The Dialects of British English in Fictional Texts 2020055299, 9780367856113, 9781003017431, 9781032008929

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Introduction: The Dialects of British English in Fictional Texts: Style, Translation and Ideology
References
Part I: Voices on Page
Chapter 1: Scots as the Language of the Uncanny: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Gothic Narratives
1.1 Introduction
1.2 Scots and Scots-English Code-Mixing in Popular Culture
1.3 The Case of Late Modern Scottish Literature
1.3.1 Robert Fergusson’s The Ghaists
1.3.2 Robert Burns: Or, When Even Death Speaks Scots
1.3.3 Scots in Gothic Prose
1.4 Concluding Remarks
Notes
References
Primary sources
Secondary sources
Chapter 2: Enregistering Nationhood: Cornwall and “Cornu-English” in the Works of Alan M. Kent
2.1 Cornwall
2.2 Cornish, Traditional Dialect and “Cornu-English”
2.3 Anglo-Cornish and Identity
2.4 Alan M. Kent and “Cornu-English”
2.5 Concluding Remarks
Notes
References
Chapter 3: An Analysis of the Use of Vernacular in Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End and Its Spanish and Italian Translations
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Non-Standard Language in Literature
3.3 Dialect Translation
3.4 Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End (2016): An Overview
3.5 The Function of Vernacular in Days Without End
3.6 Non-Standard Language in the Spanish and Italian Translations of Days Without End
3.6.1 Días Sin Fin
3.6.2 Giorni Senza Fine
3.7 Concluding Remarks
Notes
References
Part II: Voices on Stage
Chapter 4: Shakespeare’s Multilingual Classrooms: Style, Stylisation and Linguistic Authority
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Stylisation and Historical Dialogue Analysis
4.3 “King’s English” and Multilingualism
4.4 The Merry Wives of Windsor : sermo patrius and Mother Tongues
4.5 Henry V : The Nation, the Classroom, the Playhouse
4.6 Concluding Remarks
Notes
References
Chapter 5: “Peden bras vidne whee bis cregas”: Cornish on the Early Modern Stage
5.1 Introduction
5.2 Cornish in the Early Modern Period
5.3 Cornish and the Early Modern Stage
Notes
References
Chapter 6: “Aw’m Lancashire, owd cock, and gradely hearty”: Enregistered Lancashire Voices in the Nineteenth-Century Theatre
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Enregisterment, Stylisation, and the Performance of Dialect
6.3 Staging Lancashire
6.4 Analysis
6.4.1 Methodological Remarks
6.5 Data and Analysis
6.6 Concluding Remarks
Notes
References
Part III: Voices on Screen
Chapter 7: Some Observations on British Accent Stereotypes in Hollywood-Style Films
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Observations on Particular Samples
7.3 Concluding Remarks
References
Audiovisual References
Chapter 8: The Accented Voice in Audiovisual Shakespeare
8.1 Introduction
8.2 Audiovisual Shakespeare
8.3 The Function of Dialects
8.4 Cockney Comic Reliefs
8.5 The Function of American Accents in a RP Context
8.6 The Accent of the Outsider in a World of Chaos
8.7 Indigenisation Through Translation
8.8 Concluding Remarks
Notes
References
Filmography
Chapter 9: Bastard from the North or Kingg in th’ Nohrth?: /ˈbɑː.stəd/ /frɒm/ /ðə/ /nɔːθ/ or /kɪŋg/ /ɪn/ /ðə/ /nɒːθ/
9.1 Introduction: Memes and Dialectal Memes
9.2 Northern- and Southern-English Dialectal Memes
9.3 Spanish Memes
9.4 Game of Thrones : A Game of Memes
9.5 The North
9.6 The South
9.7 Translation: Juego de tronos
9.8 Memetic Translation
9.9 Bastard from the North or Kingg in th’ Nohrth?
9.10 Concluding Remarks
Notes
References
Filmography
Chapter 10: “Why is he making a funny noise?”: The RP Speaker as an Outcast
10.1 Introduction
10.2 Received Pronunciation: Is it Actually “Received”?
10.3 Regional Accents in British Television
10.4 Standard English in Northern Ireland
10.5 Derry Girls : The “Otherness” of the RP Speaker
10.6 Concluding Remarks
Notes
References
Filmography
Index

Citation preview

The Dialects of British English in Fictional Texts This collection brings together perspectives on regional and social varieties of British English in fictional dialogue across works spanning various literary genres, showcasing authorial and translation innovation while also reflecting on their impact on the representation of sociolinguistic polarities. The volume explores the ways in which different varieties of British English, including Welsh, Scots, and Received Pronunciation, are portrayed across a range of texts, including novels, films, newspapers, television series, and plays. Building on metadiscourse which highlighted the growing importance of accent as an emblem of social stance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the chapters in this book examine how popular textual forms create and reinforce links between accent and social persona, and accent and individual idiolect. A look at these themes, as explored through the lens of audiovisual translation and the challenges of dubbing, sheds further light on the creative resources authors and translators draw on in representing sociolinguistic realities through accent. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in dialectology, audiovisual translation, literary translation, and media studies. Donatella Montini is Full Professor of English Language and Translation at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, where she teaches History of English and Stylistics. She has published extensively on Shakespeare, early modern English multilingualism, language teaching, and translation (with special regard to John Florio). She has recently authored a volume on contemporary stylistics, La stilistica inglese contemporanea: Teorie e metodi (2020), and co-edited a book on Queen Elizabeth I’s language and style, Elizabeth I in Writing: Language, Power and Representation in Early Modern England (2018). Irene Ranzato is Associate Professor of English Language and Translation at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. She holds a PhD in Translation Studies. Her research lies at the intersection of linguistic and cultural issues and focuses on the linguistic analysis of film and television dialogue and on the varieties of British English. Among her most recent publications are the books Translating Culture Specific References on Television (2016) and Queen’s English? Gli accenti dell’Inghilterra (2017). She also co-edited Linguistic and Cultural Representation in Audiovisual Translation (2018) and Reassessing Dubbing: Historical Approaches and Current Trends (2019).

Routledge Research in Language and Communication

  1 The Role of Language in the Climate Change Debate Edited by Kjersti Fløttum   2 Multimodality, Poetry and Poetics Richard Andrews   3 The Language of Money Proverbs and Practices Annabelle Mooney   4 The Pragmatics of Text Messaging Making Meaning in Messages Michelle A. McSweeney   5 Multiliteracies, Emerging Media, and College Writing Instruction Santosh Khadka   6 Emoticons, Kaomoji, and Emoji The Transformation of Communication in the Digital Age Edited by Elena Giannoulis and Lukas R.A. Wilde   7 Interpersonal Positioning in English as a Lingua Franca Interactions Svitlana Klötzl and Birgit Swoboda   8 The Discourse of Food Blogs Multidisciplinary Perspectives Daniela Cesiri   9 Discourses of Perfection Representing Cosmetic Procedures and Beauty Products in UK Lifestyle Magazines Anne-Mette Hermans 10 The Dialects of British English in Fictional Texts Edited by Donatella Montini and Irene Ranzato For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Research-in-Language-and-Communication/ book-series/RRLC

The Dialects of British English in Fictional Texts Edited by Donatella Montini and Irene Ranzato

First published 2021 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Donatella Montini and Irene Ranzato to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Montini, Donatella, editor. | Ranzato, Irene, editor. Title: The dialects of British English in fictional texts / edited by Donatella Montini and Irene Ranzato. Description: New York : Routledge 2021. | Series: Routledge research in language and communication | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020055299 | ISBN 9780367856113 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003017431 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: English fiction--History and criticism. | Speech in literature. | Dialect literature, English--History and criticism. | English language--Dialects--Great Britain. | Regionalism in literature. | Language and languages in literature. Classification: LCC PR830.S64 D53 2021 | DDC 823.009/26--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020055299 ISBN: 978-0-367-85611-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-00892-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-01743-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by SPi Global, India

Contents

List of Contributors vii Introduction: The Dialects of British English in Fictional Texts: Style, Translation and Ideology

1

DONATELLA MONTINI AND IRENE RANZATO

PART I

Voices on Page 1 Scots as the Language of the Uncanny: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Gothic Narratives

9 11

MARINA DOSSENA

2 Enregistering Nationhood: Cornwall and “CornuEnglish” in the Works of Alan M. Kent

30

JOAN C. BEAL

3 An Analysis of the Use of Vernacular in Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End and Its Spanish and Italian Translations

47

JOSEP MARCO BORILLO

PART II

Voices on Stage

67

4 Shakespeare’s Multilingual Classrooms: Style, Stylisation and Linguistic Authority

69

DONATELLA MONTINI

vi Contents

  5 “Peden bras vidne whee bis cregas”: Cornish on the Early Modern Stage

91

CRISTINA PARAVANO

  6 “Aw’m Lancashire, owd cock, and gradely hearty”: Enregistered Lancashire Voices in the NineteenthCentury Theatre

108

JAVIER RUANO-GARCÍA

PART III

Voices on Screen

131

  7 Some Observations on British Accent Stereotypes in Hollywood-Style Films

133

PATRICK ZABALBEASCOA

  8 The Accented Voice in Audiovisual Shakespeare

150

IRENE RANZATO

  9 Bastard from the North or Kingg in th’ Nohrth? /ˈbɑː.stəd/ /frɒm/ /ðə/ /nɔːθ/ or /kɪŋg/ /ɪn/ /ðə/ /nɒːθ/

168

LYDIA HAYES

10 “Why is he making a funny noise?”: The RP Speaker as an Outcast

194

LUCA VALLERIANI

Index

211

List of Contributors

Joan C. Beal is Emeritus Professor of English Language at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her research is in the history and dialects of English, with a particular interest in issues of identity and place. Publications include English in Modern Times, An Introduction to Regional English and (with Loudes Burbano-Elizondo and Carmen Llamas) Urban North-Eastern English. Josep Marco Borillo is Professor of Literary Translation and Translation Studies at Universitat Jaume I in Castelló, Spain, where he has worked since 1992. He has authored about eighty publications related to his main research areas: the translation of style, corpus-based translation studies, literary translator training and translations into Catalan in the inter-war period. His main contributions to corpus-based translation studies have been published in international journals and edited volumes. He also translates literature from English into Catalan and Spanish. Marina Dossena is Full Professor of English Language at the University of Bergamo, Italy. Her research centres on late modern English, with special attention given to ‘language history from below.’ She is currently involved in the compilation of a Corpus of 19th-Century Scottish Correspondence and is co-editor of Token: A Journal of English Linguistics and InScriptum: A Journal of Language and Literary Studies. She has been invited to give plenary talks at relevant international conferences, such as ICEHL 15 (Munich 2008) and ESSE 2014 (Košice 2014); in 2017 she was one of the plenary speakers at the First International Symposium on Approaches to Dialects in English Literature (1500–1950) (Salamanca). Lydia Hayes is a PhD candidate in translation studies at University College London (UCL). She teaches Spanish-English translation at the University of Bristol and Spanish oral language at UCL. She also translates on a freelance basis. She has an MA in Traducción y Mediación Intercultural from Universidad de Salamanca and a BA in European

viii  List of Contributors studies from Trinity College Dublin. She recently published (2020): “Netflix Disrupting Dubbing: English Dubs and British Accents” (JAT: Journal of Audiovisual Translation 2 (1)). Donatella Montini is Full Professor of English Language and Translation at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, where she teaches History of English and Stylistics. She has published extensively on Shakespeare, early modern English multilingualism, language teaching, and translation (with special regard to John Florio). She has recently authored a volume on contemporary stylistics, La stilistica inglese contemporanea: Teorie e metodi (2020), and co-edited a book on Queen Elizabeth I’s language and style, Elizabeth I in Writing: Language, Power and Representation in Early Modern England (2018). Cristina Paravano holds a PhD in English studies from the University of Milan, where she currently teaches English literature. She authored a monograph on Renaissance multilingualism, Performing Multilingualism on the Caroline Stage in the Plays of Richard Brome (2018). She has published articles in ETC, SEDERI Yearbook, Notes & Queries and Borrowers and Lenders, as well as several chapters in edited collections. Irene Ranzato is Associate Professor of English Language and Translation at Sapienza University of Rome. She holds a PhD in Translation Studies. Her research lies at the intersection of linguistic and cultural issues and focuses on the linguistic analysis of film and television ­dialogue. Her most recent publications include the books Translating Culture Specific References on Television (2016) and Queen’s English? Gli accenti dell’Inghilterra (2017). She also co-edited Linguistic and Cultural Representation in Audiovisual Translation (2018) and Reassessing Dubbing: Historical Approaches and Current Trends (2019). Javier Ruano-García  is Associate Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Salamanca. His main research interests include historical dialectology of the early and late modern periods, sociolinguistics, historical regional lexicography, and corpus linguistics. He is the author of  Early Modern Northern English Lexis: A Literary Corpus-Based Study  (Peter Lang 2010) and has edited White  Kennett’s Etymological Collections of English Words and Provincial Expressions for Oxford University Press (2018). He is also one of the compilers of The Salamanca Corpus. Luca Valleriani is a PhD student in English Language and Translation at Sapienza University of Rome, where he has also worked as a teaching fellow. His research revolves around the sociolinguistic analysis of audiovisual dialogue, and his forthcoming publications focus on the translation of accents in the Disney film Zootopia (Bianchi and Manca

List of Contributors  ix 2021) and the Netflix TV series The Crown (Laviosa et al. 2021). He is co-coordinator of the Dialects in Audiovisuals project (Ranzato et al. 2017). Patrick Zabalbeascoa is Full Professor of Translation Studies at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, author of “Humor and translation—an interdiscipline” (2005), in Humor 18 (2), and “Language variation in source texts and their translations: The case of L3 in film translation” (2011), in Target, 23 (1). He is also principal researcher of projects Clipfair and MUFiTAVi and chair of the 7th IATIS International Conference.

Introduction The Dialects of British English in Fictional Texts: Style, Translation and Ideology Donatella Montini and Irene Ranzato The representation of non-standard voices in fictional texts, be they literary, dramatic or audiovisual, their linguistic construction as fictional artefacts, as well as their translation in any given language, are evolving into an increasingly rich and relevant field of research. In our “global” society, the metadiscourse activated by such accented fictional texts perpetuates sociolinguistic polarities, and translation adds a further variable to the equation. The essays presented in this collection cover some of the most interesting features related to the aforementioned issues: the crucial overlap between regional and social dialects; the effects on linguistic as well as national or social identity of a character (and an individual?) through thier multilingual performance; the ideological trap that the transcription of nonstandardness may represent, or at least the difficulty authors encounter in conveying genuine regional voices; the complex discourses that the authors of the texts’ afterlives have woven into the original narratives by adding or omitting non-standard accents and dialects in their readings and interpretations. In this perspective, the aim of this collection is to reappraise and take a closer and updated look at a number of issues which are part of contemporary investigation on the polyphony of voices. Some fictional characters, as do real people, ‘speak the dialect at home’ and ‘ordinary English abroad and to persons of quality.’ The immortal words of Thomas Hardy, an author familiar with the regional speech of his native Dorset, are apt to introduce some of the themes prominent in this collection of essays which concern themselves with the representation of non-standard varieties of British English on page, stage and screen. Evoking the (lack of) dialect in the speech of Tess of the d’Urbervilles can give us clues about some of the most interesting features related to the topic of non-standard voices as represented in fictional narratives: the rare insight as to the effects on linguistic as well as national or social identity of a character (and an individual?) through his/her multilingual performance; the crucial overlap between regional and social dialects; the inconsistencies of some of even the greatest fictional representations of dialectal voices (Tess supposedly spoke dialect at home, but then she rarely does); the ideological trap that the transcription of nonstandardness may represent, or at least the difficulty authors encounter in conveying genuine regional voices (and Hardy himself was alert to the possible grotesque effect of the

2  Donatella Montini and Irene Ranzato “rustic speech” on page); and the complex discourses that the authors of fictional texts’ afterlives (adapters, screenwriters, film directors, actors and actresses) have woven into the original narrative by adding or omitting non-standard accents and dialects in their readings and interpretations. British dialects pertain to one of the geographical areas of the Englishspeaking world, in which polarisations (between north and south especially, but not only) are most evidently ingrained in people’s consciousness, thus becoming a favourite means of stereotyping. These regional oppositions, deeply rooted in a thousand years of history, fuelling an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ ideology (Wales 2002, 61), match other contrastive topoi recurrent in literature and film, such as standard versus non-standard and British versus other ‘Englishes’ speakers, all of which are evoked in the essays included in this collection. Accented voices, especially in contemporary fictional dialogue, build on a network of references and allusions which are deeply embedded in a precise regional and social context. The viewpoint this selection assumes is thus essentially a sociolinguistic one, and particular attention has been paid to social dialects. The fine thread between social portrayal and amplification due to characterisation is typical of the use of dialects in fiction, as Agha (2007) has vividly exemplified. As is often the case with texts which have to be appreciated by a readership or by members of an audience who are not necessarily familiar with a given non-standard variety, what is generally represented on page and stage and screen are the phonological features of dialects. And the “folk term” “accent,” as Agha terms it, “does not name a sound pattern as such but a system of contrastive social personas stereotypically linked to contrasts of sound.” In these terms, accents are “enregistered in cultural awareness as part of a system of stratified speech levels linked to an ideology of speaker rank” (2007, 201). In Agha (2007, 205–19), attention is drawn to several types of metadiscourses which all contributed to the growing importance of accents as an emblem of social status. These metadiscourses, which include popular periodicals, handbooks and early prescriptivist works, promoted “a range of characterological figures” to which the readership responded “with various types of ensuing behaviors.” Although the scholar refers specifically to the period between 1760 and 1900, many of his insights can arguably be applied to other time periods. The type of metadiscourse, among those listed by the scholar, which is most relevant for the authors of this collection is provided by the fictional worlds of literary works, which we extend to audiovisual texts. Representations of accents and dialects in classic novels, for example, are not merely tools to portray the reality of social life in literature, but are used to amplify and transform reality, and to construct memorable idiolects. Agha uses the example of /h/-dropping, one of the most famous indexes of stigmatised speech, and the literary character universally associated with this feature is Dickens’s Uriah Heep, but also Shakespeare’s Fluellen, and his devoicing of [b] and [v] produce the same effect. Although

Introduction  3 these characters are stereotypically linked only to a few scattered sounds and are not generally consistent in their use of these forms of idiolectal traits, the real point is that the popularity they enjoyed succeeded in establishing an immediate, if stereotypical, link between accent and social persona and between accent and individual idiolect. Even today, the metadiscourse activated by such accented fictional texts arguably perpetuates sociolinguistic polarities, also thanks to the popularity of vivid screen representations of speakers with a local, regional accent contrasted to received pronunciation (RP) speakers portrayed as possessors of a ‘proper’ accent. In the rationale of this collection, the use of dialects is presented as a fundamental means in the stylistics of drama and one that has been comparatively neglected as means of characterisation: even when dialects are the focus of insights into characterisation, the emphasis on non-standard varieties as part of the text’s multilingualism (see for example Delabastita 2002) often risks diminishing their import as a heuristic means to the social commentary made by the author. As a departure from this standpoint, the focus of many of the contributions to this volume is on how the style shifting between standard and non-standard varieties can be a powerful tool to shed light first of all on functions of characterisation. Many of the essays of this collection are also concerned with dialect translation. The role of studies in translation in research on multilingualism is fundamental: as Delabastita and Grutman (2005) have noted, translation studies have been at the forefront of a pivotal shift between a time when studies on multilingual texts were few and far between and one in which multilingualism is pragmatically seen as a sign of the times in this globalised world. Different perspectives of the translation of multilingual texts have been proposed during this last decade: Corrius and Zabalbeascoa (2011), for example, have developed theoretical insights on the nature of the third language (L3), described as neither L1 in the source text nor L2 in the target text but any other language(s) found in either text. The difficulties of transposing complex linguacultural data into another language are particularly compelling when the accented voice is used as a form of “embroidery,” as aesthetic means to design an idiolect (Ranzato 2019). Translation adds a further variable to the equation, complicated by the mores and specificities of the various modes. Dubbing translation, for example, by replacing voice with voice, has to meet the challenge of giving account of a treasure trove of phonetic and phonological clues. In this perspective, the aim of this collection of essays is to reappraise and take a closer, updated look at a number of issues which are part of contemporary investigation on the polyphony of voices. The three sections each engage in a communicative medium endowed with its own stylistic features used to achieve the representation of multiple, non-standard languages, voices and accents. In “Voices on Page,” the three contributors bring into relief how narrations and narrators shape the representation of Scots, Cornish and Irish in order to add layers of meaning to the story they are telling, and

4  Donatella Montini and Irene Ranzato particularly to characters’ idiolects. In her essay, “Scots as the Language of the Uncanny: The Case of Nineteenth-Century Gothic Narratives,” Marina Dossena explores poems and narratives authored by some of the most important names in Scottish literature of late modern times in order to outline the ways in which linguistic choices, especially in relation to the co-existence of Scots and English in the same texts, contribute to the definition of the genre characteristics of the texts themselves. More specifically, she draws attention to the importance of Scots as a language in which Gothic stories are not only narrated, but also introduced, thus preparing the reader for a shift in the narrative. Both poetry and prose avail of this device. Authors like Fergusson, Burns, Stevenson and Hogg play on the key of linguistic effects, and heimlich and unheimlich are activated both to evoke tradition and to create distance from the world of the reader. Joan C. Beal’s “Enregistering Nationhood: Cornwall and ‘CornuEnglish’ in the Works of Alan M. Kent” analyses the works of the Cornish novelist Alan M. Kent, focussing on his use of “Cornu-English,” as he renames this variety, and considering the relationship between this dialect of English (more commonly referred to as Anglo-Cornish) and Cornish, the Celtic language of the county. Beal discusses recent sociolinguistic research on Anglo-Cornish, and the examples provided show how Kent makes creative use of the contrasts between Standard English and CornuEnglish to evoke characteristics of Cornwall and Cornish people. Josep Marco (“An Analysis of the Use of Vernacular in Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End and its Spanish and Italian Translations”) turns to the difficult task of the literary translator when called to render particular geographical or social dialects in narrative fiction. “Dialect translation is not an insoluble problem but something worse: a problem with many solutions, all of them unsatisfactory” (Sáenz 2000). Marco updates possible translation strategies and deploys a classification of four solution types, thus signalling that Sebastian Barry’s translations into Spanish and Italian align to either a “neutralisation, or unmarked translation, which renders the source text (ST) dialect as standard in the target text,” or to “marking the target text (TT) language by using a (highly) colloquial, informal tenor which does not involve departing from the norm, at least as far as spelling and grammar are concerned.” In Barry’s novel, the aesthetic function fulfilled by non-standard language in a literary context is expressed through the narrator’s voice, pervasively dominating the storytelling in an IrishAmerican dialect. Against a general neutralisation, Marco applauds the Italian translator’s strategy of choosing an informal tone for his version. Theatre and cinema, as both oral and aural media, are particularly versatile to embed and exploit the potentialities of the representation of accents and dialects: in a way which is arguably more potent than on the written page, audiences are exposed to different modes of speech, and this contributes to highlighting the relationship between standard and non-standard English, and between oral dialogue and its transcription (for example, in intralingual or interlingual subtitles), with all their ideological implications.

Introduction  5 The section devoted to “Voices on Stage” harks back to the past and offers three contributions spanning from the Early to the Late Modern age. The essays deal with other-accent voices and borrowed speech and look at multilingualism both as a dramatic device and as a cultural, social and political sign (Delabastita and Hoenselaars 2013, 9). In “‘Peden bras vidne whee bis cregas’: Cornish on the Early Modern Stage,” Cristina Paravano develops an investigation which ultimately turns into a survey of the presence of Cornish characters in a number of plays from the Early Modern period. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Cornish language played a crucial role in safeguarding Cornish ‘otherness’: Cornish people refused to be subordinated to the English, and language was a way to resist the English oppression. Shakespeare’s Henry V, John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, John Middleton and William Rowley’s A Fair Quarrel, Ben Jonson’s works, and especially those of Richard Brome, the playwright who showed the most interest among all his contemporaries in the staging of Cornishness, are examples of how the representation of Cornish was a cultural and ideological medium difficult to censor by the standardised culture of the “King’s English.” In the same section, the chapters by Donatella Montini and Javier Ruano-García both discuss multilingual fictional texts from a sociolinguistic and pragmatic perspective and explore dramatic texts through the theoretical framework of enregisterment and stylisation (Agha 2003; Coupland 2007). Donatella Montini’s essay (“Shakespeare’s Multilingual Classrooms: Style, Stylisation and Linguistic Authority”) proposes to reappraise Shakespeare’s “multi-languagedness” by exploring a scenario in which Latin, French and also Italian, as foreign languages, are performed in dialogue and confrontation with the Early Modern rising vernacular, the “King’s English.” Indeed, a marginal, although meaningful, interest in regional dialects in Shakespeare’s works (only the Histories and King Lear present characters who exhibit their linguistic identity through dialects) is significantly accompanied by the presence of other languages whose major influence on the development of English is well-known. The didactic setting is selected in the essay as a vantage point from which to observe the agon between English and its rival languages, in particular Latin and French, within the framework of stylisation that brings out the ideology expressed by heteroglossia in performance and sheds light on the identity and linguistic insight of the Elizabethan audience. Javier Ruano-García places theatrical performances of the Lancashire dialect in the late nineteenth century into the context of enregisterment, dialect stylisation, and the sociolinguistics of performance. He examines a selection of plays performed in Manchester and London, including pantomimes, drolleries, comic sketches, and melodramas, and, with the aid of corpus linguistics, he investigates whether such a repertoire varied on account of the target audience and the fact that the text of the performance was aimed for publication.

