Vernacular Speech in Writing

doi:10.1017/9781009205443.005

2 - Vernacular Speech in Writing

from Part I - The Textual Record

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 October 2025

Colette Moore

Edited by

Merja Kytö and

Erik Smitterberg

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Merja Kytö: Affiliation:
Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
Erik Smitterberg: Affiliation:
Uppsala Universitet, Sweden

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Summary

To study the history of spoken English is to study its extant vestiges in written texts. This chapter draws upon work that connects speech and writing in historical English to present a framework for contextualising written documents and the particularities of their relationships to spoken language. It examines how written English represents spoken English through different styles and genres of text and across different chronological periods. A late medieval deposition might provide certain clues to the English spoken at the time owing to the non-standard orthography and the regional morphosyntax. By contrast, a contemporary poem might provide different clues to the twentieth-century English spoken in the Caribbean owing to the representation of local English through lexical, syntactic and orthographic means. Neither of these is a perfectly faithful record of speech, however, and each reflects different constraints of genre, style, writing practices and pragmatic pressures in the Englishes that they depict.

Keywords

spoken language written language orality literacy speech representation dialect literature genre relationship between speech and writing standardisation

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Type: Chapter
Information: The New Cambridge History of the English Language
Documentation, Sources of Data and Modelling
, pp. 50 - 74

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009205443.005 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2025

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