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1 results

  • 2 - Vernacular Speech in Writing

  • from Part I - The Textual Record
  • Edited by Merja Kytö, Uppsala Universitet, Sweden, Erik Smitterberg, Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
  • Book:
    The New Cambridge History of the English Language
    Published online:
    18 October 2025
    Print publication:
    16 October 2025, pp 50-74

  • 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.