6  Donatella Montini and Irene Ranzato The essays which close the collection take the investigation a step further by considering the portrayal of accented voices in cinema and television. Exploiting the penchant that British audiences have demonstrated for non-standard varieties of English (at least, or most notably, from the 1960s), film and TV authors have used regional and social dialects also to focus the viewers’ attention and sympathy on a particular character. Dubbing and interlingual subtitling, the two modes of audiovisual translation featured in this collection, each engages with nonstandardness in the way dictated by the potentialities of the specific medium. But also intralingual subtitles may be problematic: the impact that certain modalities of dialect transcription on screen may have on viewers is a topic that has been insufficiently tackled by film scholars. If Sebba, in the domain of other text typologies, comments on the general reluctance of linguistics as a discipline to consider the analysis of visual and graphic elements in conjunction with text (Sebba 2013, 105), we contend that his reflection can be extended to subtitles. As Sebba further states (2007, 102), the writing of language varieties presents particular orthographic problems, and the most important implications to be considered are those of an ideological import. Preston (1989, 328) comments that dialect and eye dialect respellings “serve mainly to denigrate the speaker […] by making him or her appear boorish, uneducated, rustic, gangsterish and so on.” Thus, degrees of nonstandardness in texts can be transformed into degrees of projected stigma, the more “deviant” the text from the standard, the more socially marginalised its imagined speaker will be perceived to be (Jaffe and Walton 2000, 580). In the domain of dubbing, on the other hand, recent investigations have shed light on the interplay between translation issues and prosodic features (Bosseaux 2015 and 2019; Sánchez Mompeán 2017 and 2019). Audiovisual translators and dubbing professionals have not always paid sufficient attention to phonetic and prosodic elements which allow the sociolinguistic message to travel cross-culturally, and, we would add, also to cultural elements in the text which, duly transposed, might compensate part of the inevitable losses. Some of these issues are tackled in the “Voices on Screen” section of this book, which includes works by authors who describe audiovisual texts of different types and genres. In “Some Observations on British Accent Stereotypes in Hollywood-Style Films,” Patrick Zabalbeascoa looks at the use of British accents in US television and cinema productions and shows how US English(es) and British English(es), used in opposition to each other in audiovisual fiction, present similarities and differences with traditional problems of dialects and multilingualism in fiction, when they are to be rendered in translation. The scholar goes further into his exploration and considers narrative and characterisation features as additional factors to evaluate in the translation process—for example, a given character’s flatness or roundness or the role of recurring patterns in casting choices. In “The Accented Voice in Audiovisual Shakespeare,” Irene Ranzato explores film and television adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, analysing

Introduction  7 the function of regional and social accents. According to the author, the choice of using non-standard accents to portray the idiolect of certain characters in these modern adaptations of Shakespeare fulfils specific narrative purposes. The analysis of such texts is complicated by the creative interpretations of the Shakespearean plays offered by the authors of the respective adaptations, and also by the audiences’ reception and expectations. The often-nuanced operation of transplanting Shakespeare’s text into another linguacultural milieu, of transposing Shakespeare’s quintessential Britishness into another linguistic system, is also explored by Ranzato in an example of subtitling translation of an Italian art film. Building on the concept of “meme,” a term coined by Richard Dawkins (1976) to describe the processes by which cultural ideas spread and become commonly held, Lydia Hayes, in “Bastard from the North or Kingg in th’ Nohrth? /ˈbɑː.stəd/ /frɒm/ /ðə/ /nɔːθ/ or /kɪŋg/ /ɪn/ /ðə/ /nɒːθ/,” looks at “dialectal memes” which she conceives as carrying cultural connotations that lead to the perceived identity of the speaker. Hayes’s ultimate goal is to explore the various memetic signs in both the original and Spanish versions of the celebrated HBO series Game of Thrones to discern whether their connotations are comparable. Finally, Luca Valleriani’s chapter (“‘Why is he making that funny noise?’: The RP Speaker as an Outcast”) reappraises the functions of RP in the TV series Derry Girls, in which the character speaking with a received pronunciation is seen, paradoxically and contrarily to its traditional status, as an outcast; the contrast between Northern Irish and English in the series sheds light on the view that RP, in spite of being usually labelled as ‘regionless,’ can be perceived as an actual foreign accent in some parts of the UK, such as Ulster. Collectively, the essays in this volume prove how the “broken” language of English (Blank 1996), “part Irish, Saxon, Scots, Welsh, and indeed a gallimaffry of many” (Heywood 1612) expresses all its creative power in its encounter and indeed parallel with what Gill (1619) termed the “poetic language,” the language of the common people (dialects) and the language of poets both sharing a propensity for “metaplasm” (that is “when out of necessity, or for the sake of charm, a syllable or word is changed from its own proper form to another”). The “poetic” texts analysed in this volume – from Early Modern plays to contemporary novels, films and TV series – are testimonies to the fact that voices, accents and dialects on page, stage and screen have been continuously reinvented while being represented, and that their aesthetic force always transcends the particular identity they may convey, be it national, regional or social.

References Agha, Asif. 2003. “The social life of cultural values.” Language and Communication, 23(3–4), 231–273.

8  Donatella Montini and Irene Ranzato Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blank, Paula. 1996. Broken English. Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writing. London and New York: Routledge. Bosseaux, Charlotte. 2015. Dubbing, Film and Performance: Uncanny Encounters. Oxford: Peter Lang. Bosseaux, Charlotte. 2019. “The case of French dubbing: Deconstructing and reconstructing Julianne Moore.” special issue of Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice, 27(2), 218–234. Edited by Irene Ranzato and Serenella Zanotti. Corrius, Montse and Zabalbeascoa, Patrick. 2011. “Language variation in source texts and their translations: The case of L3 in film translation.” Target, 23(1), 113–130. Coupland, Nikolas. 2007. Style: Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Delabastita, Dirk. 2002. “A great feast of languages: Shakespeare’s multilingual comedy in ‘King Henry V’ and the Translator.” The Translator, 8(2), 303–340. Delabastita, Dirk and Grutman, Rainier. 2005. “Introduction. Fictional representations of multilingualism in translation.” Linguistica Antverpiensia New Series – Themes in Translation Studies, 4, 11–34. Delabastita, Dirk and Hoenselaars, Ton. 2013. “‘If but as well I other accents borrow, that can my speech diffuse’: Multilingual perspectives on English Renaissance drama.” English Text Construction, 6(1), 1–16. Gill, Alexander. [1619] 1972. Logonomia Anglica, Stockholm Studies in English, 26 and 27, trans. Robin C. Alston, edited by Bror Danielsson and Arvid Gabrielson. Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell. Heywood, Thomas. [1612] 1941. An Apology for Actors, edited by Richard H. Perkinson. New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints. Jaffe, Alexandra and Walton, Shana. 2000. “The voices people read: Orthography and the representation of non-standard speech.” Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4(4), 561–588. Preston, Dennis R. 1989. Perceptual Dialectology: Nonlinguists’ Views of Areal Linguistics. Dordrecht: Foris. Ranzato, Irene. 2019. “Talking proper vs. talking with an accent: The socioliguistic divide in original and translated audiovisual dialogue.” special issue of Multilingua, 39(2), 547–562. Edited by Marie-Noëlle Guillot, Maria Pavesi and Louisa Desilla. Sáenz, Miguel. 2000. “Dialectos dilectos.” El Trujamán. Revista diaria de traducción, 3 November 2000. http://cvc.cervantes.es/trujaman/anteriores/noviembre_00/03112000.htm. Sánchez Mompeán, Sofía. 2017. “The rendition of English intonation in Spanish dubbing.” PhD Thesis, University of Murcia. Sánchez Mompeán, Sofía. 2019. “More than words can say: Exploring prosodic variation in dubbing.” In Reassessing Dubbing: Historical Approaches and Current Trends, edited by Irene Ranzato and Serenella Zanotti, 191–209. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Sebba, Mark. 2007. Spelling and Society – The Culture and Politics of Orthography around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sebba, Mark. 2013. “Multilingualism in written discourse: An approach to the analysis of multilingual texts.” International Journal of Bilingualism, XVII(1), 97–118. Wales, Katie. 2002. “‘North of watford gap’: A cultural history of Northern English (from 1700).” In Alternative Histories of English, edited by Richard J. Watts and Peter Trudgill, 45–66. London: Routledge.

Part I

Voices on Page

1 Scots as the Language of the Uncanny The Case of NineteenthCentury Gothic Narratives* Marina Dossena 1.1 Introduction The relationship between Gothic narrative and folk lore has always been intriguing; not only are themes often related (for instance, ghostly apparitions feature prominently both in Gothic stories and in folk narratives), but language can also be shown to work in interestingly similar ways in both contexts, not least when socially and geographically marked varieties are involved. In this contribution, I intend to discuss a few texts authored by some of the most important names in the Scottish literature of Late Modern times, in order to outline the ways in which linguistic choices, especially in relation to the co-existence of Scots and English in the same texts, contribute to the definition of the genre characteristics of the texts themselves. More specifically, I aim to draw attention to the importance of Scots as a language in which Gothic stories are not only narrated, but also introduced, thus preparing the reader for a shift in the narrative.1 After an overview of how Scots and English are found to occur in folk tales and other genres pertaining to popular culture, such as ballads, I will present a few case studies drawn from the literary works of five among the most important authors to have shaped Scottish culture between the end of the eighteenth and the end of the nineteenth centuries: Robert Fergusson, Robert Burns, Walter Scott, James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson. My analysis will focus on how Scots is employed to frame the narrative and outline both characters and contexts, and how this contributes to the definition of what is “uncanny” while being presented (paradoxically) as quite familiar from the linguistic point of view.2

*  This chapter is dedicated to the memory of my very dear friend and colleague Claudio Ongaro (22 December 1954–18 January 2020), whose endless love of the humanities was a constant inspiration.

12  Marina Dossena

1.2 Scots and Scots-English Code-Mixing in Popular Culture Language has often been shown to play an unobtrusive and yet powerful role in the definition of both characters and stories, not least through the use of carefully selected labels and naming strategies (see Nevala et al. 2017 and Dossena 2019). In addition, the choice of specific linguistic forms, either in a different language or in a different variety, can convey meaning; for instance, in Alexander MacKenzie’s account of the Highland Clearances, occasional sentences in Gaelic, typically interjections of woe or cries for mercy, promptly translated by the editor, function as powerful authenticating devices (see Dossena 2001). However, in contexts where folk lore, magic and Gothic atmospheres are seen to influence one another, linguistic choices can be employed for stylistic effects that go beyond genre characteristics and have a sociolinguistic value on account of how they help define a specific cultural context and outline the protagonists’ profiles. In Scottish Gothic narrative, the wavering along the Scots-English cline results in a register that is particularly suited to representations of the “uncanny.” Indeed, as Davison and Germanà (2017–18, 2) point out, “The word ‘uncanny’ captures the in-between-ness that Scottish writers – especially those employing the Gothic – suggest is central to what might be called the ‘Scottish condition’ in the wake of the Act of Union,” when the contrasting trends of anglicization on one hand and antiquarianism on the other were particularly intense (Dossena 2005, 56–115). Within this framework, uses of Scots appear to take on ideological overtones that associate “Gothic” contexts with an ancestral, pre-rational past, while uses of English are associated with a more modern and “enlightened” world. A similar ambivalence is observed in popular culture, such as in songs, jokes, or story-telling, where the use of socially and/or geographically marked varieties may function as both an authenticating device and as a distancing one: in the former case, language is a tool employed for selfidentification; in the latter case, instead, it places recipients outside the network of the protagonists of the texts under discussion, which may also result in a certain degree of emphasis placed on how distant standardlanguage speakers can be from the “dialect” speakers in terms of education or indeed civilization. The Salamanca Corpus,3 compiled by García-Bermejo Giner et al., includes instances of both cases. A Collection of Songs, Comic, Satirical, and Descriptive, Chiefly in the Newcastle Dialect, and Illustrative of the Language and Manners of the Common People on the Banks of the Tyne and Neighbourhood, published anonymously in 1827, is meant to offer representations of a geographically marked variety through texts in which spelling represents phonological renditions. On the other hand, Howard Pease’s The White-faced Priest and Other Northumbrian Episodes, published in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1896, is a text in which

Scots as the Language of the Uncanny  13 dialect occurs with much less density. While Pease also includes a glossary (a  feature that had been typical of books offering both dialect ­literature and ­literary dialect since the eighteenth century), both texts provide introductory comments on linguistic representation, thus drawing attention to specific features of the language or indeed to the difficulty of conveying its specificity: A few words on what is called the Newcastle Dialect must suffice. This being a border town, was, before the union of the two kingdoms, subject to continual incursions from the Scotch; and after the union great numbers of them settled here. The historians of the town tell us that most of our keelmen were originally from Scotland. This accounts for our dialect and accent being in great part Scottish. What is called the bur, or forcible guttural pronunciation of the letter r, is not, as has been commonly thought, peculiar to Newcastle; it is observable in several other places in Northumberland, in some parts of Scotland, and is quite the fashionable pronunciation in Paris, whence it is thought to have been originally derived. Some of our gentry who, in this respect, affect to ape the dialect of their more southern neighbours, drop the letter altogether in their pronunciation, and instead of gridiron will talk glibly of the gidion, oast beef, &c. The clear and forcible pronunciation of this letter has been ably pointed out as a peculiar beauty of our language, by the celebrated lecturer, Mr. Thelwall. (Anon. 1827, 3, at http://hdl.handle.net/10366/122427) And now one word as to the dialect. The remarks of an able critic in regard to a former work are here quoted, for they […] may also serve to excuse the writer in the eyes of the more patriotic Northumbrians, who may resent their ancient Doric being watered down to suit the taste of a “furrinor,” who may even go so far as to stigmatize it as “a cruel jargon” upon occasion. The critic then pointed out, “that to reproduce phonetically a wholly incomprehensible dialect is but to worry and puzzle your readers. It may be said that this is impossible, for who could transliterate the burr? Or who has ever been able to write the vowel sound “o” in the Northumbrian equivalent for “home” or “stone”? “Hyem” and “styen” suggests the real sounds to none but an expert. […] If the delicious original be beyond capture, why essay to zany it?” (Pease 1896, 4, at http://hdl.handle.net/10366/82884) Pease’s comment actually echoes the remarks that Robert Louis Stevenson had made in his introduction to Underwoods, the collection of poems in Scots he published in 1887, in which he rejected any idea of linguistic

14  Marina Dossena purism in the representation of spoken language, not least because the vernacular was assumed to be dying out: Among our new dialecticians, the local habitat of every dialect is given to the square mile. I could not emulate this nicety if I desired; for I simply wrote my Scots as well as I was able, not caring if it hailed from Lauderdale or Angus, from the Mearns or Galloway; if I had ever heard a good word, I used it without shame; and when Scots was lacking, or the rhyme jibbed, I was glad (like my betters) to fall back on English. […] Let the precisians call my speech that of the Lothians. And if it be not pure, alas! what matters it? The day draws near when this illustrious and malleable tongue shall be quite forgotten; and Burns’ Ayrshire, and Dr. Macdonald’s Aberdeen-awa’, and Scott’s brave, metropolitan utterance will be all equally the ghosts of speech. (Stevenson 1887, xi–xii) Interestingly, however, the comment also suggests that vernacular forms will become “the ghosts of speech” – a “Gothic” touch that implies the survival of linguistic forms in literature long after their use in daily exchanges has died out.

1.3 The Case of Late Modern Scottish Literature In Scottish culture there is undoubtedly a very close connection between literature and popular tradition, which of course includes folk beliefs. This is exemplified in a great number of authors, the most famous names being those of Robert Burns, Robert Fergusson, Walter Scott, James Hogg and – last but not least – Robert Louis Stevenson.4 Recent studies have drawn attention to the important similarities and differences existing between these authors as far as their attitude toward Gothic narratives is concerned: see, for instance, Macdonald (2009) and Duncan (2012). What is still missing, however, is a closer analysis of the part played by language in the definition of characters and contexts: given the multilingual quality of Scottish culture, in which Gaelic, English and Scots can occur both simultaneously and alternatively, depending on what linguistic identity is conveyed, it is important to go beyond superficial distinctions that suggest mere dichotomies, such as the one between Gaelic and English, or the one between Scots and English, to see how languages influence each other and combine or diverge, resulting in complex images that underpin the narrative. In what follows, I will take into consideration a few examples to illustrate how the interplay of languages does in fact convey often ambiguous, contradictory representations; although the sample at hand does not claim to be representative from the quantitative point of view, it may nonetheless be assumed to comprise significant literary cases, the enduring success of which testifies to the validity of the linguistic strategies they employ.

Scots as the Language of the Uncanny  15 Starting from poetic texts in which the density of Scots features is highest, such as in those authored by Robert Fergusson and Robert Burns, I will then focus on cases in which stories in Scots are interpolated in (mostly) English-language novels as imitations of spoken performances: it is the case, for example, of very well-known pieces like “The Tale of Tod Lapraik” (in Stevenson’s Catriona, of 1893) or “Wandering Willie’s Tale” (in Scott’s Redgauntlet, of 1824). Stevenson’s Thrawn Janet, instead, published in 1881, is an even more interesting case, as it is entirely in Scots, although with variations within the same text, thus representing different speakers and shifting perspectives both from the point of view of the narrators and of the readership. While it would be inappropriate to make direct comparisons between uses in prose and in poetry, it may be somewhat striking that, in spite of the relative chronological distance between Scott and Stevenson, the linguistic approach in their narratives is similar, which stresses the significance of Scots as a generic marker in Gothic stories. 1.3.1 Robert Fergusson’s The Ghaists This poem, first published in 1773 in Ruddiman’s Magazine, represents the dialogue between two ghosts in Greyfriars’ Kirkyard in Edinburgh, in which recent political and financial issues are discussed.5 The two ghosts are those of well-known figures in local history: George Heriot (1563– 1624), a goldsmith and crown financier, and George Watson (1654–1723), a merchant banker. As a result, in spite of the “Gothic” setting and the references to undoubtedly “Gothic” figures, such as Major Weir, a notorious warlock,6 the two speakers use Scots in the same way as the educated classes of late-eighteenth-century Scotland are said to have done:7 […] Sure Major Weir, or some sic warlock wight, Has flung beguilin’ glamer o’er your sight; Or else some kittle cantrup thrown, I ween, Has bound in mirlygoes my ain twa ein, If ever aught frae sense cou’d be believ’d (And seenil hae my senses been deceiv’d), This moment, o’er the tap of Adams’ tomb, Fu’ easy can I see your chiefest dome: Nae corbie fleein’ there, nor croupin’ craws, Seem to forspeak the ruin of thy haws, But a’ your tow’rs in wonted order stand, Steeve as the rocks that hem our native land. […] The poem is not “Gothic” in its contents, but only in the setting and atmospheres; however, its use of marked language enhances the sense of a specific, local identity that underpins and justifies political criticism – a strategy

16  Marina Dossena that is reminiscent of the choice of Gaelic as the language of political affiliation in Jacobite poems such as those authored by Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair (1698–1770). As the magazine in which the poem appeared was published in Edinburgh, Fergusson’s readers could be expected to recognize their own language, or at least that of their older relatives. 1.3.2 Robert Burns: Or, When Even Death Speaks Scots The importance of the works authored by Robert Burns in the development of Scots as a literary language does not need to be rehearsed here;8 however, it is nonetheless interesting to see how his “Gothic” poems are somewhat tongue-in-cheek in their representation of folk traditions and in the introduction of characters who have extraordinary, otherworldly experiences, but who are probably far from sober. In Halloween (1785) the highlight of the proceedings is the way in which the young attempt to identify their future spouses, and what could be classified as “uncanny” by present-day standards seems much less relevant – something that may surprise twenty-first-century readers, for whom Halloween evokes spooky scenarios. As for the effects of drink on the perception of events, the protagonist of Death and Dr Hornbook (1785) admits freely that “The clachan yill had made me canty, / I was na fou, but just had plenty;” in Tam O’Shanter (1790), instead, it is the narrator who provides that kind of background information, stating that Tam, the protagonist, had enjoyed a pleasant evening of drink and conversation at the end of a market day: When chapman billies leave the street, And drouthy neibors neibors meet; As market days are wearing late, And folk begin to tak the gate, While we sit bousing at the nappy, An’ getting fou and unco happy, We think na on the lang Scots miles, The mosses, waters, slaps and stiles, That lie between us and our hame, […] Even so, the use of Scots in Death and Dr Hornbook draws attention to the viability of the language even in conversation with the most dreadful interlocutor of all, Death. Indeed, Death is described in the terms of a familiar image from a danse macabre: tall, thin, carrying a scythe and a fish-spear, and immediately causing the protagonist to feel “an eerie swither”: […] I there wi’ Something did forgather, That pat me in an eerie swither; An’ awfu’ scythe, out-owre ae shouther,

Scots as the Language of the Uncanny  17 Clear-dangling, hang; A three-tae’d leister on the ither Lay, large an’ lang. Its stature seem’d lang Scotch ells twa, The queerest shape that e’er I saw, For fient a wame it had ava; And then its shanks, They were as thin, as sharp an’ sma’ As cheeks o’ branks. […] The protagonist, however, addresses this scary figure, thus initiating the dialogue in which Death complains of Dr Hornbook’s medical “competence” and promises revenge in due course. As argued elsewhere (Dossena 2018), it is never a good idea to be the first to speak in a supernatural encounter, as it initiates interaction with beings that humans can hardly control, and this in turn may prove very dangerous. However, in this poem the protagonist’s move does not reflect any fear – quite the opposite, in fact. Just like Tam O’Shanter shouts his appreciation of a young witch’s dancing while in the middle of a fiendish ceilidh, the human protagonist in Death and Dr Hornbook addresses Death in friendly, even jocular terms, asking with a certain degree of irony whether he has been mowing when everybody has been sowing. As no answer is given immediately, the exchange is re-initiated and the vocative term “friend” is repeated: “Guid-een,” quo’ I; “Friend! hae ye been mawin, When ither folk are busy sawin!” I seem’d to make a kind o’ stan’ But naething spak; At length, says I, “Friend! whare ye gaun? Will ye go back?” At that point Death answers and reveals his identity, which scares the protagonist, but once he is reassured that Death has not come for him, the dialogue continues in such familiar terms that, with a dark paradox, Death even states that he is simply earning his living, although science is complicating his task: the skilful (and cunning) doctor both heals and poisons, thus thwarting Death’s work. It is a dialogue that sounds grimly humorous, in a kind of mock-Gothic situation that exorcises the terror it would otherwise elicit. In what follows, some lines from the dialogue are presented, so as to give an indication of how it unfolds; first of all, Death introduces himself: It spak right howe, - “My name is Death, But be na fley’d.”

