust a northern man in love”: The significance of the representations of Northern English and Scots in 17th century drama Lauren Stewart, University of Edinburgh

In the play Ram-Alley (1611), the widow Taffeta discusses northern men and their language with another character:

Oliver: The devill take my soul but I did love her.Taffeta: That oath doth shew you are a Northen [sic] Knight. And of all men alive, Ile never trust, a Northen [sic] man in love.Oliver: And why? and why, slut Taffeta: Because the first word he speakes is the Divell take his soule, and who will give him trust that once has given his soule unto the Divell?

Here, northern men are seen to be quick-tempered and blasphemous, and their language reflects and reinforces these characteristics. Expressions such as ‘The devil take my soul’ frequently appear within dialectal representations of Northern English and Scots in Early Modern drama. They are often marked with variant spellings (indicating dialectal pronunciation), and also may contain lexical items or morphosyntactic features from these dialects. This paper will explore the use of such expressions in the representations of the speech of Northern and Scottish characters (and their imitators) in 17th century drama, analysing the 48 plays featuring representations of Northern English or Scots from c. 1599 to 1705. I trace the changing use of these discourse markers and expressions over time, and explore what they indicate about the dialects of the time and about the perceptions of Scots and northerners and the attitudes towards them.

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‘The Lack of a Whole Language; The Lack of a Whole Mind’: Tackling Linguistic and Literary Issues from a Creative Perspective in ScotlandShane Andrew Strachan, University of Aberdeen

Scottish writer Edwin Muir stated that the ‘curse of Scottish literature is the lack of a whole language, which finally means the lack of a whole mind’ (1936). In the North-East where the use of Scots within non-standard dialect is still highly prevalent, Muir’s belief poses a problem for how local writers represent their communities if, on one hand, they are unfairly disparaged in this way when writing in their dialect, while on the other, writing in Standard English may deny their own identity and difference. Several of Muir’s contemporaries did however attempt to tackle this issue of cultural and linguistic representation in Scotland at large (Hugh MacDiarmid’s synthesised Scots) right down to the voicing of smaller communities, like Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s presentation of the North-East’s distinct dialect to a widespread audience.

As a writer in the North-East today, the ways in which these writers dealt with several factors that posed problems during their careers, as well as other issues that have arisen for writers since, have come to shape my own dialect writing and allowed me to be able to move beyond the obstacle of orthography.This paper analyses some of these factors, focusing on orthographic convention, the influence of editors and publishers, the work’s audience, political stance and the representation of class. In assessing these, the ultimate aim is to show that somewhat of a conclusion has been reached on how contemporary Scottish writers of both prose and poetry orthographically represent their distinct communities and language use.

Muir, Edwin, Scott and Scotland: the Predicament of the Scottish Writer (1936; repr. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1982)

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Is we who bleed to make this country prosperous': Dialect, Class and Immigration in The Lonely Londoners and Saturday Night and Sunday MorningJack Windle, University of Sheffield

Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) blends Standard and Caribbean Englishes to create a hybrid literary idiom which articulates the oral culture and dialects of Windrush generation immigrants in London. Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) similarly attempts to set the author’s Nottingham dialect alongside Standard English, challenging the capacity of the novel to articulate working-class consciousness. In these novels, dialect forms a challenge to the dominance of Standard English in literature and suggests the opening out of the form to articulate and represent a greater plurality of lived experience. Immigrants and the working class – groups historically marginalised in society and in the novel – were of central importance to Britain’s post-war recovery: in their sophisticated interplay of dialect and Standard English, these authors enact the realignment of British society in the fifties and subtly argue for the accommodation of marginalised groups within the cultural centre. Using Cairns Craig’s equation of dialect and dialectic alongside Homi Bhabha’s notions of mimicry and hybridity, this paper will assert the political significance of Selvon and Silltoe’s uses of dialect. It will also argue that dialect forms a productive area of commonality between texts usually categorised separately – in this case as ‘immigrant’/ ‘black’ writing and ‘working-class’ writing – and therefore helps to interrogate literary-critical categorisation itself.

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Ulster-Scots in Nineteenth-Century and Present-Day LiteratureGöran Wolf, Technical University of Dresden

Since 1990, the linguistic landscape of Northern Ireland appears to have changed. Amongst a number of developments is what could be seen as a renaissance of Ulster-Scots: a growing debate about its status as language variety in general and at the same time a growth in its literary production.

I should like to compare nineteenth-century literature, recently made accessible by the Ulster Poetry Project amongst other things, with present-day revivalist literature which is available in internet blogs and publications such as The Ulster-Scot and which I have collected and compiled in a smaller corpus with the working title MUST-C (= Modern Ulster Scots Texts – A Corpus).

At the core of this paper will be an analysis of these two collections of poetry in Ulster-Scots. This comparison will be based upon the (corpus-driven) analysis of spelling, lexis and grammatical features in selected texts. I will also reflect on ideological dimensions and audience responses will complement my contribution to the conference’s discussion of “Dialect and Literature”.

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