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‘Practised among the common people’: ‘vulgar’ pronunciations in eighteenth-century pronouncing dictionaries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 August 2023

JOAN C. BEAL
JOAN C. BEAL*
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield 9, Les Coudrais 22150 Plouguenast France j.c.beal@sheffield.ac.uk
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Abstract

In a corpus compiled from the notes in John Walker's pronouncing dictionary (first edition 1791), Trapateau (2016) found that the most frequently occurring evaluative term used was vulgar. In Walker's dictionary, vulgar is defined as ‘plebeian, suiting to the common people, practised among the common people, mean, low, being of the common rate; publick, commonly bruited’ (1791, s.v. vulgar). The frequency of this term in Walker's critical notes suggests that the role of his dictionary was to warn against unacceptable pronunciations as well as to provide an account of acceptable or, to use Walker's second most frequent term, polite ones. In this article, I discuss some of the pronunciations labelled vulgar by Walker and other eighteenth-century authors and argue that, far from dismissing such evidence as prescriptive, we should consider the role played by Walker and his contemporaries in the enregisterment of stigmatised variants and varieties.

Keywords

enregistermentphonologypronouncing dictionariesstigmatisationvariation
Type
Research Article
Information
English Language & Linguistics , Volume 27 , Special Issue 3: Speech representation in Late Modern English text types , September 2023 , pp. 447 - 467
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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