18  Marina Dossena The protagonist then invites Death to sit down and have a chat: Come, gie’s your news; This while ye hae been mony a gate, At mony a house. Death tells his story in disconsolate terms, shaking his head as he reflects on how he no longer seems to be invincible or is in fact preceded in his undertakings: “Ay, ay!” quo’ he, an’ shook his head, “It’s e’en a lang, lang time indeed Sin’ I began to nick the thread, An’ choke the breath: Folk maun do something for their bread, An’ sae maun Death. Sax thousand years are near-hand fled Sin’ I was to the butching bred, An’ mony a scheme in vain’s been laid, To stap or scar me; Till ane Hornbook’s ta’en up the trade, And faith! he’ll waur me. […] Ye ken Hornbook i’ the clachan, Deil mak his king’s-hood in spleuchan! He’s grown sae weel acquaint wi’ Buchan And ither chaps, The weans haud out their fingers laughin, An’ pouk my hips. […] A country laird had ta’en the batts, Or some curmurring in his guts, His only son for Hornbook sets, An’ pays him well: The lad, for twa guid gimmer-pets, Was laird himsel’. […] That’s just a swatch o’ Hornbook’s way; Thus goes he on from day to day, Thus does he poison, kill, an’ slay, An’s weel paid for’t; Yet stops me o’ my lawfu’ prey, Wi’ his damn’d dirt: The density of Scots forms in the turns of both Death and the protagonist makes the dialogue sound like a spontaneous exchange between fellow

Scots as the Language of the Uncanny  19 travellers: this enhances the ironic quality of the poem, in which such solemn subjects as life, death, illness and even murder are discussed in familiar terms that are interspersed with interjections like “Deil mak his king’s-hood in spleuchan!” The result is a popularization of an otherwise Gothic situation, decreasing its level of frightfulness without trivializing issues, but actually bringing them closer to audiences, who can participate in the exchange, albeit as mere spectators, thanks to the recognisability of the language. The conversation, however, is brought to a typically Gothic close: Death is plotting revenge, but before he can explain what it is, the church bells ring and both participants go their separate ways – the supernatural event vanishes when a religious note is struck, just like in folk tales when uncanny beings are dispersed by symbols of salvation: the sound of church bells, but also sunrise or prayers. 1.3.3 Scots in Gothic Prose As far as Gothic prose is concerned, significant instances were authored by various figures, but the most popular works were published by Walter Scott, James Hogg and Robert Louis Stevenson. It may therefore be worthwhile to see what they have in common and in what ways they differ in their use of Scots for the characterization of an “uncanny” setting. The texts that are particularly relevant in this respect are those in which Scots-speaking characters are the actual narrators and/or introduce the narrative. Stevenson’s Thrawn Janet is a case in point, as there are two levels in the text: one in Scottish English in which a narrator introduces the story, and one in Scots in which one of the witnesses presents the story itself. This witness, however, is not introduced explicitly: there is only a short caesura in the text to signal the switch from one speaker to the other. The relevant paragraphs are given below: The Reverend Murdoch Soulis was long minister of the moorland parish of Balweary, in the vale of Dule. A severe, bleak-faced old man, dreadful to his hearers, he dwelt in the last years of his life, without relative or servant or any human company, in the small and lonely manse under the Hanging Shaw. […]; and guidmen sitting at the clachan alehouse shook their heads together at the thought of passing late by that uncanny neighbourhood. […]; and among those who were better informed, some were naturally reticent, and others shy of that particular topic. Now and again, only, one of the older folk would warm into courage over his third tumbler, and recount the cause of the minister’s strange looks and solitary life. Fifty years syne, when Mr. Soulis cam’ first into Ba’weary, he was still a young man – a callant, the folk said – fu’ o’ book learnin’ and grand at the exposition, but, as was natural in sae young a man, wi’ nae leevin’ experience in religion. (Stevenson 1881[1905], 128–130)

20  Marina Dossena The paragraphs that introduce the story hint at the fact that the Scotsspeaking narrator could only be encouraged to talk about the supernatural events “over his third tumbler” (i.e., after some drinking). This, however, is different from the kind of drunkenness that makes Burns’s characters bold enough to address other-worldly creatures, such as we saw above in Tam O’Shanter and Death and Dr Hornbook. Here drink gives the narrator’s informants (presented as elderly, God-fearing speakers)9 the strength to recall extraordinary situations. In fact, such situations are so scary that the devil himself may have visited the village in the form of “a black man” – something that they are not prepared to discuss openly, either on account of superstitious beliefs or of actual traumatic memories. The same frightful apparition is the catalyst of the dramatic conclusion in The Merry Men, another story in which the tension between Scots and Scottish English also characterizes the antithesis between the protagonists, with the latter language spoken by the Edinburgh-educated narrator and the former by his sturdily religious uncle. In the following excerpt, the uncle tells the story of a shipwreck, and when the nephew makes a comment that sounds Catholic, the uncle is quick to make a point of doctrine in Scots, although the religious context might elicit the use of more “standard” forms:10 “She cam’ ashore Februar’ lo, about ten at nicht,” he went on to me. “There was nae wind, and a sair run o’ sea; and she was in the sook o’ the Roost, as I jaloose. We had seen her a’ day, Rorie and me, beating to the wind. She wasnae a handy craft, I’m thinking, that ChristAnna; for she would neither steer nor stey wi’ them. A sair day they had of it; their hands was never aff the sheets, and it perishin’ cauld – ower cauld to snaw; and aye they would get a bit nip o’ wind, and awa’ again, to pit the emp’y hope into them. Eh, man! but they had a sair day for the last o’t! He would have had a prood, prood heart that won ashore upon the back o’ that.” “And were all lost?” I cried. “God help them!” “Wheesht!” he said sternly. “Nane shall pray for the deid on my hearth-stane.” (Stevenson 1882 [1905], 14) Even in the Gothic story that relies most strongly on the dire consequences that extreme religious beliefs may have, James Hogg’s most famous novel, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, published in 1824, Scots only appears in very few snatches of interaction among lower-class speakers, thus emphasizing the limited viability of the language outside certain social circles.11 The protagonists themselves always use English, sometimes even to the point of equivocation – see for instance how GilMartin, the character who is probably the devil, introduces himself: I inquired the next day what his name was; […]. He replied that there was no occasion for any one friend ever naming another, when their

Scots as the Language of the Uncanny  21 society was held in private, as ours was; […]. “But if you cannot converse without naming me, you may call me Gil for the present,” […]. “Gil!” said I. “Have you no name but Gil? Or which of your names is it? Your Christian or surname?” “Oh, you must have a surname too, must you!” replied he. “Very well, you may call me Gil-Martin. It is not my Christian name; but it is a name which may serve your turn.” “This is very strange!” said I. “Are you ashamed of your parents that you refuse to give your real name?” “I have no parents save one, whom I do not acknowledge,” said he proudly. “Therefore, pray drop that subject, for it is a disagreeable one. I am a being of a very peculiar temper, […].” (Hogg 1824, 195–196) It is only when in the exchanges we find the language of ordinary people that Scots is used for both authenticity and dramatic effect; see, for instance, the following scene, where the protagonists fear they are dealing with the devil himself, whom they call euphemistically “the auld ane,” so as to avoid the utterance of the dreaded noun:12 “Oh, Tam Douglas! Tam Douglas! haste ye an’ rise out frayont that incarnal devil!” cried the wife. “Ye are in ayont the auld ane himsel, for our lass Tibbie saw his cloven cloots last night.” “Lord forbid!” roared Tam Douglas, and darted over the bed like a flying fish. Then, hearing the unearthly tumult with which he was surrounded, he turned to the side of the bed, and addressed me thus, with long and fearful intervals: “If ye be the Deil, rise up, an’ depart in peace out o’ this house – afore the bedstrae take kindling about ye, an’ than it’ll maybe be the waur for ye. Get up – an’ gang awa out amang your cronies, like a good lad. There’s nae body here wishes you ony ill. D’ye hear me?” […] The lass Tibby, seeing the innkeeper was not going to prevail with me to rise, flew towards the bed in desperation, and, seizing me by the waist, soon landed me on the floor, saying: “Be ye deil, be ye chiel, ye’s no lie there till baith the house an’ us be swallowed up!” (Hogg 1824, 355–356) The intricate nature of Hogg’s novel is well-known and is immediately evident in the complexity of its mise-en-abime structure: the text is said to have been “found” and is edited by someone whose “narrative” precedes the protagonist’s actual “confession.” Moreover, linguistic variation both helps define characters and situations, while – perhaps paradoxically – contributing to the intricacy of the reading experience. In this respect, there are two other texts that cannot be ignored when discussing the relationship between Gothic literature and linguistic uses:

22  Marina Dossena Walter Scott’s “Wandering Willie’s Tale” and Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Tale of Tod Lapraik” – two narratives that can actually be analysed in their own right, separately from the novels in which they are interpolated. In Scott’s case, Willie Steenson, or “Wandering Willie,” is a figure which evokes the typical seannachie of Scottish tradition, for whom music and storytelling coexist as invaluable sources of ancient lore.13 His name, given in a hypocoristic form (Willie) that alliterates with its qualifier (Wandering), familiarizes him – and yet, his own comments on himself place him in an “uncanny” framework in which he states he could even be the devil, whose potential for disguise is incommensurable: How do ye ken whether I am honest, or what I am? I may be the deevil himsell for what ye ken, for he has power to come disguised like an angel of light; and, besides, he is a prime fiddler. He played a sonata to Corelli, ye ken. (Scott 1824: I, 223) The protagonist ascribes this claim to either craziness or an attempt to scare him, and jokingly asks if the devil might actually put up “so silly a masquerade,” but Wandering Willie frowns and comments: “Ye ken little about it – little about it”; he then introduces his narrative with “I could tell ye something about that.” He admits that his scary stories do frighten children and elderly ladies, but the one he is about to tell is claimed to be a true story, meant to educate the listener: a thing that befell in our ain house in my father’s time – that is, my father was then a hafflins callant; and I tell it to you, that it may be a lesson to you that are but a young thoughtless chap, wha ye draw up wi’ on a lonely road; for muckle was the dool and care that came o’ ‘t to my gudesire. (Scott 1824, I, 224) Wandering Willie speaks Scots throughout the story and in the paragraphs that precede it, but his skilful storytelling is made even more powerful through voice modulation and face expression, so that non-linguistic elements combine with linguistic ones for greater effect: He commenced his tale accordingly, in a distinct narrative tone of voice, which he raised and depressed with considerable skill; at times sinking almost into a whisper, and turning his clear but sightless eyeballs upon my face, as if it had been possible for him to witness the impression which his narrative made upon my features. I will not spare a syllable of it, although it be of the longest; so I make a dash – and begin: – Ye maun have heard of Sir Robert Redgauntlet of that ilk, who lived in these parts before the dear years. The country will lang mind

Scots as the Language of the Uncanny  23 him; and our fathers used to draw breath thick if ever they heard him named. He was out wi’ the Hielandmen in Montrose’s time; and again he was in the hills wi’ Glencairn in the saxteen hundred and fifty-twa; and sae when King Charles the Second came in, wha was in sic favor as the laird of Redgauntlet? (Scott 1824, I, 224–225) Scottish English is only used in the story when younger subjects speak: it is the case of Sir John Redgauntlet, son of Sir Robert Redgauntlet. Everybody else uses Scots, both in the palace and in hell, where the protagonist of the story has to go to collect the receipt of the rent he had paid to Sir Robert. The devil himself uses the same register as the protagonist, after the latter has summoned him through his toast, although in that he had used the euphemistic label of “Man’s Enemy”: [He] took off the brandy wholely at twa draughts, and named a toast at each. The first was, the memory of Sir Robert Redgauntlet, and may he never lie quiet in his grave till he had righted his poor bond tenant; and the second was, a health to Man’s Enemy, if he would but get him back the pock of siller, or tell him what came o’ ’t, for he saw the haill world was like to regard him as a thief and a cheat, and he took that waur than even the ruin of his house and hauld. (Scott 1824, I, 244–245) When the devil appears, the protagonist is admittedly drunk, but his desperation is such that he accepts to follow the devil to hell, in order to retrieve his receipt – a statement that causes “the stranger” to laugh. The human subject is not aware of the fact that his hyperbolic claim is not hyperbolic at all for the devil: “It’s a hard pinch,” said the stranger; “but I think I can help you.” “If you could lend the money, sir, and take a lang day – I ken nae other help on earth,” said my gudesire. “But there may be some under the earth,” said the stranger. “Come, I’ll be frank wi’ you; I could lend you the money on bond, but you would maybe scruple my terms. Now I can tell you that your auld laird is disturbed in his grave by your curses and the wailing of your family, and if ye daur venture to go to see him, he will give you the receipt.” My gudesire’s hair stood on end at this proposal, but he thought his companion might be some humorsome chield that was trying to frighten him, and might end with lending him the money. Besides, he was bauld wi’ brandy, and desperate wi’ distress; and he said he had courage to go to the gate of hell, and a step farther, for that receipt. The stranger laughed. (Scott 1824, I, 246–247)

24  Marina Dossena Note that, like in the case of Hogg’s Gil-Martin, the devil avoids any explicit reference to his identity, but only refers to his powers in terms that evoke Faustian situations; he also complains that humans have always used derogatory labels to identify him (“I have been sair miscaa’d in the world”) in spite of the help he can offer (albeit at an incommensurable cost): I am one that, though I have been sair miscaa’d in the world, am the only hand for helping my freends (Scott 1824, I, 246) As these stories show, although it may be argued that Scottish Gothic narratives echo the Highlands/Lowlands antisyzygy, the opposition of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon worlds, that is not necessarily the case at all times. Scott’s Redgauntlet is set on the banks of the Solway Firth, and Stevenson’s “Tale of Tod Lapraik,” in Chapter 15 of Catriona, is set in North Berwick and on the Bass Rock, just off the Firth of Forth and indeed a short distance from Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital. In neither case are the events set north of the so-called “Highland Line.” Besides, Stevenson’s story evokes times and characters that are familiar to Scottish readers, and particularly to Edinburgh ones, because it was in Edinburgh, in Greyfriars Churchyard, that the National Covenant was inaugurated in 1638, rejecting Charles I’s attempt to force the Church of Scotland to conform to English practice and governance. The Covenant would be the cause of fights, rebellions, and indeed imprisonments – a long and tragic history which Stevenson’s readers might be expected to recall. A story of shape-shifting, the “Tale of Tod Lapraik” is about Laurie Lapraik, a weaver turned warlock who is called “Tod” (i.e., fox). The narrator, Andie Dale, reports the events witnessed by his father, Tam Dale, when he was in charge of the Bass Rock at a time when Covenanters were imprisoned there. While Andie Dale does admit that his father was “fond of a lass, and fond of a glass, and fond of a ran-dan,” thus suggesting a familiar link between alcohol and supposedly supernatural events, he also states that “it’s an unco place, the Bass.” Although it is not located in some exotic, distant and therefore more predictably “Gothic” environment, the Bass Rock is nonetheless qualified as “unco” (i.e., strange in a mysterious sort of way) – it becomes the setting of events that are all the more astonishing on account of their relative geographical proximity. On the other hand, North Berwick is associated with early witchcraft trials (1590–1592) and with James VI’s suspicion that it was witches from there who had caused storms during his crossing to and from Denmark on the occasion of his wedding in 1589. This episode is actually mentioned in Stevenson’s story, when Tod’s house is located and it is suggested that wise people avoided the area, just like the manse in Thrawn Janet: Tod had his dwallin’ in the lang loan benorth the kirkyaird. It’s a dark uncanny loan, forbye that the kirk has aye had an ill name since

Scots as the Language of the Uncanny  25 the days o’James the Saxt and the deevil’s cantrips played therein when the Queen was on the seas; and as for Tod’s house, it was in the mirkest end, and was little liked by some that kenned the best. (Stevenson 1893, 167) When the narrator and his father get there, they find Tod Lapraik in a strange, probably preternatural “dwam” that is only broken when God is mentioned: Tod was a wabster to his trade; his loom stood in the but. There he sat, a muckle fat, white hash of a man like creish, wi’ a kind of a holy smile that gart me scunner. The hand of him aye cawed the shuttle, but his een was steeked. We cried to him by his name, we skirled in the deid lug of him, we shook him by the shouther. Nae mainner o’ service! There he sat on his dowp, a’ cawed the shuttle and smiled like creish. “God be guid to us,” says Tam Dale, “this is no canny!” He had jist said the word, when Tod Lapraik cam to himsel. (Stevenson 1893: 167–168) Throughout the story, the density of Scots lexical items underpins the cultural framework of the narrative, in which superstition and religious beliefs coexist. Moreover, linguistic usage is even more consistent than in Thrawn Janet, as there is no shift from one narrative to the other, with a consequent change in register. In the Tale of Tod Lapraik, all the characters in the story use Scots at all times, thus helping readers immerse themselves in the plot even more fully.

1.4 Concluding Remarks In this contribution, I have taken into consideration a few well-known examples from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scottish literature in order to assess the role of Scots as the language of the uncanny in Gothic narratives. Starting from an outline of how Scots has always featured prominently in popular culture and in literary texts, in spite of the constant attempts to anglicize discourse that characterized Late Modern prescriptive trends, it was possible to link such linguistic traits to the most significant Gothic pieces in Scottish literature, whether in poetry or in (interpolated) prose. As a result, it has been possible to show that linguistic choices are often ambiguous in their literary role; the use of Scots in Gothic stories or poems does indeed evoke tradition and significant links with an ancestral world that still pervade reality; however, manifestations of this world pertain to the past, and are therefore distant (by definition) from the contemporary world of the readers. The uncanny that is presented in the texts is both heimlich, because the language is familiar, and unheimlich, because it is beyond the rational world in which the story

26  Marina Dossena is told. Perhaps paradoxically, Scots is an important tool with which to preserve tradition and also the language that relegates that tradition to the past. At the same time, precisely because of the significance of that tradition, no other language could be employed as meaningfully for the narration of Gothic stories, the roots of which are to be found in the popular culture of the area and the times. The social, geographical and historical profile of the narrators and the messages that the stories convey are thus consistent with each other and their coherence is enhanced through the linguistic choices made in the texts. The density of Scots features is seen to increase or decrease, depending on how evident their link is with a certain area, time frame or social context. As a result, readers become immersed in the twists and turns of the plot by means of linguistic strategies that both involve and distance them – strategies that are still successful, given the fascination that such Late Modern Gothic texts have never ceased to exert.

Notes 1 For recent discussions of the specificities of Scottish Gothic in literary terms, see Gray (2011), Duncan (2012) and Davison and Germanà (2017–18). 2 It is beyond the scope of this contribution to discuss these texts in any greater depth with reference to literary theories, such as those of the “fantastic,” although of course an interdisciplinary approach might encourage further research in that direction. 3 General information on contents and the criteria of compilation are available in an open-access site. See García-Bermejo Giner et al. (2015–present). All the websites cited in this article were last accessed in March 2021. 4 Given the importance and interest of such topics, I have dealt with them also in previous research, which would be beyond the scope of this contribution to rehearse here; for earlier studies of language in the works and correspondence of Robert Louis Stevenson, see Dossena (2012 and 2013a). The analyses in Dossena (2016 and 2018), instead, discuss language in folk lore, whereas Dossena (2013b) focuses on Scots features in political song, another important expression of popular culture. 5 The details are presented at www.scotslanguage.com/articles/node/id/314/ type/referance. 6 Major Weir is said to haunt the area where he lived in the seventeenth century, between Edinburgh Castle and the Grassmarket, even to this day. Stevenson tells the story of his crimes and of his execution (alongside that of his sister) in Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes, published in 1878. 7 Famously, Henry Cockburn presented numerous anecdotes of elderly ladies using Scots expressively (1856/1971 , 58–67), and in Robert Louis Stevenson’s posthumous novel Weir of Hermiston (1896) the father of the protagonist, Lord Justice Clerk Adam Weir, typically addresses his family in Scots. 8 Burns’s contribution to eighteenth-century literature and beyond has been the object of numerous academic publications; indeed, the University of Glasgow hosts a specific research centre on Burns’s work: see www.gla.ac.uk/schools/ critical/research/researchcentresandnetworks/robertburnsstudies/ . 9 See Watson (2017–18, 144–151) for a discussion of the cultural background of both Thrawn Janet and The Merry Men.

Scots as the Language of the Uncanny  27 10 On Scots and English in religious usage, debate about which has been lively since the Reformation, see Dossena (2009) and the references therein; see also Dossena (2013c) for a discussion of how Scots religious discourse functions as an identity marker even in correspondence. 11 Brewster (2017–18: 116) discusses Hogg’s use of the vernacular in Gothic narrative by placing it in the context of the contrasting trends existing at the turn of the nineteenth century between the survival of folk culture and “improvement” understood as cultural Anglicisation. 12 On euphemisms and labels in magical discourse, see Dossena (2016, 2018). 13 Robertson (2017–18, 112) refers to Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft as “especially authoritative on Scottish lore,” a topic in which Scott famously took great interest.

References Primary sources Burns, Robert. 1846. “Complete Works.” In The Complete Works of Robert Burns, with an Account of his Life and a Criticism on his Writings, […], edited by James Currie. Halifax: William Milner. Cockburn, Henry. 1856 [1971]. Memorials of His Time. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black; James Thin. Fergusson, Robert. 1773. “The Ghaists: A Kirk-yard Eclogue.” Weekly Magazine or Edinburgh Amusement 20(27 May 1773), 275–276, http://spenserians.cath. vt.edu/TextRecord.php?action=GET&textsid=37670. García-Bermejo, Giner, Maria Fuencisla, et al. (compilers). 2015–present. The Salamanca Corpus: Digital Archive of English Dialect Texts, www.thesalamancacorpus.com/index.html. Hogg, James. 1824. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. London: Longman, https://archive.org/stream/privatememoirsco00hoggrich?re f=ol#page/n6/mode/2up Scott, Walter. 1824. Redgauntlet: A Tale of the Eighteenth Century. Edinburgh: Constable and Co., www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk/etexts/novels.html#redgauntlet Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1878 [1879]. Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes. London: Seeley, Jackson and Halliday. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1881 [1905]. “Thrawn Janet.” In The Merry Men and Other Stories. London: Chatto and Windus, 128–142. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1882 [1905]. “The Merry Men.” In The Merry Men and Other Stories. London: Chatto and Windus, 1–67. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1887. Underwoods. London: Chatto and Windus. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1893. Catriona. London: Cassell and Co.

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28  Marina Dossena In Scottish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, edited by Carol Margaret Davison and Monica Germanà, 1–13. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Dossena, Marina. 2001. “The Voice of Witnesses in Nineteenth-Century Accounts of the Highland Clearances.” Review of Scottish Culture 13, 40–50. Dossena, Marina. 2005. Scotticisms in Grammar and Vocabulary. Edinburgh: John Donald. Dossena, Marina. 2009. “Language Attitudes and Choice in the Scottish Reformation.” In Literature and the Scottish Reformation, edited by Crawford Gribben and David George Mullan, 45–62. Farnham: Ashgate. Dossena, Marina. 2012. “Vocative and Diminutive Forms in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Fiction: A Corpus-based Study.” International Journal of English Studies 12(2), 1–17. Special issue on “A New Approach to Literature: Corpus Linguistics.” Issue Editors: Ángela Almela Sánchez Lafuente and Irina Keshabyan. Dossena, Marina. 2013a. “‘Stour or Dour or Clour’: An Overview of Scots Usage in Stevenson’s Works and Correspondence.” In Scots: Studies in its Literature and Language, edited by John M. Kirk and Iseabail Macleod, 87–101. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Dossena, Marina. 2013b. “‘And Scotland Will March Again.’ The Language of Political Song in 19th- and 20th-century Scotland.” In After the Storm: Papers from the Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster Triennial Meeting, Aberdeen 2012, edited by Janet Cruickshank and Robert McColl Millar, 141–165. Aberdeen: Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ireland. Dossena, Marina. 2013c. “Mixing Genres and Reinforcing Community Ties in Nineteenth-Century Scottish Correspondence: Formality, Familiarity and Religious Discourse.” In Communities of Practice in the History of English, edited by Joanna Kopaczyk and Andreas H. Jucker, 47–60. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Dossena, Marina. 2016. “The Lore of the People: Language, Legends and Superstitions in the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing and Beyond.” The Bottle Imp 20, www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2016/12/the-lore-of-the-people-language-legends-and-superstitions-in-the-corpus-of-modern-scottish-writing-and-beyond/. Dossena, Marina. 2018. “Spells of Silence: or, How (not) to Have a Conversation in the Supernatural World.” The Bottle Imp 24, www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2018/12/ spells-of-silence-or-how-not-to-have-a-conversation-in-the-supernatural-world/ Dossena, Marina. 2019. “The Prince and the Sassenach: Constructing Group Homogeneity through Labels (and Anachronisms) in Late Modern Times and Beyond.” In Reference and Identity in Public Discourses, edited by Ursula Lutzky and Minna Nevala, 43–65. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Duncan, Ian. 2012. “Walter Scott, James Hogg, and Scottish Gothic.” In A New Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter, 123–134. Oxford: Blackwell. Gray, William. 2011. Fantasy, Art and Life: Essays on George MacDonald, Robert Louis Stevenson and Other Fantasy Writers. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Macdonald, Kirsty. 2009. “Scottish Gothic: Towards a Definition.” The Bottle Imp 6, www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2009/11/scottish-gothic-towards-a-definition/

Scots as the Language of the Uncanny  29 Nevala, Minna, Marianna Hintikka, and Turo Vartiainen, eds. 2017. “Constructing the Social Margins in Early and Late Modern English.” Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 3(2), special issue. Robertson, Fiona. 2017–18. “Gothic Scott.” In Scottish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, edited by Carol Margaret Davison and Monica Germanà, 102– 114. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Watson, Roderick. 2017–18. “Gothic Stevenson.” In Scottish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, edited by Carol Margaret Davison and Monica Germanà, 142–154. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

2 Enregistering Nationhood Cornwall and “CornuEnglish” in the Works of Alan M. Kent* Joan C. Beal 2.1 Cornwall Cornwall is one of the most remote parts of England and some would argue that it is not, or should not be, part of England at all. It stands on a peninsula and contains the most southerly point on the main island of Britain in Lizard and the most westerly point on the English mainland in Land’s End. Distance from London (423 kilometers as the crow flies but 476 kilometers by road) and relatively poor transport links enforce this sense of remoteness.1 The county as a whole has a population of approximately 550,000 and Cornwall has only one city, its administrative centre, Truro. This city has a population of around 21,000, whilst Cornwall’s largest town, St Austell, has a population of 27,400. By contrast, the nearest large city, Bristol, has a population of 449,321.2 The population of Cornwall is growing, but only amongst the over 40s, whilst its younger population (under 40) is declining. The traditional industries of Cornwall were fishing, mining and agriculture, but the last working tin mine closed in 1998, and fishing has declined, having faced challenges such as imposition of fishing quotas, an aging workforce and the difficulty of recruiting young people. Whilst agriculture continues to be a major contributor to Cornwall’s economy, the most important industry is tourism, and the economy of Cornwall depends on tourism to a greater extent than that of any other region of the UK. Tourists are drawn to Cornwall by its very remoteness, its natural beauty, and more recently by factors such as the conditions for surfing and the presence of high-end restaurants serving local produce (to such an extent that the ubiquity of venues owned by celebrity chef Rick Stein in Padstow has led it to be nicknamed “Padstein”). The same qualities that draw tourists to Cornwall attract retirees, people of working age seeking “the good life” and second home owners. All this exacerbates the problem of housing supply: young people born and raised in Cornwall * Thanks to Alan M. Kent for answering my questions and sending me copies of his recent publications, to Holly Dann for giving me access to her thesis and to Rhys Sandow and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on a first draft of this chapter.

Enregistering Nationhood  31 can no longer afford to buy homes there, as the demand from incomers drives up prices. This explains the age imbalance in the population and the difficulties in recruiting young workers to traditional industries mentioned above. According to a strategy paper by Cornwall Council, Cornwall is classed as a “Less Developed Area” in the European context, meaning it has a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of less than 75% of the EU average (2013, 3). As Dann notes, Cornwall “has the second lowest GDP (after West Wales) in Northern Europe” (2019, 37). There is a mismatch between the external perception of Cornwall as a rural idyll and the reality of an economically challenged region. Tensions inevitably arise between those born in Cornwall and the relatively affluent incomers and tourists. Some parts of Cornwall have, with overwhelming support from local residents, banned the sale of newly built accommodation to second home owners, and, as we shall see, the derogatory term emmets (literally “ants”) is widely used to refer to tourists, especially by those who identify strongly as Cornish. What makes Cornwall even more distinct from the rest of England is a sense that there is a separate Cornish identity. Part of the attraction of Cornwall to tourists is its Celticity: historically, it was separate from Anglo-Saxon England, with a separate, Celtic language. The tensions between locals and incomers discussed above, along with the greater degree of independence granted to its Celtic neighbour, Wales, have led to a growing sense of national identity amongst some Cornish people. Of course, other regions of England display a strong sense of identity, notably Yorkshire (“God’s own county”) and the “Geordie Nation” in North East England (Beal 1999), but in no other region than Cornwall is there such an acute sense of separateness from England. Mebyon Kernow (literally “sons of Cornwall”) was founded as an association in 1951 and as a political party dedicated to securing independence from 1970. Their homepage states: The historic Nation of Cornwall has its own distinct identity, language and heritage. As one of the four nations inhabiting the British mainland, Cornwall has the same right to self-determination as England, Scotland and Wales. (www.mebyonkernow.org) “Cornish” was recognized as a separate national identity by the UK government in 2014, but in the 2011 census, despite there being no tick-box marked “Cornish” under the “ethnic group” category, 9.9% of respondents in Cornwall identified themselves as “Cornish” in the “other” category. In the next section, I will consider the relative importance of the Cornish language and Cornish dialects of English in expressing this separate identity.

