Writing in Nonstandard English (review)

This Finno-Swedish coproduction (18 of 24 contributors, including the editors, are affiliated with a Finnish or Swedish university) consists of 22 mostly descriptive papers on the representation of spoken (nonstandard) varieties of English in writing and its functions in different genres and sociohistorical contexts. Besides literary texts (e.g. contemporary Irish writing, Chandler’s fiction, Dos Passos’s USA trilogy, Dickens’s David Copperfield, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn), the reader finds analyses of nonliterary genres as diverse as legal texts, medical treatises, letters, diaries, travelogues, and oral history transcripts. All periods of English from the fourteenth century (Chaucer, Gower) onwards are represented, with an even distribution of studies on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century English and studies ranging from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century. Almost all of the historical studies have been authored by members or close associates of the vigorous Helsinki School of historical socio- and corpus linguistics. This also accounts for the quantitative approach adopted in most of the papers.

Apart from the corpus-based studies, the contributions to this volume represent a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches: literary interpretation, historical linguistics, dialectology, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics. Just as varied are the lessons one can learn from the individual contributions. To name just a few: Patricia Poussa convincingly rehabilitates Charles Dickens as a lay sociolinguist, as it were, who in David Copperfield rendered the older dialect of East Anglia in a systematic and faithful way. Other studies show that in many texts in which one might expect a high proportion of nonstandard features, these seem to have been systematically filtered out on all structural levels (cf. the joint paper by Jonathan Culpeper and Merja Kytö, and Kate Moore’s critical report from the fieldwork front on the deplorable practice of what she calls ‘linguistic airbrushing’ in transcripts of oral history interviews). Another angle from which the representation of nonstandard varieties is looked at is the complex of language attitude, language ideology, and creation of cultural identity (cf. the papers by Gerald Porter and Loreto Todd).

One problematic aspect of this volume is its rather loose understanding of what constitutes ‘nonstandard’. Uncontroversial are regional varieties such as Irish English; Scots; the dialects of Lancashire, Norfolk, and the Shetlands; Caribbean Creoles, and West African Englishes. Yet some of the authors stretch the concept of nonstandard to such an extent, partly even beyond recognition, that one wonders whether the relevant paper really belongs into this volume. Laura Wright, for example, defines as nonstandard the use of a restricted range of standard variants as opposed to the full range of options the grammar of standard English allows. No less problematic is the interpretation of nonstandard in two other papers. David C. Minugh is simply interested in archaic forms like thou, thy, thine, or the -eth ending on verbs as used in contemporary newspaper language. At the end of his paper he wonders himself whether these forms should really be considered nonstandard and suggests that a case can also be made for regarding them as part of ‘highly prestigious formal varieties’ of standard written English (299). Similar doubts seem to have beset Päivi Koivisto-Alanko, who investigates the use made by Chaucer of learned loan vocabulary in the semantic domain of cognition (e.g. conception, imagination, intellect, intelligence, science). As early as in the subtitle, the author raises the question whether the suprastandard, i.e. ‘the uppermost register’ (205) of a language ‘which has no part in the standard language of its day’ (220), is a nonstandard.

In sum, this volume offers a wide range of viewpoints and approaches, with contributions of rather mixed scope and quality as well as pertinence to the subject. Nonetheless anyone interested in this subject is bound to find something of value in this book.