Strange Vernaculars: How Eighteenth-Century Slang, Cant, Provincial Languages, and Nautical Jargon Became English by Janet Sorensen (review)

Strange Vernaculars is a compelling book that reappraises the development of the English language during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries.¹ The book’s nuanced argument complicates the story of the development of the English language and the British nation during this period by focusing on what Sorensen calls “print institutions of the vernacular.” Embellishing what scholars know about totems of eighteenth-century Standard English—works like Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, for example—Sorensen places alongside these totems a fascinating and variegated archive of lexicographic and literary texts that document ways in which language (and nation) were remade as a result of reciprocal exchanges between elite and vernacular print culture during this period.

Sorensen’s book draws on a wide-ranging archive. On the lexicographic side, the term “print institutions of the vernacular” is flexible enough to include canting dictionaries from across the early modern period, glossaries and dictionaries of “vulgar” and provincial language, as well as occupational dictionaries, especially in this case the lexicons of maritime and sailors’ jargon that are discussed in the book’s brilliant final chapter. On the literary side, “print institutions of the vernacular” refers to novels that represent cant, slang, and provincial language by Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Maria Edgeworth, and others; the term also refers to popular theatricals like John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and provincial dialect dialogues that were popular throughout the eighteenth century. In brief, this book gathers a tremendous amount of archival material and carefully deploys it to chart the transformation of a hierarchically organized society into a national society of strangers with strange linguistic particularities. As Sorensen puts it, “[P]rint institutions of the vernacular made room for the ‘common people’ within national culture, but only after representing their language as strange” (3).

Strange Vernaculars is divided into three parts of unequal length. The first part—“Wandering Languages”—comprises four interrelated chapters that “track the eighteenth-century’s startling reclamation of cant” (26). Sorensen shows clearly how print institutions of the vernacular transformed previously demonized forms of language into signs of British freedom—and this is certainly a startling transformation. Whereas cant and canting crews had long been associated with the low and extralegal and therefore had been vilified and proscribed by lexicographers, Sorensen argues convincingly that by the end of the eighteenth century cant had ceased to be a thieves’ cryptolanguage and had instead come to possess a poetic panache, one consonant with the idea of free speakers innovating with the lexical resources of an internally diverse vernacular.

It makes sense that this first part of the book is the longest because it must cover a wide terrain. It also possesses some of the book’s most exciting theoretical insights, like in the first chapter when Sorensen identifies “the lure of the obscure” (45), that is, the way in which cant “shares something of the semiotic logic of the proverb and the colloquial and vernacular more generally” because it “incites questions about meaning” (49) and therefore initiates a form of literary hermeneutics. Similarly insightful is the second chapter’s argument that Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack dissociate cant from criminality and instead represent it as an ambient form of linguistic existence that becomes a regular part of dialogue in fictional prose thereafter.

Focusing on Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, the third chapter articulates medial differences between the way cant functions in prose and on stage in relation to emerging notions of British freedom. Finally, the fourth chapter identifies varying ways in which lexicography itself changed over the course of the century while also analyzing the transformation of cant into slang in gendered terms. Whereas early compilers of cant glossaries observed, overheard, and questioned travelers, for example, Sorensen spends an appropriate amount of time showing how later lexicographers and...