32  Joan C. Beal

2.2 Cornish, Traditional Dialect and “Cornu-English” I noted in the previous section that the historical existence of a separate Celtic language in Cornwall contributed to the sense of a separate national identity there. Cornish is a Celtic language most closely related to Welsh and Breton, but the least spoken of these three. Siarl Ferdinand states that, whilst there are 3,000 speakers of Cornish in Cornwall and Scilly,3 only about 500 can be described as fluent (2018, 57). The fact that even such small numbers speak Cornish today is due to revival of the language from the early twentieth century onwards. Kent (2006) cites the Act of Uniformity (1549) – intended to impose conformity of worship but having the secondary effect in Cornwall of imposing English as the language of worship – as a catalyst for language shift from Cornish to English. A rebellion against this imposition was harshly put down, the leaders were executed and the Cornish language was suppressed by the state. Kent goes on to cite John Norden, writing in 1584, as observing that “of late the Cornish men haue much conformed themselues to the vse of the Englishe tongue” and predicting “that in few yeares the Cornishe Langauge wilbe little by little abandoned.” (Norden 1966 [1584], 21, cited in Kent 2006, 11). Whilst popular accounts state that Dolly Pentreath of Mousehole, who died in 1777, was the last speaker of Cornish, there is evidence of speakers of various degrees of fluency living in the nineteenth century. It would be safer to say that there were no monoglot speakers of Cornish by the end of the eighteenth century. The revival of the language began in 1904, but throughout the twentieth century, rival models of Cornish were promoted by different groups (see Kent 2006, 7–9 for a brief account of these). In 2002, the UK government recognized Cornish as a minority language of Britain according to the terms of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, and the first official language strategy for Cornish was published by Cornwall Council in 2004. Ferdinand outlines the objectives of Cornwall Council’s language strategy for 2015–2025 as follows: ) the need to increase the number of Cornish speakers, 1 2) the need to increase the use of Cornish as a community language, 3) the need to maintain and increase the profile and status accorded to Cornish in public life and 4) the need to maintain and develop the use of Cornish as a language that can be used for a full range of activities in all areas of human activity. (Cornwall Council 2015, 12, cited in Ferdinand 2019, 108) This indicates that there is now official support for Cornish, but Ferdinand found that, of the 220 self-declared Cornish speakers in her study, only 19% were fluent speakers, with 60% knowing only a few words and

Enregistering Nationhood  33 phrases (2019, 112). Ferdinand also found that, amongst Cornish speakers and non-speakers, attitudes towards the Cornish language were overwhelmingly positive, with the majority declaring that they considered Cornish an interesting language and disagreeing or strongly disagreeing with the statement “Cornish is a low-class language” (2019, 112). The association of Cornish with low social class and lack of education was one of the factors leading to the decline in its use in the eighteenth century, but it appears that this stigma has disappeared. Kent suggests that, if anything, it has become an elite language “spoken by a […] middle-class group, who have the time, finance and resources to learn it, often in later life” (2006, 12). As such, it is not available as a vehicle for expressing Cornish identity to the vast majority of Cornish people. Ferdinand found that only 42% of respondents who identified as Cornish nationals, and only 41% of Cornish speakers, saw the Cornish language as a mark of Cornishness. She argues: The sentiment of being Cornish does not depend solely on the language spoken, but on the convergence of different factors such as heritage, music, cuisine, etc., which may be different for each individual. (2019, 115) The association between the Cornish language and Cornish identity is more evident in symbolic, institutional uses of the language (e.g., in bilingual signage) and in the commodification of the language for commercial purposes. Apart from souvenirs such as tea-towels printed with Cornish words and their English equivalent, the commodification of Cornish is evident in practices such as the naming of craft beers. The St Austell Brewery advertises Korev lager and Mena Dhu stout. Korev is the Cornish word for beer (cognate with Breton Coreff, which is also the name of a beer brewed in Brittany), whilst Mena Dhu means “black hill.” The marketing of Korev provides insights into this commodification: it is the official beer of Surfing UK, and the page “Korev People” introduces the concept as follows: Think of Cornwall and you might well think of our stunning coastline, rich landscape, warm climate and, of course, life by the sea. Named after the old Cornish language word for “beer,” Korev lager is made up of all those things but, above all, it’s the people who love Korev who make this lager unmistakably part of Cornwall. (www.staustellbrewery.co.uk) Commodification of dialect has been connected with dialect contact and resistance to globalization, both phenomena which tend to lead to the attrition of local dialect (Johnstone 2009, Beal 2018). The same process seems to be occurring with minority languages, as in the case of Cornish, and of Occitan in southern France4 (Alèn Garabato and Boyer 2020).

34  Joan C. Beal The same brewery that produces Korev and Mena Dhu also has an India Pale Ale called “Proper Job,” an Anglo-Cornish expression meaning something like “well done.” Here, Anglo-Cornish and Cornish seem to be fulfilling the same function of associating the ales with Cornwall, and the beauties of that county evoked in the extract from the brewery’s website cited above. Given that so few residents of Cornwall speak Cornish, dialects of Cornish English are much better candidates for everyday expression of Cornish identity. However, the traditional English dialects of Cornwall, as recorded in the Survey of English Dialects, are associated with stereotypical ideas of Cornwall that bear little resemblance to the everyday life of working-class people in the county. Perceptual dialectology studies (Montgomery 2007, Montgomery and Moore 2018) demonstrate that both the idea of Cornish dialect and individual features salient to this dialect (such as rhoticity and the use of a short, relatively fronted vowel in words such as bath) are associated with the notion “farmer.” The survey of attitudes to accents of English reported by Coupland and Bishop (2007) shows that “Cornish” and “West Country” accents were ranked respectively eighth and ninth out of thirty-four for “pleasantness” but thirteenth and fifteenth for “prestige.” So the accent and dialect of Cornwall are considered to be attractive, in line with the perception of the county as bucolic, but not prestigious. As discussed above, the reality of life for many people born in Cornwall is far removed from the rural idyll, and the county has experienced a great deal of in- and outmigration, or, as Britain (2017, 182) terms it “rural churn,” meaning that the population is far from isolated in terms of dialect (and language) contact. The Survey of English Dialects (SED) set out to record forms of dialect least affected by contact, “traditional dialect, genuine and old” (Orton 1960, 332), but as Britain points out, even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries “there was considerable mobility within rural areas” (2017, 182). Kent discusses the tendency of associations promoting Cornish dialect to favour the “traditional, genuine and old” dialect of the SED, stating that “this reinforces an agrarian, non-technological, provincial view of the Cornish, paradoxically in complete contrast to their actual identity, which was global and technological” (2006, 220). As we shall see, Kent advocates instead the use of a modern Cornish dialect, for which he coined the term “Cornu-English,” but which is now more frequently referred to as Anglo-Cornish in sociolinguistics. In the next section, I discuss recent studies which demonstrate how speakers in Cornwall use features of Anglo-Cornish to signal their Cornish identity.

2.3 Anglo-Cornish and Identity Until relatively recently, little sociolinguistic research had been carried out in Cornwall. This can to some extent be explained by what Britain (2017, 177) terms the “urban gaze” in sociolinguistics, whereby urban

Enregistering Nationhood  35 areas have been seen as more interesting from the point of view of linguistic variation and change. As Britain notes “assumptions have been made that cities are the sources, generators and projectors of change” (2017, 180). These assumptions have been particularly influential in what Eckert (2012) refers to as the first and second waves of sociolinguistics, whereby linguistic variation is correlated with static social categories such as social class, gender, etc. in the first wave, and more ethnographic studies concentrating on social networks in the second. The third wave, described by Eckert as “still in its infancy” (2012, 88), considers instead the active agency of individuals and communities of practice in constructing social meaning through linguistic variation. Using this approach, two recent studies have investigated the ways in which some Cornish residents use features of Anglo-Cornish to project a “Cornish” persona, but one which is associated with modern Cornwall rather than the stereotypical rural idyll. Sandow and Robinson investigated “the extent to which use of Anglo-Cornish lexis reflects a Cornish-oriented worldview” (2018, 334). More specifically, they sought to determine whether amongst their sample of male speakers in Redruth, the use in careful and casual styles, and/or the knowledge of, Anglo-Cornish terms for the concept lunch box, correlated with positive orientation to Cornish identity. They found that, as might be expected, use and knowledge of the Anglo-Cornish terms crib box and croust tin was more prevalent in older speakers, all of whom at least knew these terms, whilst most younger speakers knew only the Standard English term lunch box. What was more surprising was that, amongst the older speakers, use of the Anglo-Cornish terms was more frequent in the careful than the casual speech context of the interviews. This suggests that, when paying more attention to speech, these speakers (consciously) use the non-standard term – the opposite of what we find in classic sociolinguistic studies such as Labov (1966) and Trudgill (1974), where the shift in careful styles is always towards greater use of the standard variant. In third-wave sociolinguistic studies, style-shifting is considered to be evidence for the order of indexicality (Silverstein 1976) of the linguistic variant concerned. The first, or nth, order involves correlations between a linguistic variant and a social category such as age, gender, social class, etc. which are revealed by sociolinguistic analysis but of which the speakers themselves are not aware. As explained by Johnstone et al. (2006, 83), the second (or, in Silverstein’s terms n +1) order of indexicality is evidenced “when people begin to use first-order correlations to do social work.” As with Labov’s (1972, 179) markers, these variables “show stylistic variation.” The evidence from Sandow and Robinson’s study reveals that, for these male speakers in Redruth, the Anglo-Cornish terms crib box and croust tin are indexed at this second/n + 1 order. Sandow and Robinson administered an identity questionnaire to determine the extent to which participants identified as Cornish, the answers to which were used to calculate an identity index

36  Joan C. Beal (IDq) score for each individual. An IDq of 35 was considered to mark a strong sense of Cornish identity. Sandow and Robinson found that “speakers who scored above 35 on the IDq were far more likely to use and recognize the dialect terms crib box/croust tin” whilst “those who scored below 35 did not exhibit any use of local dialect lexis and were much less likely to recognize the terms crib box/croust tin” (2018, 343). Sandow and Robinson argue that the division between those scoring above and below 35 on their IDq index reflects a contrast between two ideological stances, Kernowcentric and Kernowsceptic. They explain that “the label Kernowcentric signifies people who believe Cornwall should have greater autonomy and perceive sociopolitical encroachment from outside the county to be unwelcome,” whilst Kernowsceptics hold that “economic and cultural assemblages in Cornwall should be more closely wedded to those systems on a national scale” (2018, 348–49). The use of Anglo-Cornish and Standard English terms for lunch box index these two ideologies respectively. In a more recent paper relating to the same study, Sandow concludes: Those with a Kernowcentric ideology, that is, a favourable view of Cornwall and Cornish social practices, typically confer positively valorised social meanings on Anglo-Cornish dialect lexis and ultimately use such words in order to stylise their local identity. (2020, 82) In using these Anglo-Cornish terms, Sandow argues, speakers are performing Cornish identity. Dann (2019) discusses similar findings with regard to phonological variation. Having determined by means of a perception experiment that the use of “South Western ‘long ’ (the /aː/ variant in bath, trap and palm)” is “the most salient feature of West Cornish English” (2019, 18). Dann goes on to analyse the speech of schoolchildren aged 11–13 in West Cornwall by comparison with samples of traditional Cornish dialect from the SED and of Received Pronunciation (RP). The children were recorded speaking in more formal (word list) and less formal (map task) contexts in order to provide opportunities for style shifting. What Dann found was that the female speakers shifted towards a more fronted pronunciation in the more formal context, and that both genders shifted to a shorter pronunciation in this context. The salient “long ” of traditional South-Western varieties is both fronted and long, so differs from the RP vowel in bath and palm on the front-back dimension and from that of Northern varieties in terms of length. Dann argues that, in shifting to a shorter variant in more formal contexts, and, for the female speakers, shifting to a fronted variant, these young people are performing their regional identity, but rejecting the “rural” associations of the traditional long .

Enregistering Nationhood  37 So, both the lexical study reported in Sandow (2020) and Sandow and Robinson (2018) and the sociophonetic analysis reported by Dann (2019) demonstrate that speakers in Cornwall use features of Anglo-Cornish to assert or perform their Cornish identity. Dann argues that this performative use “may also highlight the enregisterment of fronted variants of bath as a feature of Cornish English” (2019, 228). “Enregisterment” is a term introduced by Agha (2003) to describe the process whereby a repertoire of linguistic (and/or other) features becomes associated with “characterological figures or social personae” (2003, 243). For the young people in Dann’s study, the traditional South Western long /aː/ variant is associated with the characterological figure of the farmer, or at least the “rustic.” and as such almost certainly forms part of a repertoire including other traditional dialect features of the region. In using a shorter, fronted variant in the more formal context, these young people are disassociating from this characterological figure and instead evoking a different social persona. More research of an ethnographic nature would need to be conducted to determine exactly what this persona might be, and what other linguistic and non-linguistic features are part of the enregistered repertoire, but we might for the present suggest a “modern Cornish” persona.5 In the next section, I discuss the ways in which Alan M. Kent makes creative use of this repertoire of modern Anglo-Cornish dialect to evoke this persona in his poetry and novels.

2.4 Alan M. Kent and “Cornu-English” Alan M. Kent was born in 1967 in St Austell, Cornwall and grew up in what was then a clay mining district. He was taught Cornish by his mother and so could be described as a native speaker. He completed his PhD on “Cornu-English and Anglo-Cornish Literature” in 1998.6 He combines academic research with publishing poetry, novels and plays, as well as anthologies of Anglo-Cornish literature. He thus has command of three languages/dialects: Cornish, Cornu-English or Anglo-Cornish, and Standard English. Although he makes references to the Cornish language in his published work, and publishes some poetry in Cornish, Kent mainly uses a combination of Standard English and Anglo-Cornish. He states that “the most extreme use of dialect could be as effective a badge of difference (in particular from England) as the Cornish language itself” (2006, 24). Kent’s work thus mainly falls into Shorrocks’s category of “literary dialect,” defined as “the representation of non-standard speech in literature that is otherwise written in standard English […] and aimed at a general readership,” as opposed to “dialect literature,” described by Shorrocks as “composed wholly (sometimes partly) in a non-standard dialect, and aimed essentially, though not exclusively, at a non-standard dialect speaking readership” (1996, 386). As we shall see, the density of dialect varies

38  Joan C. Beal in Kent’s work, but he explicitly distances himself from the “dialect literature” that has tended to win prizes at the Cornish Gorseth: Any cursory study of the last twenty years of prize-winning entries to any of the Cornish Gorseth’s Dialect competitions in either prose or verse […] will show a picture of careful retention, rather than embracing new words and concepts. […] In many ways, much of twentiethcentury dialect literature has been limiting, fearful and residual. (2006, 22) Kent thus rejects the backward-looking dialect literature, evoking as it does the stereotypical “rural” image of Cornwall. Instead, he aims to portray both the true technological and industrial past of Cornwall and its post-industrial present. He rejects the purism of those who decry innovation in local speech, pointing out that Cornu-English is creative in “its interaction with surfing lingo” and in coining words for new technology, an example of which is “bank hole” for an ATM. With regard to the latter, Kent states, “[T]his is somehow utterly Cornish” (2006, 23). Kent believes that “Cornu-English works culturally best, when it is juxtaposed with Standard English. […] That way the readers and audiences can see Cornish difference more clearly” (2006, 26). Kent’s aim is to portray this “Cornish difference,” meaning difference from England. His stance is Kernowcentric, to the extent that the central character in his trilogy of humorous novels is named Charlie Curnow. The titles of these three novels evoke characteristically Cornish phrases and cultural items: Proper Job, Charlie Curnow! (2005); Electric Pastyland (2007) and Voodoo Pilchard7 (2011). Kent’s most recent published collection of poems, Interim Nation (2015), likewise evokes the status of Cornwall as a nation without officially acknowledged national status. The separateness of Cornwall is frequently referenced in Kent’s work, where England is spoken of as a different place. In his poem English Heretic (2010, 88), the second stanza begins “In England,” whilst in Turning Serpentine, the narrator represents the old fisherman Henry Kelynak as grateful for the isolation of the Lizard peninsula, where there was “no interference in the old ways, some prig from England telling ov ‘ee how to do it better” (2019, 26). Another character, a young girl with aspirations to become a teacher, recognizes that she will have to leave the Lizard “to train somewhere far away, up-the-line in England” (2019, 90). Later in this novel, there is a dialogue between an exiled Polish count and a former vicar with an interest in local history which brings up the issue of Cornish nationalism: “So tell me, Doctor Bodrugan – this Cornwall – you tell me it wishes greater status for itself, and that it is truly no English county.”

Enregistering Nationhood  39 “Yes. That’s true. We like to be thought of as a Celtic nation. We should have the same status as Wales.” (2019, 134) Kent also introduces allusions and anecdotes which counter the “rural, backward” stereotype of Cornwall. In English Heretic, he writes: In England, a boy I taught, joked to me That for the Cornish, a rake was technical. (2010, 88) The same “joke” is repeated in Turning Serpentine, this time in the reported speech of a headmaster from “up-the-line”: “Yes – the simple garden rake. I suppose that’s something technical for the Cornish” (2019, 54). This headmaster is reported as “trying to knock the dialect out of” the young girl, a theme that often arises in Kent’s work. In English Heretic, he writes, “[T]hey tried an’ failed t’ kick’ un out o’ me” before asserting the right of the poet to use his own voice: I’ll write my homilies the way we d’speak: I are the poet: do ee at your language geek. (2010, 88) Here, Standard English is mixed with Anglo-Cornish: the periphrastic do in “d’speak” and “do ee”; the non-standard form of the verb in “I are”; the form “ee” for standard “you” and the Anglo-Cornish “geek,” meaning look. The juxtaposition powerfully demonstrates that, as an educated person, Kent has command of Standard English, but that nobody has the right to judge him as rustic if he chooses to use the local variety. The tension between Standard English, Anglo-Cornish and even Cornish is often explicitly stated in Kent’s poetry. In Lapsus Linguae, the title of which is in an earlier, elite, imperial language, he writes of the difficulties of communication. There are many days, too many days When to communicate at all, I have to metamorphosise Pupate into proud new words (2010, 95) He goes on to write that “some days / even the Cornish comes out” and that “[T]here are now only a few / to whom I can talk broad,” before concluding: and when I “lapse back” when I speak ‘un true, why the hell does it feel like a slip of the tongue? (2010, 96)

40  Joan C. Beal Kent both acknowledges and fights against the internalization of the stigma of “broad” dialect, when in fact this is the “true” speech and it is Standard English, imposed from without, that should be seen as “a slip of the tongue.” In Lapsus Linguae, Kent notes that “the Cornish comes out” occasionally, to the bafflement of interlocutors. In Conversations with a Breton Woodsman, he tells of his attempts to communicate in Cornish with a Breton-speaking woodsman: I am conversing in the dust of Cornish hoping some splinters will pierce and make it through the grind of separation. (2015, 58) The poem ends with a comparison of the vitality of Breton and Cornish: “Do you speak Breton every day?” I ask. “Yes. Every day, I know no French. And you – with Cornish?” “Occasionally,” I try to say. His puzzled face becomes a canopy of leaves. My land is still a sapling. His, a forest. (2015, 58–9) In the extracts so far discussed in this section, Kent is commenting on the relative status of Standard English, Anglo-Cornish and Cornish within and outside Cornwall and on their indexicality. Standard English is the language of “England,” imposed on the Cornish by the education system and other institutions; Anglo-Cornish is, to outsiders, indexed as rural, backward and uneducated, and this is internalized by many speakers; whilst Cornish, the indigenous language, is one that Kent can use only “occasionally” but which is within him, ready to “come out.” As mentioned above, Kent’s use of Anglo-Cornish dialect is more or less dense depending on the genre of writing and the personae represented. In the humorous Charlie Cernow novels, the narratorial voice (that of Cernow) is represented as Anglo-Cornish, whilst in the more historical, epic novels, such as Voog’s Ocean (2012) and Turning Serpentine (2019), the narration is mainly in Standard English (though in the latter there are occasional asides with Anglo-Cornish features) and Anglo-Cornish is used to represent the speech of certain characters. The extracts below demonstrate this contrast. The first extract is from Electric Pastyland and relates the story of an attempted hold-up:

Enregistering Nationhood  41 Ee ‘ad a quick geek over at the grannies who were shakin’ an’ just t’turn ut up a bit, pointed the shotgun back at they. One o’ they decided t’get a bit mouthy. That wuz the angry Methody in she. “They’ll ‘ave ‘ee up fur this dun’t ‘ee knaw?” “na, they wun’t my ‘andsome,” said markie. ‘Ee wuz a cocky little bastard an’ naw mistake. [...] What none ov they knew wuz that in actual fact, the fuckin’ shotgun wudn’ a pile o’ use. ‘Twudn even loaded. (2007, 170) The second extract is from Turning Serpentine. The old fisherman has gone to retrieve his crab pots: These creatures were bigger, more gnarled and armoured, each of the five with large claws. To stop them fighting like the rest, he tied rubber bands around each of their pinchers. “Yes,” said Henry politely, almost apologetically to them. “I knaw you d’want freedom, but your greed’s been the end of you my bewdie….” (2019, 26) In the section from Electric Pastyland, the majority of the words have some indication of non-standard speech, but it is not difficult for a non-Cornish reader to understand. This is achieved by minimal use of non-standard lexis: geek being the only word particular to Anglo-Cornish (though “my ‘andsome” is a stereotypically Cornish, or perhaps more broadly West Country, term of endearment). There is a great deal of semi-phonetic spelling to indicate the accent. Apostrophes are used to indicate “missing” letters, or rather deletions: for standard , for , for . The spelling for standard in represents not a “missing” sound, but the substitution of the alveolar for the velar nasal. However, this is popularly known as “g-dropping,” so the apostrophe conveys the sound intended. All of these spellings indicate variants that are not uniquely Anglo-Cornish but ubiquitous in many non-standard varieties of English, but they make an important contribution to the informal nature of the dialogue, as does the inclusion of “fuckin’.” Other spellings do represent more specifically Anglo-Cornish features: for suggests a pronunciation with schwa or /ʌ/ rather than /ɪ/. This particular spelling for “it” appears often in Kent’s work, and, although pronunciations like this are heard elsewhere, the more unusual phonetic spelling makes it stand out.8 The spellings for suggest the monophthongal /oː/ pronunciation found in south-western English accents (Wakelin 1986, 27). Other spellings in this extract are examples of eye-dialect, where the pronunciation indicated by

42  Joan C. Beal the spelling is no different from that of RP, but the non-standard spelling adds to the impression of casual and/or regional speech. Examples of this are and for standard and . Conspicuously absent from Kent’s writings are spellings which would indicate the stereotypical features of the traditional dialects of Cornwall: there is no attempt to substitute for or for to suggest the voicing of these consonants, for instance. Likewise, there is nothing to signal rhoticity or the “long back ” discussed by Dann (2019), albeit these two features are difficult to represent via semi-phonetic spelling. This could be an attempt on Kent’s part to avoid evoking the rural stereotype, or it could be that they are simply taken as read. The majority of specifically Anglo-Cornish features represented by Kent in this extract are morpho-syntactic, or “grammatical” dialect features. In writing “back at they,” “One o’ they,” and “in she,” Kent signals the feature known as “pronoun exchange,” defined by Wagner as “the use of a subject personal pronoun in an object position or all other positions that would normally require the use of an oblique” (2008, 421). Wagner goes on to suggest that, within Cornwall, the use of subject pronouns in these contexts is more common in the west, precisely the area in which Kent’s novels are set. Another feature represented here are the use of “thee” (here represented as ) for the second person singular pronoun, a feature found in south-western English dialects (Trudgill 1999 [1990], 92–93). This short extract is thus densely packed with nonstandard forms which mark out the speakers and the narrator as using Anglo-Cornish. By contrast, the second extract uses Standard English to represent the narrator’s voice but introduces some Anglo-Cornish features in the speech of the fisherman, a traditional Cornish character. The spelling is used again, and the endearment “my bewdie,” an alternative to “my ‘andsome.” The fisherman is also represented as using another characteristic morpho-syntactic feature of Anglo-Cornish, periphrastic “do” in “you d’want freedom.” This use of unemphatic “do” before another verb was used in Standard English up to the seventeenth century, but is now, within England, largely confined to the South West (Wagner 2008, 435–36). In this extract, and throughout this novel, the (mostly) Standard English of the narrator and some characters contrasts with the Anglo-Cornish of other characters, mainly those who have not come from outside the Lizard nor have moved away from it at some point. This contrast sets up a number of indexical associations: Standard English is indexed as educated and socially and geographically mobile, whereas Anglo-Cornish is linked to localness and traditional industries and occupations such as stone-turning and fishing. The two varieties do not distinguish between generations: the young stone-turner Davy Endean uses Anglo-Cornish just as his father and grandfather do, whilst the Reverend Dr Bodregan,

Enregistering Nationhood  43 born on the Lizard but educated elsewhere, speaks Standard English. This juxtaposition of varieties echoes the dialect contact increasingly experienced in Cornwall as previously discussed.

