Object

Group publication title:

Token

Contributor:

Newman, John G. Ed.  ; Dossena, Marina. Ed.  ; Samson, Christina. Guest Ed.  ; Cecconi, Elisabetta. Guest Ed. Martini, Isabella. Guest. Ed.

Abstract:

This article traces the historical policing of pronunciation in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, with particular attention to regional variation and its entanglement with class, authority, and linguistic legitimacy. It begins by contextualizing how regional accents were socially charged, often eliciting responses of ridicule or exclusion. The analysis then turns to early prescriptive works by orthoepists such as Thomas Sheridan (1762 and 1780), William Kenrick (1783), and John Walker (1791), who helped construct a linguistic hierarchy in which ‘proper’ pronunciation was aligned with moral and social superiority. Building on these foundations, nineteenth-century newspapers and periodicals extended prescriptive ideologies to a wider public, naturalising linguistic norms through humour, commentary, and complaint. Drawing on a corpus of editorials, advertisements, and letters to the editor from sources including The Times, The Morning Chronicle, and others, the article highlights how the press functioned as both a conduit and creator of metadiscourses on speech. These texts reveal that standard language ideologies were not solely imposed from above, but were also taken up, reproduced, and contested by the reading public. In examining how pronunciation became a symbolic site for the performance of class identity and cultural legitimacy, the article underscores the long-standing role of accent in structuring social inclusion and exclusion.

Table of contents:

5 Dedicatoria
9 Tabula gratulatoria
11 Elisabetta Cecconi, Christina Samson and Isabella Martini, Introduction
45 Letizia Vezzosi, The propagandistic narrative in Saint Erkenwald
69 Elisabetta Cecconi, Propaganda in 17th-century pamphlets on Jamaica: A corpus-assisted discourse study (1655-1700)
95 Elisabetta Lonati, Language ideology and national propaganda in 18th-century British dictionaries of arts and sciences
125 Massimo Sturiale, Elocution, editorials, and Englishness: The role of print media in shaping accent attitudes in the long nineteenth century
147 Christina Samson, Fanning fires. A corpus assisted analysis of women’s letters during the 1857-58 Indian uprisings
171 Matylda Włodarczyk, The bluestocking in the Polish press (1830s-1890s): Othering women through code-switching, borrowing and loan translations
201 Gabriella Del Lungo and Sabrina Cappelli, Propaganda discourse in an imperial setting: The case of Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria
233 DavideMazzi, “The mask is off at last!”: Propaganda discourse in the Irish Civil War
253 BirteBös, Propaganda in TIME Magazine – A diachronic corpus-assisted discourse study
281 Roberta Facchinetti, Striking a balance between norms of impartiality and adversarialness in broadcast interviews
299 Marina Bondi, Jessica Jane Nocella, Roberto Paganelli, Vaccines discourse: A diachronic case study
325 Isabel Ermida, Ageist propaganda on social media: Disguising hate speech through mock politeness

Place of publishing:

Kielce

Physical description:

s. 125-146

ISSN:

2299-5900

Publisher:

Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jana Kochanowskiego w Kielcach

Date issued:

2025

Identifier:

doi:10.25951/14395

Language:

angielski

Is part of:

Token : A Journal of English Linguistics

Has part:

vol. 18

Type:

tekst

Access rights:

otwarty dostęp

Format:

application/pdf