2.5 Concluding Remarks The examples provided in the previous section give a flavour of the ways in which Alan M. Kent makes creative use of the contrasts between Standard English and what he terms “Cornu-English” to evoke characteristics of Cornwall and Cornish people. In doing this, he is both drawing on the existing indexicalities of these varieties, as witnessed in Sandow (2020), Sandow and Robinson (2018) and Dann (2019), and reinforcing the enregisterment of Cornu-English/Anglo Cornish as the language of a people distinct from the “English,” but neither backward nor rustic. As such, he is an important link in the “speech chain” (Agha 2007, 67), whereby the indexical associations of a variant or variety are transmitted from a sender to a receiver, who in turn becomes the sender to another receiver. The difference between the everyday transmission of these links between language and identity by speakers in Cornwall and the literary transmission by authors such as Kent is that the latter reaches a much larger number and wider range of receivers in his readership. Authors who, like Kent, represent non-standard English in their work thus play a significant part in the enregisterment of the varieties concerned.

Notes 1 The development of the airport at Newquay has mitigated this, with flights to London, Leeds-Bradford and Teesside. 2 These figures relate to 2013 and are taken from www.countrydigest.org (accessed 11 August 2020). 3 The Isles of Scilly lie to the south-west of Cornwall and are part of the ceremonial county of Cornwall. 4 The reference to Coreff beer demonstrates the same phenomenon in Brittany. As a resident of Brittany, I have noticed many instances of this, but am not aware of any scholarly publications on the subject. 5 Compare Watt’s (2002) finding that young Tyneside speakers avoid the traditional centering diphthongs in FACE and GOAT words, but rather than the RP variants, they use the “pan-northern” monophthongal variants for words in these lexical sets. He argues that these speakers are rejecting the stigmatised associations of “Geordie” instead seeing themselves as northerners. 6 In a personal communication (8 July 2011), Kent writes: “I think I did coin the term Cornu-English as a direct response to Celtic English – it is a much more accurate term than dialect, which I hate.” 7 The pasty is an iconic Cornish food item, originally created as a convenient packed lunch for miners, whilst pilchards are a type of large sardine fished off the coast of Cornwall. The titles of these two novels also evoke the music

44  Joan C. Beal of Jimi Hendrix. Charlie Curnow plays electric guitar in a band, and his virtuoso piece is a rendition of the Cornish anthem “Trelawney” in the manner of Hendix’s famous performance of “The Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock. 8 According to Wells (1982, 348), there is a question as to whether there is any phonemic opposition between /ʌ/ and /ə/ in “much west-country speech.” Wakelin (1986, 23) on the other hand, cites /ɪ/ for the unstressed vowel in “dozen” and “brother” for some speakers in Cornwall.

References Agha, Asif. 2003. “The social life of cultural value.” Language and Communication 23: 231–273. Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alèn Garabato, Carmen, and Henri Boyer. 2020. Le Marché et la Langue Occitan au Vingt-et-unième Siecle: Microactes Glottopolitiques Contre Substitution. Limoges: Lambert. Beal, Joan C. 1999. “‘Geordie Nation’: Language and Regional Identity in the Northeast of England.” Lore and Language 17(1–2): 33–48. Beal, Joan C. 2018. “Dialect as Heritage.” In The Routledge Handbook of Language and Superdiversity, edited by Angela Creese and Adrian Blackledge, 165–180. London: Routledge. Britain, David. 2017. “Which way to look? Perspectives on ‘Urban’ and ‘rural’ in dialectology.” In Language and a Sense of Place. Studies in Language and Region, edited by Chris Montgomery and Emma Moore, 171–188. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cornwall County Council. 2013. Economy and Culture Strategy. https://www. cornwall.gov.uk/media/3624007/Economy-and-Culture-Strategy-EvidenceBase.pdf. accessed 12 August 2020. Cornwall County Council. 2015. Cornish Language Strategy 2015–2025. https://www.cornwall.gov.uk/media/25229704/Cornish-LanguageStrategy-2015-2025.pdf. accessed 21 August 2020. Coupland, Nikolas, and Hywel Bishop. 2007. “ideologised values for British accents.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 11(1): 74–93. Dann, Holly. 2019. Productions and Perceptions of BATH and TRAP vowels in Cornish English. University of Sheffield PhD thesis. Eckert, Penelope. 2012. “Three Waves of Variation Study: The Emergence of Meaning in the Study of Variation.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 87–100. Ferdinand, Siarl. 2018. “‘Py lies Kerneweger eus yn Kernow’ [How many Cornish Speakers Are there in Cornwall]. In Proceedings of the Association of Celtic Students in Ireland and Britain, Vol. III–V, edited by Fanch BihanGallic, Christopher Lewin, Samantha Summers and Charles Wilson, 51–57. Edinburgh: Association of Celtic Students of Britain and Ireland. Ferdinand, Siarl. 2019. “The promotion of Cornish in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly: Attitudes towards the Language and Recommendations for Policy.” Studio Celtica Fennica XVI: 107–130. Johnstone, Barbara. 2009. “Pittsburghese shirts: Commodification and the Enregisterment of an American Dialect.” American Speech 84(2): 157–175.

Enregistering Nationhood  45 Johnstone, Barbara, Jennifer Andrus and Andrew E. Danielson. 2006. “Mobility, Indexicality and the Enregisterment of ‘Pittsburghese.’” Journal of English Linguistics 34(2): 77–104. Kent, Alan M. 2005. Proper Job, Charlie Curnow! Tiverton: Halgrove. Kent, Alan M. 2006. “‘Bringing the Donkey down from the Carn’: Cornu-English in Context 1549–2005 – A Provisional Analysis.” In The Celtic Englishes IV. The Interface Between English and the Celtic Languages, edited by Hildegard L. C. Tristram, 6–33. Potsdam: Potsdam University Press. Kent, Alan M. 2007. Electric Pastyland. Wellington: Halgrove. Kent, Alan M. 2010. The Hope of Place. London: Francis Boutle. Kent, Alan M. 2011. Voodoo Pilchard. Wellington: Halgrove. Kent, Alan M. 2012. Voog’s Ocean. Wellington: Rylands. Kent, Alan M. 2015. Interim Nation. London: Francis Boutle. Kent, Alan M. 2019. Turning Serpentine. Wellington: Rylands. Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Mebyon Kernew. www.mebyonkernew.org. accessed 28 August 2020. Montgomery, Chris. 2007. Northern English Dialects: A Perceptual Approach. University of Sheffield. PhD thesis. Montgomery, Chris, and Emma Moore. 2018. “Evaluating S(c)illy Voices: The Effects of Salience, Stereotypes, and Co-Present Language Variables on RealTime Reactions to Regional Speech.” Language 94(3): 629–661. Norden, John. 1966 [1584]. Speculum Magnae Britanniae Pars Cornwall – A Topographical and Historical Description of Cornwall. Newcastle upon Tyne: Frank Graham. Orton, Harold. 1960. “An English dialect survey: Linguistic Atlas of England.” Orbis IX(2): 331–348. Sandow, Rhys J. (2020). “The Anglo-Cornish Dialect Is ‘a Performance, a Deliberate Performance’: Ideological Orientation and Patterns of Lexical Variation in a Peripheral Dialect.” English Today 36(3): 77–84. Sandow, Rhys J., and Justyna Robinson. 2018. “‘Doing Cornishness’ in the English Periphery: Embodying Ideology through Anglo-Cornish Dialect Lexis.” In Sociolinguistics in England, edited by Natalie Braber and Sandra Jensen, 333–362. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Shorrocks, Graham. 1996. “Non-standard dialect literature and popular culture.” In Speech Past and Present. Studies in English Dialectology in Memory of Ossi Ihalainen, edited by Juhani Klemola, Merja Kytö, and Matti Rissanen, 358– 411. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Silverstein, Michael. 1976. “Shifters, Linguistic Categories and Cultural Description.” In Meaning in Anthropology, edited by Keith H. Basso and Henry A. Selby, 11–55. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. St Austel Brewery. www.staustelbrewery.co.uk. accessed 28 August 2020. Trudgill, Peter. 1974. The Social Differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trudgill, Peter. 1999 [1990]. The Dialects of England. 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell.

46  Joan C. Beal Wagner, Suzanne. 2008. “English Dialects in the Southwest: Morphology and Syntax.” In Varieties of English. Volume I: The British Isles, edited by Bernd Kortmann and Clive Upton, 417–439. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Wakelin, Martyn F. 1986. The Southwest of England. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. Watt, Dominic. 2002. “‘I don’t Speak with a Geordie Accent, I speak, like, the Northern Accent’: Contact-Induced Levelling in the Tyneside Vowel System.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 6(1): 44–63. Wells, John C. 1982. Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

3 An Analysis of the Use of Vernacular in Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End and Its Spanish and Italian Translations Josep Marco Borillo 3.1 Introduction This chapter aims to analyse the use of non-standard language in Sebastian Barry’s novel Days Without End (2016a) and how it fares in its Spanish and Italian translations, both published in 2018 and authored by Susana de la Higuera Glynne-Jones and Cristiana Mennella, respectively. Non-standard language, which often attempts to represent particular geographical or social dialects in fiction, is arguably one of the most problematic issues facing literary translators. As remarked by Miguel Sáenz, an acclaimed Spanish translator (2000), “[d]ialect translation is not an insoluble problem but something worse: a problem with many solutions, all of them unsatisfactory.”1 In Days Without End the difficulty is compounded by the fact that non-standard language is pervasive, as it permeates the narrator’s voice. The translator, therefore, is faced with the daunting task of convincingly recreating that voice with target language resources. As hinted by Sáenz, that task can be approached in different ways. The layout of the chapter is as follows. Section 3.2 briefly touches upon the role of non-standard language in literature. Section 3.3 summarises some of the main contributions to the discussion on dialect translation. Section 3.4 provides an overview of the novel – plot and main themes, narrative point of view, and critical reception in the English-speaking world. Section 3.5 deals with the key issue of function by first describing the features of non-standard English used in the novel and discussing their geographical affiliation, and then considering the narrative levels at which non-standard occurs and how it is valued by the implicit author. Section 3.6 provides an account of the translators’ decisions as regards non-standard language in terms of the general technique used and the specific lexical and grammatical resources deployed, which may align the target text with the tone and style of the source text or otherwise. Section 3.7 offers some concluding remarks.

48  Josep Marco Borillo

3.2 Non-Standard Language in Literature It is assumed in this paper that the main question raised by the use of non-standard language in a literary work is that of its function. Standard language is non-marked; non-standard language is marked. Therefore, if an author takes the trouble of deviating from the standard, they must do so for a good reason. The most immediate reason that comes to mind is realism: a given voice is assigned non-standard features in order to imitate the way people from a similar geographical or social background speak in the real world. But matters are often not that simple. Powerful as the mimetic urge may be, it soon bumps against the limits imposed by literary convention, which tacitly decrees that using non-standard language entails not faithfully transcribing all details and nuances of a given speech form but rather selecting a number of representative features. In literary terms, then, the emphasis cannot be on realism but on the added, symbolic meaning acquired by non-standard language, which links it to aspects of characterisation, setting, plot or theme. Mair (1992) provides a systematic framework for the analysis of nonstandard language in fiction. In his elucidation of its function, he argues that three issues need to be addressed. The first is assessment of the representation. Even if that representation is governed by convention rather than mimetic realism at all costs, it may be useful to determine how it compares to that which is being represented (i.e., the particular dialect or vernacular as used in the real world). The second issue is what Mair refers to as the limits to the use of non-standard language in fiction, as it may only occur in the speech of certain characters or alternatively permeate the narrator’s voice. It is, therefore, a matter of narrative levels. The third issue is the key one of valuation. What particular values are assigned to non-standard language by the implicit author? Dialects and vernaculars of all kinds are often stigmatised by society at large, but in literature they may be endowed with new values and used to highlight the plight of the marginalised (i.e., to give a voice to those who have traditionally been deprived of one). It is of the utmost importance for literary and translation scholars to pay due attention to this issue. Mair’s framework is not incompatible with other, more recent approaches to the study of non-standard language in literature or other types of discourse. The issue of values, for instance, lies at the basis of Ranzato’s distinction (2016, 2) between geographical/political and psychological/semiotic dimensions of dialects. And there is a remarkable degree of overlap between the aspects put forward by Mair and key issues in perceptual dialectology as presented, for example, by Palliwoda and Schröder (2016) in their interview-based survey of knowledge of and attitudes towards a number of German dialects on the part of German speakers. These overlaps will not be pursued here, but may constitute a solid basis for further research.

An Analysis of the Use of Vernacular  49

3.3 Dialect Translation Due to space constraints, it is impossible to provide a thorough account of the long-standing debate on dialect translation. Interestingly enough, even though translation studies over the last 20 or 25 years has tended to be descriptive and to shun prescription outside the areas where it naturally belongs (translator training or translation quality assessment, for example), many scholars have voiced their opinions on the best ways to render dialect in translation and the paths to be avoided. Use of the standard in the target text is endorsed by many, and other options are either viewed with suspicion or openly rejected because of their alleged unfeasibility or undesired effects. The main argument behind this position is that there is no such thing as functional equivalence between dialects of different languages (e.g., Rabadán 1991, 97; Muñoz Martín 1995, 210), even if some authors admit that standardisation may result in flattening (Hervey, Higgins and Haywood 1995). One possible alternative is using target language colloquial features, which, by bringing register close to common speech, partly compensate for loss of dialect. Proponents of this option include Slobodník (1970), Buzelin (2000) and Lavault-Olléon (2006). Carbonell i Cortés (1999) warns, though, of possible unwanted consequences of this option on the ideological plane. On the other hand, some authors are in favour of deviating from the target language standard in order to try and capture the function of source text dialects. Julià Ballbè, a Catalan translator and translation scholar, strongly advocates the use of real target language dialects in translation (1997a, 1997b, 1998) and follows his own advice in his published translations. He had an illustrious forerunner in Catford (1965), who thought that in dialect translation human geography is more important than physical geography and endorsed the hypothetical possibility of translating Cockney into French as parigot, as both are urban, working-class dialects, regardless of the geographical location of London or Paris in their respective countries. Even so, the option of resorting to real dialects is not supported by many scholars. A less radical choice for a translator who wishes to depart from the target language standard would be to select a number of nonstandard features that do not conform to any particular regional variety (Hatim and Mason 1997, 107), an option dubbed by Briguglia (2009, 59) as “cross-dialectal.” All these options have advantages and drawbacks, which can be determined on the basis of several relevant factors repeatedly mentioned in the literature, such as the semiotic values associated with particular dialects, the cultural verisimilitude of target language dialects occurring in a source culture setting, whether the source text featuring dialectal language is monodialectal or polydialectal, or whether dialect occurs only in characters’ speech or colours the narrator’s voice as well. However, there seems to be general agreement on function as the guiding criterion

50  Josep Marco Borillo for dialect translation. Prevalence of function undoubtedly underlies Catford’s suggestion to render Cockney as parigot, and is at the basis of Slobodník’s concept of “homology of functionality.” This kind of homology as the ideal goal in dialect translation has not been questioned by later scholars (Marco and Tello Fons 2016, 196). It is important to bear in mind that most pieces of research on dialect translation are case studies, and authors are often keener on dealing with the peculiarities of the case at hand than on mapping translation options from a theoretical point of view. But some authors have attempted to provide such mappings. Some years ago, I presented what I thought were the available options as a tree with three forks (Marco 2002, 81). Braga (2016, 19–20) mentions two further lists of dialect translation “procedures”: Perteghella (2002) and Tello Fons (2011). Perteghella’s classification is intended for theatre translation and identifies five categories: dialect compilation, pseudo-dialect translation, parallel dialect translation, dialect localization and standardisation. Tello Fons’s (2011) typology, intended for the translation of narrative fiction, includes compensation, neutralisation, colloquial translation, creation of a dialect and dialectal translation. In a more recent joint article, Tello Fons and I managed to integrate our mappings of the theoretical options (variously termed “translation techniques,” “strategies” or “solution types”)2 available to a translator when facing non-standard language. Our new classification (2016, 201) included four options and will be used in this chapter for analytical purposes: a) neutralisation, or unmarked translation, which renders the source text (ST) dialect as standard in the target text; b) marking the target text (TT) language by using a (highly) colloquial, informal tenor which does not involve departing from the norm, at least as far as spelling and grammar are concerned; c) target language norm transgression by means of a set of non-standard features which cannot be identified as belonging to any particular target dialect; and d) target language norm transgression by using real target language dialects which can be easily identified as such by the target reader. Translators tend to adhere to the first technique above, or at most to move between the first and the second, which can be envisaged as two points along the +/– formal/colloquial cline. It is norm transgression that entails a qualitative leap insofar as it involves using non-standard features on the graphological or grammatical level, and most translators are reluctant to follow that path. Carbonell i Cortés (1999, 92) regards standardisation as “perhaps the most frequent option.” Braga (2016, 19) claims that geographical vernaculars “tend to be neutralized when rendered into another language, thus erasing the necessary differentiation

An Analysis of the Use of Vernacular  51 between characters or other purposes (as provoking laughter) derived from dialectal use.” In the particular case of translation into Spanish, Tello Fons and I (2016, 196–197) concur with that opinion: “Most Spanish translators have traditionally adhered to neutralisation, since the typical association between standard variety and written language tends to tip the balance towards this procedure.” However, as remarked in the previous paragraph, most research on dialect translation is made up of case studies, which shed no light on translation norms in Toury’s probabilistic sense. Therefore, most statements on tendencies in dialect translation must be understood as impressions based on personal reading experience rather than empirical work. But there are exceptions. Briguglia (2009) examines translations of three Italian novels with dialect markers into several languages and concludes that “the overview of translations into Spanish, English and German has shown that translators tend to ignore the rich dialectal heritage in their languages and avail themselves exclusively of the standard variety, with colloquial language sometimes coming to the surface” (2009, 259). Similar conclusions are reached by Tello Fons (2011), who analyses the Spanish translations of ten novels originally written in English from different geographical and temporal backgrounds. Thus, impressionistic claims seem to be confirmed by empirical research, scant as it is.

3.4 Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End (2016): An Overview Days Without End (DWE) is a multi-layered story. It is, perhaps first of all, a story of dispossession – hunger, emigration, deprivation, and the loss of dignity that comes with it all (Franco Batista 2017, 104). Thomas McNulty is the only member of his Sligo family to be spared by the potato famine that ravaged Ireland so cruelly between 1845 and 1852. Driven by hunger and desperation, he sets sail for North America in one of the so-called coffin-ships and lands in Quebec before ending up in Missouri, where he joins the US army. From then on, the novel is largely a story of war. Thomas and his inseparable friend and lover John Cole fight first in the Indian Wars, rife with episodes of massacre and attempted genocide, and then in the American Civil War. The two ingredients (dispossession and war) lead Franco Batista (2017) to claim that Thomas McNulty and his like are both victims and perpetrators of trauma. Thomas was not alone in fleeing from his native Ireland as a result of a famine caused to a large extent by the country’s colonial situation and then, paradoxically, enrolling in an army engaged in the blatantly colonial enterprise of wiping out North America’s indigenous population. But DWE is also a love story featuring different kinds of affection. The central love affair is the relationship between Thomas and John and its ever-understated tenderness. There is also parental and filial love between the couple and their foster child Winona, a Sioux girl cut apart from her biological family by the vicissitudes of war. And finally, there is

52  Josep Marco Borillo a kind of communal love in the companionship and solidarity shown by soldiers in everyday military life. This weaving together of different strands is one of the defining features of the novel, as will be seen later. As regards point of view, the narrative voice (that of Thomas McNulty himself) remains in full control of the events narrated from beginning to end. Many other voices are heard, of course. A stunning variety of characters marches before the reader’s eyes, with all kinds of geographical backgrounds; but their voices are filtered through the narrator’s, which thus becomes the yardstick by which everything in the story is measured. Reviewers of Barry’s novel have emphasised two basic features: the odd blend of brutality and lyricism, and the authenticity and truth of the narrator’s voice. Hayden (2017) puts it neatly: “Like the earlier novel [A Long Long Way, set in World War I], Days Without End is epic in scope, the grace and lyricism of the writing in stark, unsettling contrast to the horrors described.” McNamee (2016) focuses on the creative nature of Thomas McNulty’s lyricism: “McNulty narrates. The making of a new world demands a new language, and McNulty has the tools for it. It is a detached, lyric voice. Wonder is never far away, whether that wonder is directed at inhumanity or at the physical beauty of his lover.” Smith (2017) dwells on the narrator’s attitude towards the brutality he witnesses and takes part in: “It may seem incongruous to call a novel as violent as ‘Days Without End’ dreamlike, but Barry’s narrator is a gentle witness to brutality: neither reluctant nor rabid, but a semi-willing instrument – which is to say, like most of those who participate in war.” Wigston (2017), on the other hand, insists on the truth of the narrator’s voice: “Bloody though this narrative frequently is, and brutal, it is loving, too, filled with the magic of the unexpected in sentences that ring with truth – things we’ve never read before but in Barry’s hands resound with wisdom. Of course, we think, it surely was like that. It must have been. Perhaps still is.” These comments will prove relevant when it comes to assessing the role of non-standard language in the novel.

3.5 The Function of Vernacular in Days Without End Let us start with the identification of non-standard features in the novel, which are akin to Mair’s standards of representation. On a purely graphic level, we find many instances of spelling which reflect pronunciation: “musta been,” “I wish I could of met myself,” “sonofabitch,” “musta taken,” “must of felt,” “sorta,” “kinda built,” “coulda used,” etc. These spellings represent processes of vowel or consonant elision or assimilation that are common in speech (in many languages) but not usually reflected in print. They count as deviations from the standard and bring the language of the novel closer to oral, colloquial registers. On a lexical level, there is a relatively high number of words and set phrases usually marked by dictionaries as US English. Here is a small

An Analysis of the Use of Vernacular  53 sample: “got” used as a verb root (“didn’t got much to crow about”), “purtier” (instead of “prettier”), “mighty” (used as an intensifier, as in “a mighty queer thing”), “tarnation” (a euphemism for “damnation”), “man” (used as an exclamation), “beady” (derived from the noun “bead” as in “to draw a bead on,” meaning “to take aim”), “darn” or “darned” (used as intensifiers, as in “darned glad”), “hightailing it” (meaning “to move or travel fast”), and “sockdolager” (meaning “an exceptional person or thing”). The distance between these lexical items and the standard varies: whereas some are clearly non-standard, others are just marked as US/North American English and further as informal. Idioms such as “starved in her stocking feet,” used by the narrator to describe Ireland during the Famine, are also typically American. On the other hand, there are idioms unequivocally marked as British English, such as “something has the wind up him,” “the chief sets out his stall” and “upping sticks.” As expected, there are also typically Irish lexical and phraseological uses, such as “the same look of the arse out of his trousers.” In Irish English, the idiom “he hasn’t an arse left in his trousers” is used to refer to someone with no money, particularly due to excessive drinking or gambling.3 Further examples are adduced by Clark (2016): “‘hames’, as in making a hames, or a mess, of something, or ‘frocken’, a small berry found on Irish mountainsides, gathered up and sold for dye.” On the morphological level, the following non-standard features have been found: • regularisation of irregular simple past and past participle forms: “speaked,” “was ever knowed”; • the opposite, i.e., the simple past and past participle forms of regular verbs become irregular by analogy with irregular verbs: “clumb a tree.” These two features were identified by McDavid (1980, 173) as characteristic of the vernacular speech of North American whites across a number of regional varieties; • “ain’t” as the negative form of “have/has” and “am/are/is” – also identified as typical of North American whites, although it is used in some varieties of British English among others; • reflexive pronouns: “hisself,” “theyselves.” Again, this feature was identified as characteristic of North American whites by McDavid (1980, 173) under the heading “levelling of the pattern of the compound reflexive-intensives”; • past participle used instead of simple past: “I seen,” “the ones that shown regard.” Reed (1977, 38) claims that “seen as past tense is common everywhere” when referring to American dialects; • simple past used instead of past participle: “had took back,” “were gave the job,” “had rode”; • “be” instead of “am/are/is”: “I be thinking.” McDavid (1980, 174), in his inventory of social differences in white speech in North America,

54  Josep Marco Borillo

• • •

states that “the present of the verb to be may vacillate among am, is, are and be”; singular instead of plural: “six month gone”; -ing forms preceded by a-: “a-wandering”; and progressive instead of simple aspect with stative verbs, such as those denoting intellectual states or states of emotion: “I guess I’m thinking,” “Then he was laughing,” “We’re hoping,” “Or so I was thinking.” This is presented by Filppula (2008, 332–34) as one of the most striking features of the tense-aspect-modality systems of Irish English.

On the syntactic level, the following deviations from the standard can be observed: • as regards subject-verb concord, non-standard uses are very common: “I is a boy,” “You sure is,” “We was asked,” “his head weren’t,” “it don’t care much either way,” “he weren’t no more,” “Big speeches is made.” McDavid (1980, 174) claims that in the speech of North American whites, “[v]erbs may lack the third singular –s inflection or generalize it for all person-number forms.” He then adds that mixed usage is very common and attributes it to dialect mixture in the United States, although this feature is not exclusive to American English; • double or multiple negatives: “I was never no different neither,” “there wouldn’t be a horse tethered no more.” This feature is common to many English varieties, including American (see, e.g., McDavid 1980, 174) and Irish English (Filppula 2008, 337–38); • subject or verb omission: “Boys would eat you for their supper quick as see you,” “Goddamn mongrel sonsabitches what they are,” “That just the army way,” “That how he saw it.” McDavid (1980, 174) mentions omission of the copula “to be,” especially in third person singular “is,” as a characteristic of the non-standard speech of American whites; • omission of “if” in conditionals: “He said they took you prisoner you would regret it”; • double subject (sometimes called “left dislocation” of subject): “the colonel he ranges,” “that sergeant he just wrong,” “because an Indian he never plans for nothing.” This feature is not geographically marked; • use of reflexive pronouns in subject position: “myself was Thomasina,” “myself and John Cole pushed over.” This is a very common feature of Irish English; • the definite article (“the”) is used more freely than in standard English: “the few dollars,” “he wants her to go on to the university.” This is typical of Irish English;

An Analysis of the Use of Vernacular  55 • “Them” used as a determiner: “Them Indians is wore out from slaughter,” “the long dread history of cornbread in them sinks.” Again, this feature is not geographically marked; • omission of relative pronoun: “We was cunts deserved to die of frostbite,” “Ain’t a trooper alive don’t love his horses,” “Wasn’t a man among hadn’t had his nose skinned off a hundred times.” Filppula (2008, 340) refers to “the so-called zero relative construction (also known as the ‘contact clause’)” as a commonly used means of relativisation in Irish English, even though this feature can also be found in other varieties; • “for to” to indicate finality: “for to make ten million gems,” “They had a bear for to butcher.” This is typical of both American (McDavid 1980, 174) and Irish English (Filppula 2008, 341); • inversion of typical word order for the sake of topicalisation of certain elements, sometimes through a cleft sentence, as in the last of the following examples: “Goddamn blackberries they were as black as,” “Blooms in my head the picture,” “and it is very glorious and crazy the feeling,” “It was a small stack of purple smoke it looked like lying there.” Amador Moreno (2005, 83) mentions “the high occurrence of cleft sentences in IrE [Irish English]” and attributes it to transfer from Irish Gaelic. As to the geographical affiliation of the non-standard features found in Barry’s novel, the above data show that it is not always easy to draw a clear line between those found exclusively in America and those deriving from Irish English, the latter often with Gaelic as an underlying influence. Some of these features are common to both (and even other) varieties, which is only natural in view of the fact that, as has often been claimed (e.g., Hickey 2002, 54), Irish English may have exerted a remarkable influence on the configuration of American English on account of the large number of Irish immigrants seeking their fortune in the US in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But there are other features which can clearly be ascribed either to American or Irish origin. In terms of narrative verisimilitude, this is to be expected, since Thomas McNulty, as mentioned above, lived in Sligo until he moved to America in his early teens and is still living there when he narrates the facts, now a mature man. Dialect mixture in the narrator’s voice reflects his origins and development. However, the two varieties are not assigned equal weight – an American bias can be clearly perceived. This is confirmed by Barry himself and some reviewers of his novel. In an interview for an Australian radio station, the author (Barry 2016b) declares that Thomas McNulty is “a totally uneducated person, as is John Cole. He writes in a quite bashed version of how he would have spoken as a child and then what America has given to his language. It’s a lingo, it’s quite brokenhearted in its syntax, but also, I think, his sense of life comes through.”

56  Josep Marco Borillo Clark (2016) claims that “[t]he emigrant Thomas rarely sounds exactly Irish, though the odd word bubbles up.” And McNamee (2016) concludes that “Connacht vernacular gives way to American idiom, which in turn gives way to a voice that seems called from McNulty by the land itself. You’d expect no less of Sebastian Barry. The glory is always in the language.” The previous paragraphs address the first of the three aspects of the use of dialect in literature identified by Mair (1992), namely standards of representation. The second aspect is that of the narrative levels at which dialect is used. As remarked above, in Barry’s novel the narrator’s voice is in full control of the events narrated, including linguistic events, that is, representation of speech and thought. In fact, there is no clear dividing line between the narrator’s and the characters’ voices, as the latter are not signalled through the conventional typographical means (inverted commas) and only occasionally are dialogue interventions assigned separate paragraphs. The overall impression, as far as voices are concerned, is that everything is filtered by the narrator, whose own idiom, therefore, might be colouring that of the other characters. Characters use non-standard language, with very few exceptions, and the narrator uses the kind of vernacular described in the preceding paragraphs. Therefore, this vernacular permeates the language of the whole novel. The third aspect of the use of dialect in literature is valuation, as remarked above. When it comes to assigning values to a particular use of language as a means of interpretation, it is difficult to escape the charge of subjectivity. However, values are assigned not only by commentators but also, implicitly, by readers to make sense of a literary work beyond the basic level of plot and characters – that is inevitable. I would like to argue that the non-standard features described above do not tell the whole story as far as the expressive subtleties of the narrator’s voice are concerned. Alongside his vernacular we find indicators of a more formal register (e.g., “and all the rest of the paraphernalia of existence”) as well as a wealth of learned references of different kinds. The novel features allusions to mythological beings like Medusa or the Fates; literary works such as Gulliver’s Travels (“like Brobdingnag versions of what serves for our muskets”) or the Homeric poems (“but the following day he will be Homer’s Hector again”); historical references (“Indians always talk like Romans for sure”); and Biblical allusions (“Snow falling like bread of heaven that won’t feed no Israelite”). In terms of verisimilitude, this wealth of learning in someone described by his creator as “a totally uneducated person” can only be accounted for by the fact that he must have had intellectual interests between his young days as a soldier and the season of maturity when he writes this memoir. He may be formally uneducated, but by the time he becomes a writer he is no longer unread. The narrator’s style can be seen, thus, as a synthesis, a melting pot where his younger incarnation is inextricably bound to his more mature self.

An Analysis of the Use of Vernacular  57 As seen above, the particular blend of vernacular, on the one hand, and lyricism and depth of feeling and thought, on the other, audible in the narrator’s voice, is regarded as the hallmark of the novel’s style or, at least, one of its defining features. If the vernacular factor were not present in the equation, the whole thing would be simpler and arguably less convincing. The overall valuation of vernacular as used by Barry, then, must perforce be positive, as it makes a (more than) considerable contribution to the sense of truth and authenticity in the narrator’s voice referred to by several reviewers.

3.6 Non-Standard Language in the Spanish and Italian Translations of Days Without End Two translations of DWE will be analysed here: the Spanish one (Días sin fin), by Susana de la Higuera Glynne-Jones, published by Alianza in 2018 (Barry 2018a), and the Italian one (Giorni senza fine), by Cristiana Mennella, published by Einaudi also in 2018 (Barry 2018b). Since manual analysis is extremely time-consuming, it will be restricted to the first ten chapters of the novel, out of a total of twenty-three. That amounts to over a third of the text and can be regarded as representative of the whole. 3.6.1 Días Sin Fin The Spanish translator chooses the first technique among the four listed in Section 3.3 – neutralisation. There is no transgression of linguistic norms in the Spanish translation, and decisions concerning non-standard ST features are made along the +/– formal/colloquial cline. In that respect, some specific solutions might bring the TT close to the second technique above (i.e., using an informal tenor without deviating from the standard). But the overall strategy adopted for the translation rather matches the first, or at least leaves the translation poised somewhere between the first and the second. A number of translation decisions definitely align the TT with the ST’s tone and style by including a wide array of colloquial expressions, such as phraseological units (idioms, set phrases, habitual collocations, proverbs), and vulgar language. Of these two types of colloquial elements, phraseological units are undoubtedly the most prominent. Here is a representative sample (page numbers and back translations (BT) are given in brackets): •

“Nos pareció que allí estaban nuestras habichuelas si éramos capaces de buscarlas” (15) (BT: It seemed to us that there were our beans if were able to look for them) ← “We were of the opinion our share of food was there if we sought it out” (6). “Buscarse las habichuelas” figuratively stands for seeking a way of earning one’s living;

58  Josep Marco Borillo • “Cualquier hijo de vecino sabe” (20) (BT: Any son of neighbour knows) ← “Every citizen knows” (12). It is a colloquial way of saying “everybody” or “anybody”; • “que recogían sus bártulos y allá que se marchaban” (24) (BT: who picked up their stuff and there they went) ← “upping sticks and off they’d go” (17). Again, “(re)coger los bártulos” is a colloquial way to refer to “leaving,” often in haste or anger, even if “bártulos” literally means “utensils, tools, instruments that one handles”; • “O montabas a caballo o adiós muy buenas” (25) (BT: Either you rode a horse or goodbye, that’s all) ← “You rode or you died” (18). “Adiós muy buenas” is a way of referring to the end – not necessarily death, as here; it may be the end of an affair, the end of hope, etc.; • “la peor calaña” (54) (BT: the worst kind) ← “the worst devils” (53). Saying that someone is “de mala calaña” amounts to dubbing them ill-natured; • “ellas se ponen las botas” (58) (BT: they put on their boots) ← “if we have nothing to gorge on,” “they do” (58). The personal pronoun “they”/“ellas” refers to the flies pestering the soldiers at this point. “Ponerse las botas” means “to have a field day with something” – to draw as much profit as one can (e.g., while eating). Most of these phraseological units hold wide currency in Spanish and, therefore, their use will surprise no reader. They make the TT colloquial but do not imply departing from any norm. It surely comes as no surprise that vulgar or taboo words should be used in the Spanish translation, as they congruently feature in the ST too as part of the general tone of the novel. Here are two examples: • “Los huevos y el trasero duelen del carajo” (25) (BT: The balls and the bottom hurt damned bad) ← “It’s hard on the bollocks, and the lower back, God damn it” (18); • “La orina se helaba nada más salir de la verga” (49) (BT: The urine froze as soon as it came out of the dick) ← “The piss froze as it left our peckers” (47). “Orina” is perhaps more polite than “piss,” but “verga” is a rather unpleasant word in Spanish, so no attempt is made here to euphemise. However, these features aligning the TT with the ST’s style and tone are counterbalanced by other features that do just the opposite. Even if a certain neutrality of tenor (neither too formal nor too informal) is the key in the TT, a relatively high number of words and phrases can be found that lean towards the formal end of the cline and might even be regarded as learned. This is not wholly out of character with the narrator’s voice in the ST – as observed above, that voice may occasionally use sophisticated language and make learned allusions, as an indication that Thomas

An Analysis of the Use of Vernacular  59 McNulty has improved his mind since the wild days of his youth. But the problem with some of these expressions in the TT is that their occurrence is not justified by their matching ST segments. On page 26, for instance, the narrator claims that “Sabíamos en nuestro fuero interno que nuestra misión iban a ser los indios” (BT: We knew in our conscience that our mission was going to be the Indians), “fuero interno” being a rather technical expression not often used in spoken Spanish. The matching ST segment says, more simply: “We knew in our hearts our work was to be Indians” (20). Later on, the narrator mentions two soldiers who are under arrest and probably “vertiendo improperios” (44) (BT: hurling abuse) through the meal hatch. The ST, more sober, just says “giving out” (41). After a bout of Indian slaughter, the narrator says: “Sentí un leve ápice de tristeza por ellos” (48) (BT: I felt a slight shred of sadness for them), which translates “I did feel a seeping tincture of sadness for them” (44). Where the ST is poetic, the TT is just formal, as witnessed by the use of “ápice.” Further examples of this trend towards formality in the TT are “actos execrables” (53) (BT: “execrable acts”) as a translation of “shabby acts” (51) and “gélidos estragos” (BT: icy havoc) as a translation of “cold deeds” (51). A second feature that does not favour the alignment of the TT with the tone and style of the ST is an excess of literalism. As remarked above, some commentators on Barry’s novel have highlighted the sense of truth and authenticity in the narrator’s voice, and this sense cannot be re-created in the TT through the use of target language expressive resources that may ring foreign to many readers. One of these resources is adjective position. In Spanish, adjectives can either precede or follow the noun they modify, but post-noun position is the unmarked option. Prenominal adjectives signal qualities that are not essential to the noun and are often perceived as rhetorical embellishment. However, the fact that adjectives in English are prenominal can, in most cases, end up influencing adjective position in Spanish translations. Here are a few examples: “enorme y musculosa serpiente” (50) (BT: huge and muscular snake), “esquilmado número de hombres” (57) (BT: much reduced number of men), “grato alivio” (58) (BT: pleasant relief) or “gélidos estragos,” mentioned in the preceding paragraph. Another expressive resource that may be regarded as an instance of literalism or calque is the use of “condenado/-a” (“damned”) as a translation of “damn,” “damned,” and other swear words in English. Most swear words in Spanish are not adjectives, so using nouns or verbs, for instance, as equivalents for English expletives would often imply major syntactic changes. It requires less effort to use adjectives, which, however, may ring foreign to Spanish ears (even though they have become partly naturalised through frequent use in dubbed films) and thereby lose some force as expletives. That is exactly the case with “condenado/-a.” On page 50 of the Spanish translation two examples can be found in a single paragraph: “condenado

60  Josep Marco Borillo sargento” (“damned sergeant”) as a translation of “damn sergeant” (48) and “condenadamente buenos” (“damned good”) as a translation of “evil good” (48).

3.6.2 Giorni Senza Fine The Italian translator, like the Spanish, chooses the first technique of the four listed in Section 3.3 (i.e., neutralisation), as no transgression of the linguistic norm is observable in the Italian translation either. Again, as in the Spanish translation, decisions are made on the +/– formal/colloquial cline, but with one difference: the Italian seems to lean more decidedly towards the colloquial than the Spanish. Therefore, the former might be said to be closer to the second technique (substituting target language colloquial or informal features for the non-standard ST) than the latter. In the following paragraphs, a number of these features will be presented, together with elements that, more generally, align the TT with the ST’s style and tone. On the lexical level, the colloquial tenor is heard in such expressions as “sono dolori” in “Se ti fanno prigioniero, sono dolori” (41) (BT: If they make you prisoner, there is trouble), which translates “they took you prisoner you would regret it” (53), or in the idiom contained in “abbiamo fatto buon viso a cattivo gioco,” which literally means “to make a good face to a bad game” but could be regarded as a functional equivalent of “to make the best of a bad business.” The ST segment triggering the use of this phrase is “we were content to do that because we got to be” (63), which is not phraseological in nature. This solution suggests that the Italian translator is on the lookout for colloquialisms even when their use is not prompted by their matching ST segments, probably because she sees them as congruent with the overall style of the ST. The reader also comes across many vulgar or taboo words in the Italian text that render ST swear words: “porco boia” (38), which literally means “pig executioner” but might be regarded as an equivalent of “shit,” from the English “damn it” (49); “Bastardi figli di puttana” (46) (BT: Bastard sons of a bitch), the rendering of “Goddamn mongrel sonsabitches” (59); “Stupidi indiani del cazzo” (46), which literally would mean something like “Stupid Indians of the dick” and could be more functionally rendered as “Bloody stupid Indians,” from the ST segment “Goddamn stupid Injuns” (59). Many similar examples could be provided of this trend towards colloquial and even vulgar language, which undoubtedly accords with the ST’s tone and style. Still on the lexical level, even though there is also a rhetorical ingredient in this trait, reference must be made to the fact that the Italian translator does not avoid repetitions. Here are two examples: “stretti stretti per restare in vita” (43) (BT: close close to stay alive; the narrator is saying that soldiers slept very close to one another because it was freezing cold) ←

An Analysis of the Use of Vernacular  61 “sleeping close for life” (56); “Stanchi, stanchi morti, siamo tornati indietro” (31) (BT: Tired, dead tired, we went back) ← “Wearily, wearily, we walked back” (38). The repetition in the second example is prompted by the ST, but that in the first is not. As above, this signals a readiness on the translator’s part to avail herself of all expressive resources in the target language that may serve her stylistic ends. The Spanish translator does not make use of repetition in either of these cases. An interesting aspect of the Italian translation is that Mennella often uses resources beyond the lexical level to achieve a sustained colloquial effect. One such resource is the non-use of the passato remoto. Italian has two verbal tenses to refer to past events (apart from the imperfetto, where the aspect is different): the passato prossimo and the passato remoto. The former designates past actions that bear some relevance to the present, whereas the latter refers to events that happened in the past and are perceived as remote from the present. This difference features in the verbal systems of many languages – in English, for instance, it is mirrored by the present perfect/simple past distinction. What is peculiar to Italian is its geographical distribution: in northern and central Italy, as well as in Sardinia, the passato remoto is not used at all in oral communication, whereas the opposite is true of the south and Tuscany. Both are commonly used in writing, where the semantic distinction explained above does in fact apply. Thus, by avoiding the use of the passato remoto, the translator adheres to the oral norm of northern Italy, where the passato prossimo is used for all purposes in speech, and the remoto is reserved for writing and perceived as more formal. The Italian translator also exploits the possibilities offered by Italian syntax to create a sense of colloquialism and orality. Word order flexibility is deftly used to that end, either by means of direct object fronting or left dislocation through pronouns. Here are two examples of fronting of direct objects: • •

“anche se lassú gli alligatori non li ho mai visti” (38) (BT: even if up there the alligators I have never seen them) ← “though I never saw alligators up there” (50); “Io questo ho notato” (40) (BT: I this have noticed) ← “That’s what I notice about it” (52).

Left dislocation, on the other hand, is effected through such pronouns as ne, ci or li, which can be used both anaphorically and cataphorically. In the following examples, reference is always cataphoric: • “Ci avresti potuto legare cinquanta cavalli, al tronco di certe” (28) (BT: There [Ci] you could have tied fifty horses, to the trunk of some of them [the narrator is talking about ancient redwood trees]) ← “You could have tethered fifty horses to the girth of some of them” (34);

62  Josep Marco Borillo • •

“ce ne siamo accorti tutti, che era bello” (34) (BT: of it [ne] we have all noticed, that it was beautiful) ← “we all felt the fineness in it” (44); and “iniziavamo a sognarceli, i bisonti” (43) (BT: we started to dream of them [li], the buffalo) ← “we started to dream of buffalo” (55).

It should be noted that both fronting and left dislocation are presumably used by the translator as part of her general effort to adjust the translated text to common Italian usage. There is nothing in the ST to trigger these syntactic adjustments, which must have been regarded as idiomatic resources in Italian that can only contribute to the sense of truth and authenticity in the narrator’s voice, already referred to. Finally, mention will be made of another syntactic feature in the Italian translation that helps align it with the ST’s tone and style insofar as it promotes informality: non-avoidance of juxtaposition. Here is a representative sentence (Barry 2018b, 31): “Si sono alzate altre scintille, era una visione di morte, la fine del mondo, in quei momenti non riuscivo piú a pensare, avevo la testa senza sangue, vuota, frastornata, sconvolta.” In this respect, the translation does no more than reflect the frequent use of juxtaposition in the ST. Clauses are simply placed beside one another, with no hierarchy dictated by grammar or connectives, but only commas acting as boundaries between them. Here is the matching ST sentence (Barry 2016a, 38–39): “More sparks flew up, it was a complete vision of world’s end and death, in those moments I could think no more, my head bloodless, empty, racketing, astonished.” The Spanish translation, by contrast, is more rhetorical. Even if the syntactic structure is quite similar both to that of the ST and the Italian translation, punctuation makes a huge difference (Barry 2018a, 43): “Se alzaron más y más chispas: era una visión apocalíptica del fin del mundo y de la muerte; en esos momentos, no pude pensar nada más, mi cabeza se quedó sin sangre, vacía, trémula y atónita.” The colon after “chispas” and the semicolon after “muerte” signal hierarchy and elaboration instead of mere accumulation, more typical of oral discourse.

3.7 Concluding Remarks What the previous section makes, I hope, abundantly clear is that technique categorisation does not tell the whole story when it comes to describing how non-standard language fares in translation. Both translations brought under scrutiny in this paper may be said to fall under the category of neutralisation. Neither translation deviates from the standard in its corresponding language. However, within this category there is room for difference, which is far from subtle in this case. I have tried to show that the Italian translation makes more prominent use than the Spanish of a whole range of expressive resources that tend to align

An Analysis of the Use of Vernacular  63 the former – more markedly than the latter: the difference is of degree, not kind – with the colloquial, informal tenor prevalent in the ST. The Spanish translation shows features of this kind too, but to a lesser extent, the Italian being more consistent in their use and resorting to linguistic levels other than the lexicon. As a result, the Italian translation comes closer to the second technique listed in Section 3.3 (marking the TT language by using a (highly) colloquial, informal tenor) than the Spanish. If, as claimed at the beginning of this paper, the main issue about nonstandard language in literature lies in aesthetic function, I would argue that the function fulfilled by this feature in the ST is better preserved in the Italian than the Spanish translation. As seen above, vernacular makes an important contribution to the ring of truth and authenticity that several reviewers of DWE have clearly identified in the narrator’s voice. That voice is a particular blend of Irish and American dialectal traits that can obviously not be reproduced in the target language; it could have been recreated with non-standard target language features, but neither translator took that path. Therefore, the only room left for manoeuvre lay in informal tenor, and the Italian translation may be said to have used that room to better effect than the Spanish. Once the strategic decision not to deviate from the standard has been made, using more or less colloquial features can make a difference in flavour, like so much salt or pepper on an otherwise exotic dish.

Notes 1 All translations from languages other than English are my own. 2 As argued elsewhere (Marco 2007, 258), “a host of terms circulate within the discipline to refer to what might be paraphrased as the (form adopted by the) relationship between a source text and a target text segment.” I follow Hurtado Albir (2001) and favour the term “technique” for the concept just defined in order to avoid conceptual and terminological confusion, as “strategy” can also refer to the path followed by a translator to reach a given solution. Technique relates to the translation result, whereas strategy relates to the translation process. 3 I am indebted to my colleague Alfred Markey for drawing my attention to this expression, which I had overlooked.

References Amador Moreno, Carolina P. 2005. “Discourse Markers in Irish English: An Example from Literature.” In The Pragmatics of Irish English, edited by Anne Barron and Klaus P. Schneider, 73–100. Berlin and Boston: Mouton de Gruyter. Barry, Sebastian. 2016a. Days Without End. London: Faber and Faber. Barry, Sebastian. 2016b. “Sebastian Barry’s New Novel Days Without End.” Interview by Kate Evans. ABC Radio National, November 2, 2016. https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/archived/booksandarts/ sebastian-barrys-new-novel-days-without-end/7959748. Barry, Sebastian. 2018a. Días Sin Final. Translated by Susana de la Higuera Glynne-Jones. Madrid: Alianza.

64  Josep Marco Borillo Barry, Sebastian. 2018b. Giorni Senza Fine. Translated by Cristiana Mennella. Turin: Einaudi. Braga, Jorge. 2016. “Thomas Hardy’s Dialect in Spanish Translation: The Reception of Tess of the D’Urbervilles.” Status Quaestionis. Language, Text, Culture 11: 17–41. https://ojs.uniroma1.it/index.php/statusquaestionis/article/ view/13831. Briguglia, Caterina. 2009. “La traducción de la variación lingüística en el catalán literario contemporáneo. Las traducciones de Pasolini, Gadda y Camilleri.” PhD diss., Universitat Pompeu Fabra. http://hdl.handle.net/10803/7574. Buzelin, Hélène. 2000. “The Lonely Londoners en français: l’épreuve du métissage.” TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction 13(2): 203–243. Carbonell i Cortés, Ovidi. 1999. Traducción y cultura. De la ideología al texto. Salamanca: Ediciones Colegio de España. Catford, John C. 1965. A Linguistic Theory of Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clark, Alex. 2016. “Days Without End by Sebastian Barry Review – a Bravura Journey into America’s Past.” The Guardian, October 28, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/28/days-without-end-by-sebastian-barry-review Filppula, Markku. 2008. “Irish English: Morphology and Syntax.” In Varieties of English, vol. 1: The British Isles, edited by Bernd Kortmann and Clive Upton, 328–359. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Franco Batista, Camila. 2017. “Soldiers and Indians: Victim and Perpetrator Traumas in Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End.” Em Tese 3: 100–112. doi:10.17851/1982-0739.23.3.100-112. Hatim, Basil, and Ian Mason. 1997. The Translator as Communicator. London: Routledge. Hayden, Joanne. 2017. “Sebastian Barry: The Pride Given to You by Your Gay Child Is Unquantifiable.” The Independent, September 24, 2017. https://www. independent.ie/entertainment/theatre-arts/sebastian-barry-the-pride-given-toyou-by-your-gay-child-is-unquantifiable-36150881.html. Hervey, Sándor, Ian Higgins, and Louise M. Haywood. 1995. Thinking Spanish Translation. A Course in Translation Method: Spanish to English. London: Routledge. Hickey, Raymond. 2002. A Source Book for Irish English. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hurtado Albir, Amparo. 2001. Traducción y traductología. Introducción a la traductología. Madrid: Cátedra. Julià Ballbè, Josep. 1997a. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn i les traduccions impossibles.” In Traducció i literatura. Homenatge a Ángel Crespo, edited by Soledad González Ródenas and Francisco Lafarga, 195–202. Vic: Eumo. Julià Ballbè, Josep. 1997b. “Dialectes i traducció: reticències i aberracions.” In Actes del II Congrés Internacional sobre Traducció, abril 1994, edited by Montserrat Bacardí, 561–574. Bellaterra: Servei de Publicacions de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Julià Ballbè, Josep. 1998. “Varietats i recursos lingüístics a la traducció literària catalana.” In Actes del III Congrés Internacional sobre Traducció, Març 1996, edited by Pilar Orero, 371–384. Bellaterra: Servei de Publicacions de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

An Analysis of the Use of Vernacular  65 Lavault-Olléon, Élisabeth. 2006. “Le skopos comme stratégie de déblocage: dialecte et scotticité dans Sunset Dog de Lewis Grassic Gibbon.” Meta: journal des traducteurs 51(3): 504–523. Mair, Christian. 1992. “A Methodological Framework for Research on the Use of Nonstandard Language in Fiction.” AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 17(1): 103–123. Marco, Josep. 2002. El fil d’Ariadna. Anàlisi estilística i traducció literària. Vic: Eumo. Marco, Josep. 2007. “The Terminology of Translation: Epistemological, Conceptual and Intercultural Problems and Their Social Consequences.” Target 19(2): 255–269. Marco, Josep, and Isabel Tello Fons. 2016. “Thieves’ Cant in Spanish Translations of Dickens’s Oliver Twist.” Status Quaestionis. Language, Text, Culture 11: 193–221. http://statusquaestionis.uniroma1.it/index.php/statusquaestionis/ article/view/13837/13604. McDavid, Raven I. 1980. Varieties of American English. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. McNamee, Eoin. 2016. “‘Humorous, Glorious’: Majestic Prose from Sebastian Barry.” The Irish Times, October 22, 2016. https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/ books/humorous-glorious-majestic-prose-from-sebastian-barry-1.2832723. Muñoz Martín, Ricardo. 1995. Lingüística para traducir. Barcelona: Teide. Palliwoda, Nicole, and Saskia Schröder. 2016. “Perceptual Dialectology, Speech Samples, and the Concept of Salience: Initial Findings from the DFG-Project ‘Lay Linguists’ Perspective on German Regional Varieties: Reconstructing Lay Linguistic Conceptualizations of German in a Perceptual Dialectology Approach.’” In Cityscapes of Perceptual Dialectology. Global Perspectives on Non-Linguists’ Knowledge of the Dialect Landscape, edited by Jennifer Cramer and Chris Montgomery, 257–274. Boston and Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Perteghella, Manuela. 2002. “Language and Politics on Stage: Strategies for Translating Dialect and Slang with References to Shaw’s Pygmalion and Bond’s Saved.” Translation Review 64: 45–53. Rabadán, Rosa. 1991. Equivalencia y traducción. Problemática de la equivalencia translémica inglés-español. León: Universidad de León. Ranzato, Irene. 2016. “Introduction: Reading Dialect Varieties in the Literary Macrotext.” Status Quaestionis. Language, Text, Culture 11: 1–16. doi:10.13133/2239-1983/13830. Reed, Carroll E. 1977. Dialects of American English. Amherst: University of Massachussets Press. Sáenz, Miguel. 2000. “Dialectos dilectos.” El Trujamán. Revista diaria de traducción, 3 November 2000. http://cvc.cervantes.es/trujaman/anteriores/noviembre_00/03112000.htm. Slobodník, Dusan. 1970. “Remarques sur la traduction des dialects.” In The Nature of Translation. Essays on the Theory and Practice of Literary Translation, edited by James Holmes, 139–143. Bratislava: Publishing House of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. Smith, Katy Simpson. 2017. “A Dreamlike Western with a Different Kind of Hero.” The New York Times, February 3, 2017. https://www.nytimes. com/2017/02/03/books/review/days-without-end-sebastian-barry.html.

66  Josep Marco Borillo Tello Fons, Isabel. 2011. “La traducción del dialecto: análisis descriptivo del dialecto geográfico y social en un corpus de novelas en lengua inglesa y su traducción al español.” PhD diss., Universitat Jaume I. http://www.tdx.cat/bitstream/ handle/10803/90249/itello.pdf?sequence=1. Wigston, Nancy. 2017. “Sweeping Western by a Masterful Irish Writer.” The Star, January 22, 2017. https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2017/01/22/ sweeping-western-by-a-masterful-irish-writer.html.

Part II

Voices on Stage

4 Shakespeare’s Multilingual Classrooms Style, Stylisation and Linguistic Authority Donatella Montini 4.1 Introduction Let them keep their limbs whole, and hack our English (MWW, III.1.71–72) “No literary tradition in early modern Europe was as obsessed with the interaction between the native tongue and its dialectal variants or with foreign languages and the associated phenomenon of translation, as early modern English drama” (Delabastita and Hoenselaars 2015, 1). Multilingual dialogues and characters feature across the various genres of early modern drama (and quite conspicuously in early modern comedy), where they serve such specific purposes as locating the action of the play, signalling identities both regional and social, and even conveying xenophobic attitudes, but ultimately and consistently providing information about characters in the drama. In this regard, from Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday to John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan or William Haughton’s Englishmen for My Money, down to Caroline drama and the city comedies, the Elizabethan stage quite consistently provided a context in which to display and examine the linguistic behaviours of individuals and social groups, linguistic hierarchies, and positive and negative role models. It is thus remarkable that there should be comparatively very few examples of such “multi-languagedness” in Shakespeare: aside from notable exceptions, comprising the disguised Edgar in King Lear and Sir Hugh Evans and Dr Caius in MWW, Shakespeare seems characteristically uninterested in marking speakers by their accent, national or regional.1 James Siemon appropriately distinguishes Shakespeare’s use of dialects from social dialects, underlining that his multilingual characters tend to be placed “within verbal environments where differing sociolects interact with and interpenetrate one another in complex ways, even within the utterances of individual speakers, whose language may shift vocabulary and usage according to circumstance” (Saenger 2014; Siemon 2019, 134).

70  Donatella Montini In line with Jonathan Hope’s claim that “we are used to historicizing Shakespeare in every respect except his language” (Hope 2004, 1), the more recent tendency among historical linguists has been to reassess Shakespeare’s language in a historical perspective. Emphasizing “the language used in Shakespearean text” (Crystal 2008, 41), more than Shakespeare’s language, has resulted in the healthy debunking of long-standing myths customarily associated with Shakespeare’s linguistic performance (Crystal 2008; Hope 2010; Culpeper and Ravassat 2011; Plescia 2016). In this perspective, linguistic variations and varieties, voices and accents, as well as foreign languages, in the works of Shakespeare and on the Shakespearean stage, are increasingly tackled and investigated as key markers of social and cultural identity, as well as the ideological representation of difference. In early modern comedy, the language of the “other” is often exploited to mark Anglo-foreign distinctions, either to emphasise or remedy them, and to stage the dangers of learning and literacy, and interestingly, the representation of languages other than English recurs in Shakespeare’s plays within the specific bounds of an educational setting: what we may call the didactic scene is the place where early modern English is seen to dialogue and compare with Latin and French, the languages with which the “king’s English” entertained a special relationship. I have chosen this particular mise en abyme as a privileged frame of investigation, both for sociolinguistic and for pragmatic reasons: the classroom is a topical place where characters are assigned predetermined and extralinguistic roles of power, language becomes the object of the message, and multilingual scenes are inevitably accompanied by metalinguistic comments, which serve to guide the interpretation of that representation of literacy.2 My aim in this chapter is to place a select number of polyglot scenes from Shakespeare within this framework. Drawing on recent sociolinguistic readings of the fictional representation of language differences, I analyse instances of the concept of stylisation (Coupland 2007) and engage in historical dialogue analysis – the investigation in a pragmatic perspective of historical speech-based texts, surviving in the form of written records, as diagnostic of spoken contextualised interaction (Culpeper and Kytö 2010; Jucker and Taavitsainen 2013). I will draw attention to the relationship between dramatic exchange and early modern teaching manuals of foreign languages, in order to show the enregisterment of the pedagogic setting as an ideological construct. The main focus lies on the potential pragmatic effects of these scenes in character creation, as a humorous device, and in ideological debates touching on social, gender, and national identity (Locher 2017), thus showing that multilingual exchanges are a favoured practice both in the depiction and in the stylisation of the Other. The chapter is divided as follows. I first review the theoretical background of Coupland’s concept of stylisation in relation to recent work on the pragmatic analysis of historical dialogues. Then, I look at the historical and ideological linguistic context that contributed to establish

Shakespeare’s Multilingual Classrooms  71 the so-called “king’s English, in parallel with the spread of multilingual didactic systems of language-teaching in early modern England. In the final paragraphs, I turn to the two case studies, the Latin lesson in The Merry Wives of Windsor and the French lesson in Henry V, in a close reading that investigates the ideological effects of stylisation in multilingual didactic scenes.

4.2 Stylisation and Historical Dialogue Analysis In texts of fiction, the representation of accents and other languages always carries some symbolic value, based on social and stylistic assumptions regarding the characters’ origin, race, and social class, and producing enregistered voices to serve as indexical of the speaker’s attributes (Agha 2003, 2005; Planchenault 2017). One of the most recurrent representations of heteroglossia in dramatic exchanges occurs through processes of linguistic differentiation that generally set certain voices against an assumed conventional standard, and any deviation along these lines contributes to the characterisation process, the development of the story, and the definition of the historical and geographical setting. Bakhtin’s theorisation of multilingualism as an intrinsic feature of language underpins the cultural and ideological meaning of heteroglossia by pointing to the idea that “our speech (…) is filled with others’ words, varying degrees of otherness or varying degrees of ‘our-own-ness’, varying degrees of awareness and detachment” (1986, 89). Through processes of enregisterment and stylisation, such variations are made to signify some correlate value, and stylisation, intended as “an artistic image of another’s language” (Bakhtin 1981, 362) usually foregrounds “the politics in the performances of the Other” (Planchenault 2017, 267). Within the contemporary framework of the sociolinguistics of variation, these insights provide the basis for the concept of stylisation and its several functions, which also serve to reassess the effects on readerships or audiences of multilingual verbal performance. In Coupland’s definition of stylisation, •

Stylised utterances project personas, identities and genres other than those that are presumedly current in the speech event; projected personas and genres derive from well-known identity repertoires, even though they may not be represented in full. • Stylisation is therefore fundamentally metaphorical. It brings into play stereotyped semiotic and ideological values associated with other groups, situations or times. It dislocates a speaker and utterances from the immediate speaking context. • It is reflexive, mannered and knowing. It is a metacommunicative mode that attends and invites attention to its own modality. (2007, 154)

72  Donatella Montini These first general features of stylisation seem to converge on what may also be seen as a substantially figurative nature of stylisation that entails a verbal and semiotic transfer; what Coupland defines as a dislocation of the “speaker and utterances from the immediate speaking context” typically results in a sort of reconceptualisation of experience whereby the process of defamiliarisation and foregrounding heightens the reader/spectator’s awareness of the linguistic medium. The encoding process further entertains a bi-directional relation with the audience’s decoding: • [Stylisation] requires an acculturated audience able to read and predisposed to judge the semiotic value of a projected persona or genre. It is therefore especially tightly linked to the normative interpretations of speech and non-verbal styles entertained by specific discourse communities. • It instigates, in and with listeners, processes of social comparison and re-evaluation (aesthetic and moral), focused on the real and metaphorical identities of speakers, their strategies and goals, but spilling over into re-evaluation of listeners’ identities, orientations and values. (…). • Stylisation can be analysed as strategic inauthenticity, with complex implications for personal and cultural authenticity in general. (Coupland 2007, 154) In this sense, the stylisation of linguistic variation in fictional representations determines and informs the makeup and extent of its intended audience; targeting audiences of a given quality and identity serves at once as a selection tool and instrument of analysis of the communicative potentialities of the audience itself. In the investigation of historical, fictional, and multilingual dialogues, it is expedient to integrate the theoretical background of stylisation with a pragmatic perspective, for a more comprehensive framework of analysis. For several reasons, the study of dialogues was until recently restricted to modern languages; in particular, historical linguists did not concern themselves with them to any great extent, considering speech-based ­ texts and linguistic variation as unreliable materials for analysis.3 Recent research on historical dialogues has encouraged the study of ­fictional ­language in this perspective. Andreas Jucker, Irma Taavitsainen, Jonathan Culpeper, and other scholars started applying pragmatic tools to texts from the past, and historical pragmatics has reappraised d ­ ialogues as text-types and taken a fresh look at the role and functions of “speechrelated” written genres, such as trial proceedings, plays, fiction, and didactic works as genres that offer important clues as to the historical use of language as face-to-face interaction. Research efforts that deal with dialogic elements such as address terms, speech acts, and conversational

Shakespeare’s Multilingual Classrooms  73 turns have shed light on the history of English and its changes through fictional representations of dialogues (Rudanko 1993; Jucker et al. 1999; Mazzon 2003; Morgan 2019). Because there is no possible access to voices from the past, language performance is examined in written form, focusing on the cultural connotations associated with different accents and languages, often proposed through the fabrication of a graphic system instead of phonetic signs (Hodson 2016). However, in the specific instance of the representation and performance of multilingualism, there are aspects of ideological import that analytical frameworks should attempt to capture: as widely explored by the semiotics of theatre, playwrights write dialogues to be delivered as though they were not scripted, and action is inscribed within the very language of drama (Elam 1980). Multisemiotic forms of communication take place on the theatre stage, the crucial features of which are liable to be missed in analyses of the written record alone, such as the “degree of foregrounding, the balance between phonetic realism and stereotyping, ironic distancing and comic exaggeration, the body move accompanying the words” (Delabastita 2002, 11). The language-learning setting as proposed in the early modern context was meant as an undertaking that was oral, aural, and sociable, and the dramatic communicative framework works as a perfect resonance chamber to amplify its effects.

4.3 “King’s English” and Multilingualism “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy” – An aphorism In compiling his Firste Fruites (1578), the Elizabethan linguist and translator John Florio listed a dialogue in which he has one of the speakers describe the English language as a language confused, bepeesed with many tongues: it taketh many words of the latine, and mo from the French, and mo from the Italian, and many mo from the Duitch, some also from the Greeke, and from the Britaine, so that if every language had his owne wordes againe, there woulde but a fewe remaine for English men, and yet every day they adde. (Florio 1578, 50) Such was the makeup of English in the early modern period: French, native Germanic, Dutch, Italian, Latin, and some classical Greek, though in different proportions, contributed to the making of a vernacular that was trying to become established as the common language of the nation (Nevalainen 2006).4 Multilingualism was a fact that shaped the linguistic

74  Donatella Montini configuration of Elizabethan society, and early modern English was literally fabricated out of an assortment of cohabiting different languages, whose diverse roles depended on their history and on the means of their chief delivery, whether written or oral. At the same time, a supra-regional written standard of English was also emerging that produced a shift in attitudes towards linguistic diversity. English underwent the same set of processes that historical linguists have found in almost all languages that aim at standardisation: “London English” rose in rank among other varieties as the city emerged as a centre of power and the language there used was attributed an increasing number of official functions which distinguished it as a variant increasingly associated with government and the law (Baugh and Cable 2000; Hodson 2014); thus, “[h]istorical influence rather than intrinsic value” lent the necessary prestige to consolidate the English vernacular (Giles and Coupland 1991, 38). In his study on language and power, Pierre Bourdieu emphasised that the “imposition of an official language establish[es] relations between the different uses of the same language,” and within this system of linguistic power relations, “the linguistic differences between people from different regions cease to be incommensurable particularisms,” and are instead relegated to the “outer darkness of regionalisms, the ‘corrupt expressions and mispronunciations’ that schoolmasters decry” (Bourdieu 1991, 53). As the “king’s English” became the imposed standard and regional dialects were cast into an ideological picture either as expressing plurality within the prospective unity of the national language or as a menace to it (Tudeau-Clayton 2018, 2019), Latin and French preserved their special role. For all the negative connotations it carried as the language of scholasticism and Papism, Latin was also the language of rhetoric and classical learning; French, on the other hand, was “the language of a political arch-rival, but also deeply rooted in English since Anglo-Norman times” (Delabastita and Hoenselaars 2015, 8). Unlike British dialects, both Latin and French were taught at school and ingrained in a specific set of stereotyped and routinised social contexts. Latin was undergoing a slow decline as a language of spoken communication, but continued to be practised by scholars, clerics, and students, as part of the humanist ideal of a proper education, predicated on the knowledge of classical authors and regarded as a necessary means for employment in the service of the state. At school and universities, pupils were trained to read classical Latin texts through specific methods, and going to school meant learning Latin grammar (in a sense, Latin was the only language that had a grammar). The syllabus of the most renowned grammar schools showed clearly that the first years were devoted “to learning how to read, write and speak Latin. Pupils begin by learning the rules of Latin grammar, which they practice by learning and imitating elementary texts and dialogues” (Mack 2002, 14).5 Proficiency in spoken Latin was frequently required from the pupils, who studied printed dialogues for use in school, notably those of Erasmus.

Shakespeare’s Multilingual Classrooms  75 Knowledge of Latin was important both academically and in international relations: it provided a common medium for the educated elite to share ideas and discoveries; in addition to this, Latin guaranteed a neutral mode of communication, bearing no political affiliations (Barber 1976; Burke 1991).6 More innovatively, French was taught by headmasters and grammarians, most of them Protestant refugees fleeing their own countries. From 1560 onwards, due to religious persecutions at the hands of the Catholic powers in various parts of Europe, a large number of Protestant refugees arrived from France, Holland, and Italy, geographical and cultural “gobetweens,” for the most part expert craftsmen, and teachers who earned their living sharing their linguistic competence. Multilingual books designed to teach foreign languages entered the market, mainly dialogue books that taught the language through the art of conversation (Howatt and Widdowson 2004; Montini 2011, 2018; Gallagher 2019).7 Scholars agree on framing the spread of didactic manuals within the rising importance of vernaculars in sixteenth century Europe; however, the great medieval tradition of the didactics of Latin as a dead language remained a paradigm for the analytical teaching of living national languages. Grammars for private study and for both public and grammar schools, situational language teaching textbooks, and phrasebooks and dictionaries were the stock-in-trade of a didactic format that had been continued over the centuries in the form of dialogues expressly conceived for the teaching of Latin. Erasmus and Juan Vives wrote colloquia on everyday topics, to be rehearsed in the practice of good pronunciation and enabling students to use the language at once, and along similar lines, the catechistic technique, common in religious communities, consisted of a question and answer format which helped students to break the text into short and simple phrases that could be easily learnt by heart, whereas, on the more secular front, the courtesy books and French manières de langage offered model conversational formats. Appropriately, in the two case studies for this chapter, the representation of languages other than English is filtered through the didactic methods and approaches of the time, in a display of the linguistic, communicative, and ideological effects issuing from the contest between the emergent English vernacular and its learned rivals and counterparts: the language of the nation is seen to challenge Latin and French within the classroom, therefore on their own ground, in a verbal skirmish, the outcome of which is more ambiguous than might be expected.

4.4 The Merry Wives of Windsor : sermo patrius and Mother Tongues In his introduction to the Arden edition of the play, Giorgio Melchiori defines The Merry Wives of Windsor “not so much ‘an English comedy’, as ‘the Comedy of English’ (…), a unique example of representation of

76  Donatella Montini a cross-section of contemporary English social structures” (2000, 4–5). Nearly exclusively in prose, the play brings into focus the relationship between language and community and especially the collective linguistic agency of the community. The play is also notable for explicitly postulating such an entity as “the king’s English,” as a language that members of the community share even as they are continually embroiled in miscommunication (Magnusson 2012; Tudeau-Clayton 2018).8 The scene with the Latin lesson is absent from the Quarto text and has been stigmatised by most modern editors as seemingly irrelevant to the main action, in the wake of Dr Johnson’s trenchant opinion that it was “a very trifling scene, of no use to the plot, and I should think of not great delight to the audience” (Parker 1996, 117).9 More recently, a quite contrary view has emerged as contemporary scholars have reversed this perspective, reading the scene as affording essential clues about the comedy’s inner meaning (Parker 1996; Delabastita 2005; Magnusson 2012; Massai 2020): while undoubtedly intended for an educated audience with a knowledge of Latin, it carries complex implications because of the very fact of playing not on a living language but on Latin, the father language surviving as a set of rules in a school grammar (Melchiori 2000). The scene occurs in Windsor on the street leading from Mrs Page’s house to Sir Evans’s school; it is about 8 a.m., the time children are taken to school (Melchiori 2000, 239). Particular prominence is given to the master’s linguistic performance of the “posing of the parts,” a routinised form of exercise presented in A Shorte Introduction of Grammar (1549), attributed to William Lily and John Colet. Introduced by Edward VI, and intended for “the brynginge up of all those that entende to atteyne the knowledge of the Latin tongue,” the text achieved its purpose by setting out in English the Latin parts of speech. It was the foundational text of Elizabethan grammar schools and would have been “a text familiar to Shakespeare as another schoolboy Will” (Parker 1996, 118). The four characters involved in the scene are Mrs Page; Will Page, the schoolboy; Sir Hugh Evans, a parson and Latin teacher at the town school, whose speech is a Welsh-English idiom; and Mrs Quickly, English housekeeper to Dr Caius, the French physician. Merely presenting the characters is enough to give a hint of the multilingual context in which the play is immersed. While the mimetic function of the scene clearly emerges from the topographical setting in which the dialogic exchange takes place, the effect of realism is produced by the situational context.10 The comic function of the scene is based on the reiterated misunderstandings between Sir Evans and Mrs Quickly occasioned by his saying something in Latin (or rather, his own Welsh Latin) and her supposing she is hearing something said in English, and thus understanding something else entirely. Mistress Page. Sir Hugh, my husband says my son profits nothing in the world at his book. I pray you, ask

Shakespeare’s Multilingual Classrooms  77 him some questions in his accidence. Evans. Come hither, William; hold up your head; come.    15 Mistress Page. Come on, sirrah; hold up your head. Answer your master, be not afraid. Evans. William, how many numbers is in nouns? William. Two. Quickly. Truly, I thought there had been one number    20 more, because they say, ‘Od’s nouns.’ Evans. Peace your tattlings! What is ‘fair,’ William? William. Pulcher. Quickly. Polecats! there are fairer things than polecats, sure.   25 Evans. You are a very simplicity ‘oman: I pray you peace. - What is ‘lapis,’ William? William. A stone. Evans. And what is ‘a stone,’ William? William. A pebble.    30 Sir Hugh Evans. No, it is ‘lapis:’ I pray you, remember in your prain. William. Lapis. Evans. That is a good William. What is he, William, that does lend articles? William. Articles are borrowed of the pronoun, and be    35 thus declined: Singulariter, nominativo, hic, haec, hoc. Evans. Nominativo, hig, hag, hog; pray you, mark. Genitivo, hujus. Well, what is your accusative case? William. Accusativo, hincEvans. I pray you have your remembrance, child:    40 accusativo, hung, hang, hog. Quickly. ‘Hang-hog’ is Latin for bacon, I warrant you. Evans. Leave your prabbles, ‘oman. - What is the focative case, William? William . O,—vocativo, O.    45 Evans. Remember, William; focative is caret. Quickly. And that’s a good root. Evans. ‘Oman, forbear. Mistress Page. Peace. Evans. What is your genitive case plural, William?    50 William. Genitive case? Evans. Ay. William. Genitivo,—horum, harum, horum. Quickly. Vengeance of Jenny’s case! fie on her! never name her, child, if she be a whore.    55 Evans. For shame, ‘oman. Quickly. You do ill to teach the child such words. -He teaches him to hick and to hack, which they’ll do fast

78  Donatella Montini enough of themselves, and to call ‘whore ‘m’ - Fie upon you!    60 Evans. ‘Oman, art thou lunatics? Hast thou no understandings for thy cases and the numbers of the genders? Thou art as foolish Christian creatures as I would desires. Mistress Page [to Quickly]. Prithee, hold thy peace.    65 Evans. Show me now, William, some declensions of your pronouns. William. Forsooth, I have forgot. Evans. It is qui, quae, quod: if you forget your ‘quis,’ your ‘quaes,’ and your ‘quods,’ you must be preeches. Go your    70 ways, and play; go. (MMW, IV.1.12–71)11 The scene plays itself out in a precise sequence of turns of question and answer, and of comments on them, with a first speaker (Evans) launching the exchange and Mrs Quickly regularly replying in counterpoint. But far from proceeding in the controlled, pedagogical questionnaire format that was typical of the discipline,12 this lesson in grammar soon veers off track, corrupted both by the Welsh schoolmaster’s (mis)pronunciation, and Mrs Quickly’s bawdy vernacular. Thus, Welsh phonology and English semantics, each in representation of their mother tongue, enter into an unwitting alliance, the outcome of which is to hack at Latin and the authority of the sermo patrius. Cases as well as inflections are mangled into non-existence (“focative,” “hung, hang, hog”) as translation by ear literally carries the semantics away and begets new meanings (“pulcher”: “polecats”; “genitive”: “Jinny’s case”). Non-standard spelling envoices the character (Planchenault 2017, 11) and comes to automatically index Welsh speakers and related values. The outcome is a competition between Latin and English: between the classical Latin of the classroom and the everyday English of city life, pitching orality against literacy. Mrs Quickly stands as a language user who still bears a strong orientation to orality while her linguistic community is effecting the transition from orality to literacy: she relies on the ear, “she half-hears and half-produces,” she is the true go-between, and represents orality and literacy in transition (Magnusson 2012). As Sonia Massai puts it, variations, both phonetic and semantic, are used “to fine-tune characterisation” and set “some speakers apart from other characters, thus creating a layered acoustic context within which individual voices take on specific, local innovations” (Massai 2020, 160). However, despite Evans’s corruption of sounds, meaning is preserved, basically because a fixed social context supplies the frame for felicitous communication between the speakers: on the one hand, teacher and pupil, despite the unconventional open-air setting, maintain their

Shakespeare’s Multilingual Classrooms  79 respective roles and behaviours that are becoming to them. On the other hand, besides reformulating meaning within the setting of the dramatic action, Mrs Quickly’s vernacular also re-orients the recipient of her message from the ostensible to the actual and selects a different audience for itself – one more attuned to the new message. Arguably, it is the semiotic multiplicity of addressers and addressees in the theatre that opens new and implicit ideological scenarios. In a way, the whole scene may be analysed and interpreted as a macro example of stylisation and its effects: the envoicing of the characters projects them as metaphorical personas, where Evans, as a representative of high culture, effects the chief sabotage of Latin (but also English), and Mrs Quickly, paradoxically standing for plain English, trivialises the hierarchical relationship between Latin and English. There is more. In Coupland’s definition of stylisation, the recipient is assigned a particular role to the extent that a stylised message “requires an acculturated audience able to read and predisposed to judge the semiotic value of a projected persona or genre” (Coupland 2007, 154). With the addressee thus conceptualised as the recipient of an appositely stylised text-type, vast possibilities for inferential insights into the very nature of the audience itself open up for the analyst, who may decode the terms of the stylisation and thereby frame the audience of Shakespeare’s performance. It turns out to be, indeed, an audience with higher-than-usual awareness of language differences and nuances in linguistic performance. All characters are the bearers of a self-parodying representation of one language, without exception, and first and foremost, the national language. In all cases, though functional to distinct domains, the acceptance of cohabiting languages on the behalf of an Elizabethan audience seems to testify to a comprehensive culture of competing forms, in which the rise of a national vernacular and the process of its standardisation stood in parallel with the coexistence of variant forms that could still be easily decoded by its recipients. In this communicative context, Mrs Quickly’s performance of English and Dr Evans’s Latin “in a Welsh pronunciation” testify to the spectators’ understanding of verbal and non-verbal metaphorical implicatures, and give them the opportunity to re-evaluate their own ideological position – ultimately, their own Englishness.

4.5 Henry V: The Nation, the Classroom, the Playhouse “It hath been ever the use of the conqueror to despise the language of the conquered and to force him by all means to learn his.” (Spenser 1596 [1970: 67]) English had quite a different relationship with French in the early modern period than it had with Latin. The Norman conquest of 1066 had entailed a situation of diglossia within select social strata and functions, with the two languages coexisting side by side into the fourteenth century

80  Donatella Montini and beyond (Crunelle-Vanrigh 2015). French held its place for some time as the language of the court without evolving into a completely isolated variety, but by the beginning of the fifteenth century things changed to the extent that law French survived as a subspecies of the original Anglo-Norman dialect in judicial proceedings and law books, whereas Parliament returned to using English for deeds and petitions.13 However, French continued to be the sister language to which English tended to refer and compare: unlike Italian and Dutch, French was the language of a clearly defined nation, and both the language and the nation held a position of tangible relevance. In other words, France was the Other that was always already capable of winning any struggle for agency, whether on real or imaginative terms. (…) Because English people were so deeply familiar with French people and France, it was impossible to construct a trope of the cultural alien, in the way one could construct it for the more exotic Others. (Saenger 2013, 22–23) Language manuals reproduced the format of Erasmus’s Colloquia familiaria but adopted a synoptic layout with two or three languages displayed in parallel columns.14 Dialogues dealing with lively topics related to everyday life, such as finding one’s way, arranging accommodation, dealing with landlords, paved the way for the “practical language of the Grand Tour” (Howatt and Widdowson 2004, 32): the acquisition of an ample and serviceable vocabulary was highly valued, and its embedment within the dialogical form exposed the learner to practising language as action. Dialogues were commonly structured on the principle of orienting the exchange by focussing on the addressee and showed an eminent interest in registers and diaphasic variation, in both speaker and addressee, the latter usually taking the guise of gentleman, merchant, woman, or servant, who conversed in “familiar speech,” “il parlar commune,” designated as a universal rule (Montini 2011, 2018). In their volume devoted to historical dialogues, Culpeper and Kytö point out how early modern pedagogical dialogues are patent examples of “face-to face spoken interactions […] embedded within written texts. The result is even greater functional richness, as we have the functions of the original (or imaginary) interactions embedded in a text which in turn has its own interactive functions with readers” (2010, 9). There is more. Despite being classified as “speech-purposed” texts, manuals aimed at a more comprehensive effect: they trumpeted the usefulness of their dialogues and their perlocutive output, “they reflected social realities but also [were] intended to act within them” (Gallagher 2019, 59). In the sixteenth century, French Protestant refugees such as Jacques Bellot and Claudius Holyband opened schools specifically devoted to teaching the language, which indicates that at that time French had

Shakespeare’s Multilingual Classrooms  81 become an object of second language acquisition. The study of French had started earlier, with the manuals of William Caxton, John Palsgrave, and Jacques Bellot, but the ethical issues proposed by the English humanists were best interpreted in the pedagogical strategies developed by Claude de Sainsliens, anglicised by Claudius Holyband. His textbooks (The French Schoolmaster, 1573; The French Littleton, 1576) presented dialogues in Latin on the left-hand page, and French and English in parallel columns on the right-hand page, thus allowing a synoptic display of the languages and of pronunciation, and adopted a method that innovatively induced a deviation from the traditional teaching, based on grammar and translation. Kate’s English lesson in Henry V has to be framed within this system of textual and linguistic relations, but may also be read as a declaration of the end of a historical and political era, as the reversal of the rise to power of the French idiom brought about by the conquest. Critics have usually focussed on the sexual and political submission represented in the scene (Dollimore, Sinfield 1992; Howard, Rackin 1997), as the princess “translating” her body in preparation for sexual consummation: “Like the French territory she symbolises, Katherine is preparing to be occupied, although her occupation will be called marriage” (Howard, Rackin 1997, 8). Arguably, as accurately shown by Anny Crunelle-Vanrigh, the use and rendering of English in the Shakespearean play parallels in ideology the historical Henry V’s contribution to the reintroduction of vernacular (Blank 1996; Crunelle-Vanrigh 2015). The scene takes place in the middle of Act III (III.4), after the siege and capitulation of Harfleur and the scene of the three captains. The setting would thus be broadly multilingual in its premises, with several regional English dialects as well as the foreign language par excellence, the language of the enemy. The actual dialogue is entirely conducted in French, with the exception of a few English words, thereby taking to its furthest extreme the requirement for foreign speech to be understandable to the audience.15 The didactic context here presents no predetermined social roles to define the speakers’ identity: no teacher/schoolboy or Evans/Will pairing, but rather two noblewomen of different rank, of whom the “inferior,” Alice, plays the teacher, and the “superior,” the princess of France, plays the learner. As in MWW, the characters, Katherine and Alice, are each allocated an identity and position by the language they speak, and the mimetic device at work helps enhance the credibility of the characters and of the dramatic situation (Delabastita 2002). Enter KATHERINE and ALICE, an old Gentlewoman. KATHERINE:  Alice, tu as été en Angleterre, et tu parles   bien le langage. ALICE:  Un peu, madame. KATHERINE:  Je te prie, m’enseignez. Il faut que j’apprenne

82  Donatella Montini   à parler. Comment appelez-vous “la main” en   anglais? ALICE:  La main? Elle est appelée “de hand.” KATHERINE:  De hand. Et “les doigts”? ALICE:  Les doigts? Ma foi, j’oublie les doigts; mais je   me souviendrai. Les doigts? Je pense qu’ils sont   appelés “de fingres”; oui, de fingres. KATHERINE:  La main, de hand. Les doigts, le fingres.   Je pense que je suis le bon écolier. J’ai gagné deux   mots d’anglais vitement. Comment appelez-vous “les   ongles”? ALICE:  Les ongles? Nous les appelons “de nailes.” KATHERINE:  De nailes. Écoutez. Dites-moi si je parle   bien: de hand, de fingres, et de nailes. ALICE:  C’est bien dit, madame. Il est fort bon anglais. KATHERINE:  Dites-moi l’anglais pour “le bras.” ALICE:  “De arme,” madame. KATHERINE:  Et “le coude”? ALICE:  “D’ elbow.” KATHERINE:  D’ elbow. Je m’en fais la répétition de tous   les mots que vous m’avez appris dès à présent. ALICE:  Il est trop difficile, madame, comme je pense. KATHERINE:  Excusez-moi, Alice. Écoutez: d’ hand, de   fingre, de nailes, d’ arma, de bilbow. ALICE:  D’ elbow, madame. KATHERINE:  Ô Seigneur Dieu! Je m’en oublie; d’ elbow.   Comment appelez-vous “le col”? ALICE:  “De nick,” madame. KATHERINE:  De nick. Et “le menton”? ALICE:  “De chin.” KATHERINE:  De sin. Le col, de nick; le menton, de sin. ALICE:  Oui. Sauf votre honneur, en vérité vous prononcez   les mots aussi droit que les natifs d’Angleterre. KATHERINE:  Je ne doute point d’apprendre, par le grâce   de Dieu, et en peu de temps. ALICE:  N’avez-vous pas déjà oublié ce que je vous ai   enseigné? KATHERINE:  Non. Je réciterai à vous promptement: d’   hand, de fingre, de mailes— ALICE:  De nailes, madame. KATHERINE:  De nailes, de arme, de ilbow— ALICE:  Sauf votre honneur, d’ elbow. KATHERINE:  Ainsi dis-je: d’ elbow, de nick, et de sin.   Comment appelez-vous “le pied” et “la robe”? ALICE:  “Le foot,” madame, et “le count.”

Shakespeare’s Multilingual Classrooms  83 KATHERINE:  Le foot, et le count. Ô Seigneur Dieu! Ils   sont les mots de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et   impudique, et non pour les dames d’honneur d’user.   Je ne voudrais prononcer ces mots devant les seigneurs   de France, pour tout le monde. Foh! Le foot et le   count! Néanmoins, je réciterai une autre fois ma   leçon ensemble: d’ hand, de fingre, de nailes, d’   arme, d’ elbow, de nick, de sin, de foot, le count. ALICE:  Excellent, madame. KATHERINE:  C’est assez pour une fois. Allons-nous à   dîner.   They exit.

(HENRY V III.4, 1–60)16 Kate’s training in English integrates maniére de langage and nominalia: the lesson focusses on vocabulary and pronunciation, and is conducted by a dialogue between two speakers, thus rehearsing a linguistic situation regularly featured in language primers and early modern didactic dialogues. Two kinds of recipients and learners are involved, internal and external to the linguistic communication on stage. Keeping in line with theatrical communication, what for Kate are nominalia (parts of the body, days of the week, etc., as typically featured in language manuals), the audience receives as a lesson in dialogue form conducted in a foreign language, namely French, occurring in a “question and answer” format (Mayer 2008).17 The bilingual puns in the scene, however, are obtained especially on the phonological level, and the use of misspelling may also be interpreted as a model of pronunciation. While the obscene double entendre is curiously designed to work only to a French ear, humour may also be derived from “a sense of in-group solidarity among those who believe to embody the notion of linguistic normality” (Delabastita 2002, 313) – something of a Freudian sense of superiority arising from the “us and them” match. Far from being merely ornamental, phonetic devices in the scene show the relevance of heteroglossia as a cultural and political statement. In the terms of stylisation, we have seen that in the Latin lesson in MWW, the teaching context leads to an ideological debasement of the sermo patrius, whereas here the French lesson has more ambiguous implications: in the role-play of Alice as teacher and Katherine as pupil, it is unclear which language is conqueror and which is conquered, English is demeaned, and its most basic, everyday words are turned into bawdy language. In the “processes of social comparison and re-evaluation” that stylisation produces by the involvement of both the speakers’ and “the listeners’ identities, orientation and values,” the English audience is exposed to an (in)voluntary reconsideration of the relationship between the two languages and the two cultures. In spite of the notion that the conquering of France by the English king may be like a reversed Norman

84  Donatella Montini invasion, language teaching frames a more hybrid linguistic condition that testifies to a de facto situation of heteroglossia. In this case too, phonology and semantics cooperate in a joint effort to the creation of new words: Katherine’s mispronunciation of English words generate obscene French words and the two languages merge one into the other, apparently begetting a third language that is macaronic and a self-parody of national English.

4.6 Concluding Remarks In this chapter, I have examined how multilingual didactic contexts in Shakespeare’s dramatic dialogues provided a peculiar insight into the cultural and linguistic knowledge of other languages, and conveyed both the perception of the Other, and the definition of a national Self, in a constant “negotiation of home and abroad, of good and bad” (Delabastita and Hoenselaars 2015, 8). A considerable number of semiotic and sociolinguistic theories and approaches converge in the reappraisal of multilingualism and linguistic variation within fictional texts of the past, such as historical dialogue analysis, the semiotics of theatre, stylisation, and enregisterment: all agree in positioning the use of polyglossia, as a multilayered linguistic device that sheds light on significant cultural scenarios, on complex questions of linguistic identity, and on power relations inherent to language itself. As Tim Machan argues, Multilingualism causes concern not because it resists the economic power of a majority language group or works against national unity, but because languages mediate power, and multilingualism therefore simply has the potential to be coopted in various kinds of power relations. (Machan 2009, 22) Drama, as an oral and aural medium, and the didactic setting within dramatic scenes, is well-suited to this type of investigation because it functions as a place in which the audience is exposed to different modes of speech in dialogue with each other: this contributes to highlighting ideological associations between the concepts of standard English and linguistic authority (Reynolds 2008). The Shakespearean scenes analysed capitalise upon the attitude stereotypically associated with foreign languages, the rise of the national language, and its progressive, but inevitable conquest of primacy. Still, a closer analysis of the language through the lens of stylisation shows a more complex perspective that conflicts with the conventional picture of the triumph of the vernacular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In comparing itself with Latin and French, as rival languages in terms of cultural prestige and linguistic richness, the “king’s English” is able to perform a self-reflexive and metalinguistic exercise and the “others,” Latin

Shakespeare’s Multilingual Classrooms  85 teachers or French princesses, are allowed to “hack our English,” apparently without fear of threats to a still rising linguistic authority. Things change if we attribute to the English language a bifold linguistic authority, and thus a hiatus between the language of the institutions and the language of the people, between standard English and everyday English, between Henry and Falstaff, or Henry and Hal, in other words: in that case, the multilingual performance exhibited in the didactic scenes would offer a perfect picture of the ambiguities of a language that seeks freedom from subjection and at the same time recreates hierarchies within itself.

Notes 1 The second historical tetralogy is the exception that proves the rule: the first and second parts of Henry IV and Henry V present characters who speak Welsh (1HIV, 3.1.193–206), or French (HV, 3.5), Irish, and Scots; or, we may better say, the plays feature characters whose English bears the phonological and syntactic markings of their Welsh, Irish, or Scots speech (HV, 3.3). On how little attention regional dialects receive in Shakespeare’s plays, see also Hope (2004, 6). 2 The Latin lesson Lucentio (in his disguise as Cambio, the teacher) delivers to Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew (3.1) is a case in point (Delabastita and Hoenselaars 2015, 2–3), as is the memorable Latin scene in The Merry Wives of Windsor. In Shakespeare’s macrocorpus, characters like Holofernes and Armado in Love’s Labour’s Lost are specifically devoted to parodying Latin and inkhornisms. 3 On “bad data problem,” see Labov (1994); Nevalainen (1999). 4 Historical dictionaries can give us an idea of the extent to which the English language borrowed words from other languages. The Chronological English Dictionary (CED) for 1604 shows the following data: Latin 30%, French 29%, Native Germanic 20%, Spanish 6%, Greek 1%, Italian less than 1% (Nevalainen 2006, 51). See also Crystal and Crystal 2002. 5 “Across England grammar schools shared the aim of making their pupils wise, pious and eloquent. (…) Moral sentences formed the pupils’ elementary reading matter in the Sententiae pueriles, which they learned by heart as examples of Latin syntax.” (Mack 2002, 11–12). 6 On the multifarious roles played by Latin in early modern Europe, see Leonhardt 2013. 7 In an illuminating book on translation and textuality, A.E.B. Coldiron shows how multilingual books implemented a multididactic strategy: they were material, visual examples of multiple cultures, they “juxtapose alterities before the readers’ eyes, permit no amnesia about the prior foreign work(s), and foster no appropriative illusions of possession” (2015, 173). This particular bilingual mise en page showed a remarkable degree of balance between two or more languages, and induced the reader to assume that the co-presence of cultures is horizontal, even if the status relation among the vernaculars in question was not fully equal. In this respect, multilingual pages are ‘contact zones’ (to borrow Mary Louise Pratt’s term) and the reading they require is comparative and contrastive in nature. (...) and then invite judgments about the relations between the native and the foreign” (Coldiron 2015, 175). 8 The trope “King’s English” first occurred in Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique, 1553. In contrast with Magnusson 2012, Tudeau–Clayton argues

86  Donatella Montini that Shakespeare’s use of the phrase in MWW is intended to mark specific exclusions, in dialogue and confrontation with the Host’s use of “our English tongue,” “our English” as ”an accommodating, inclusive, and mobile vernacular without a centre of ownership” (Tudeau-Clayton 2018, 114). 9 See Parker 1996 for a list of critics and modern editors of the play who agreed in sentencing the scene to irrelevancy: from Northrop Frye, to G. R. Hibbard (New Penguin), to H. J. Oliver (Arden), and T. W. Craik (Oxford). 10 In his attempt to work out broad generalisations about the performative effects of multilingualism on the early modern stage, Dirk Delabastita lists three main functions: mimetic, comic and ideological. In the first case foreign languages (and dialects) help to give credibility to individual characters and dramatic situations, contextualizing geolinguistic and sociolinguistic facts. “When characters such as Fluellen or Katherine resort to ‘foreign languages’ or ‘funny’ accents this adds further strokes to their individual portraits in the play, but not without simultaneously giving them a position and an identity in a wider spatio-temporal setting which was known to be historically authentic” (Delabastita 2002, 306). Humour, on the other hand, is a classic effect of multilingualism on stage: the clash between English and its regional varieties, as well as between English and the various foreign languages present in a play, is systematically exploited through polyglot puns on the semantic, pragmatic, and phonetic levels, and especially in translation. Finally, Shakespeare’s use of his typical “great feast of languages,” in a dialogue between linguistic normality and abnormality, rarely disregards ideological meanings, in a period in which England was in the process of establishing itself as a nation state. 11 All quotations are from The Merry Wives of Windsor (2000, edited by Giorgio Melchiori). 12 The method of the lesson is the double translation as offered in Colet’s official grammar, a system of translating out of Latin into English and back into Latin again, without difference. “Young students first read Latin texts and translated texts from Latin into English; then, translating from English to Latin undergo in what Walter Ong famously called ‘a Renaissance puberty rite’, a process of cultural assimilation and subjectification that reinforced the notion of translation imperii et studii” (Correll 2011, 28). 13 Towards the end of Late Middle Ages, French lost its place as the second language of the kingdom and a slow but irreversible process from the AngloFrench Plantagenet dynasty to a monolingual nation under the Tudors began. In 1385 John of Trevisa (1326–1412), cleric and translator, complained that English children knew more French than English, and the break with the past was marked a few years later, when Richard II’s deposition (1399) was read in English, as well as Henry IV’s acceptance speech. Eventually, Henry V adopted English as the language of royal correspondence, and at the end of the fifteenth century, statutes and affairs of state were written in English (Howatt and Widdowson 2004). 14 On the influence of the visual and typographical forms of didactic dialogues and on the way transcultural textual relations were codified in the English printed texts of the later sixteenth century, see Coldiron 2015. 15 However, Crunelle-Vanrigh argues that in the wooing scene “Kate’s French is (…) made doubly familiar for the audience: lexically, because her specific corpus has for the most part been absorbed into English; and syntactically, because her sentence structure is English especially in longer sentences. (…) Kate’s statement is linguistically transparent because, under a thin disguise, it simply accommodates French to the

Shakespeare’s Multilingual Classrooms  87 not for [N] to [V] structure indicative of prohibition in English. (…) If shorter statements are fairly idiomatic, Shakespeare seems to have devised an anglicised variety of French on the model of syntactic evolution of Anglo-French for longer statements, understandably harder on the audience” (Crunelle-Vanrigh 2015, 77–8). 16 All quotations are from King Henry V (1992, edited by J.H. Walter). 17 In the 1960 BBC adaptation of the play, Alice holds a teaching book in her hand and answers Katherine’s (Judy Dench) questions while checking it.

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88  Donatella Montini Delabastita, Dirk. 2002. “A Great Feast of Languages. Shakespeare’s Multilingual Comedy in ‘King Henry V’ and the Translator.” The Translator 8(2), 303–340. Delabastita, Dirk. 2005. “Cross-Language Comedy in Shakespeare.” Humor, International Journal of Humor Research 18(2), 160–184. Delabastita, Dirk, and Ton Hoenselaars, eds. 2015. Multilingualism and the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Dollimore, Jonathan, and Alan Sinfield. 1992. “History and Ideology, Masculinity and Miscegenation. The Instance of Henry V.” In Faultlines. Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading. Edited by A. Sinfield, 109– 142. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Elam, Keir. 1980. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London: Routledge. Florio, John. 1578. His Firste Fruites: Which Yeelde Familiar Speech, Merie Proverbs, Wittie Sentences, and Golden Sayings. Also a Perfect Introduction to the Italian and English Tongues. London: Thomas Woodcock. Gallagher, John. 2019. Learning Languages in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Giles, Howard, and Nikolas Coupland. 1991. Language Contexts and Consequences. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Hodson, Jane. 2014. Dialect in Film and Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hodson, Jane. 2016. “Dialect in Literature.” In The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics. Edited by Violeta Sotirova, 416–429. London: Bloomsbury. Hope, Jonathan. 2004. “Shakespeare and Language: An Introduction.” In Shakespeare and Language. Edited by Catherine M.S. Alexander, 1–17. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hope, Jonathan. 2010. Shakespeare and Language: Reason, Eloquence and Artifice in the Renaissance. London: Methuen. Howard, Jean, and Phyllis Rackin. 1997. Engendering Nation. A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories. London: Routledge. Howatt, A.P.R., and H.G. Widdowson. 2004. A History of English Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jucker, Andreas, Gerd Fritz, and Franz Lebsanft, eds. 1999. Historical Dialogue Analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Jucker, Andreas, and Irma Taavitsainen. 2013. English Historical Pragmatics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Labov, William. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change. Volume 1: Internal Factors. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Leonhardt, Jurgen. 2013. Latin: Story of a World Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Locher, Miriam. 2017. “Multilingualism in Fiction.” In Pragmatics of Fiction. Edited by M.A. Locher and A.H. Jucker, 297–327. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Machan, Tim William. 2009. Language Anxiety. Conflict and Change in the History of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mack, Peter. 2002. Elizabethan Rhetoric. Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Magnusson, Lynne. 2012. “History and Language-Games.” In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare. Edited by A.F. Kinney, 239–257. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Massai, Sonia. 2020. Shakespeare’s Accents. Voicing Identity in Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shakespeare’s Multilingual Classrooms  89 Mayer, Jean-Christophe. 2008. “The Ironies of Babel in Shakespeare’s Henry V.” In Representing France and the French in Early Modern English Drama. Edited by Jean-Christophe Mayer, 127–141. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Mazzon, Gabriella. 2003. “Pronouns and Nominal Address in Shakespearean English. A Socio-affective Marking System in Transition.” In Diachronic Perspectives on Address Term Systems. Edited by Irma Taavitsainen and Andreas H. Jucker, 223–249. Amsterdam, John Benjamins. Melchiori, Giorgio. 2000. “Introduction.” In William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor. Edited by Giorgio Melchiori, 1–117. London: The Arden Shakespeare. Montini, Donatella. 2011. “Teaching Italian as a Foreign Language: Notes on Linguistic and Pragmatic Strategies in Florio’s Fruits.” Textus XXIV, 517–536. Montini, Donatella. 2018. “Multilinguismo e strategie pragmatiche nei dialoghi didattici di John Florio.” Studi di grammatica italiana, Accademia della Crusca 37, 75–93. Morgan, Oliver. 2019. Turn-Taking in Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nevalainen, Terttu. 1999. “Making the Best Use of ‘Bad’ Data: Evidence for Sociolinguistic Variation in Early Modern English.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 100(4), 499–533. Nevalainen, Terttu. 2006. An Introduction to Early Modern English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Parker, Patricia. 1996. Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture,Context. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Planchenault, Gaelle. 2017. “Doing Dialects in Dialogues: Regional Social, and Ethnic Variation in Fiction.” In Pragmatics of Fiction. Edited by M.A. Locher and A.H. Jucker, 265–296. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton. Plescia, Iolanda, ed. 2016. The Shape of a Language, Memoria di Shakespeare. A Journal of Shakespearean Studies 3. Reynolds, Erin. 2008. “‘Strange Accents or Ill Shapen Sounds’: Dialect in Early Modern Drama.” http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/courses/6362-ReynoldsErin.htm (last accessed 30 April 2020). Rudanko, Juhani. 1993. Pragmatic Approaches to Shakespeare. Lanham: University Press of America. Saenger, Michael. 2013. Shakespeare and the French Borders of English. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Saenger, Michael, ed. 2014. Interlinguicity, Internationality, and Shakespeare. Montreal-Kingston: McGill Queen’s University Press. Shakespeare, William. 1992. King Henry V. Edited by J.H. Walter. London: The Arden Shakespeare. Shakespeare, William. 2000. The Merry Wives of Windsor. Edited by Giorgio Melchiori. London: The Arden Shakespeare. Siemon, James. 2019. “Shakespeare and Social Languages.” In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Language. Edited by L. Magnusson and D. Schalkwyk, 132–148. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spenser, Edmund. 1596/1970. A View of the Present State of Ireland. Edited by W.L. Renwick. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

90  Donatella Montini Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret. 2018. “‘The King’s English’ ‘Our English’?: Shakespeare and Linguistic Ownership.” In Shakespeare and Authority. Citations, Conceptions and Constructions. Edited by K. Halsey and A. Vine, 113–133. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret. 2019. Shakespeare’s Englishes. Against Englishness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

5 “Peden bras vidne whee bis cregas” Cornish on the Early Modern Stage Cristina Paravano

5.1 Introduction In 2006 the Royal Shakespeare Company asked the well-known Cornish theatre company Kneehigh to stage Shakespeare’s Cymbeline for their festival in Stratford-upon-Avon. This Cornwall-based company, which has a strong connection with the Cornish community, was also given permission to rewrite the play according to their very peculiar theatrical aesthetic. As the then artistic director Anne Rice explained, the company’s rendition of the play is profoundly informed by its origins and by its Cornishness: “The way we work affects the shows we produce,” claimed Rice, “the air we breathe gives us a freedom and a wildness which I think are essentially Cornish” (qtd in Sierz 2006). Besides providing a controversial reading of the play1 and making “an even more incisive break from the Shakespearean text, with its modern Cornish dialect” (Kirwan 2012, 56), the production emphasised the uniqueness of the Cornish language and culture, while suggesting how distinctive Cornish must once have been when it was used on stage by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. If compared to other early modern regional languages and dialects, Cornish2 did not enjoy a long and prolific use on the English Renaissance stage.3 Even though “most surviving literature in middle and early modern Cornish is dramatic” (Murdoch 1994, 211), early modern English drama mainly features references to Cornish people, and to a number of cultural stereotypes related to them. Rather than actual Cornish speakers who employ their native language consistently, we find single or derivative Cornish words. Nonetheless, the issue deserves more critical attention.4 Paula Blank (1996, 2003 and 2006) briefly discusses it in what is an otherwise thorough investigation of the representation of southern English (1996, 69–99) but does not examine dramatic specimens of Cornish. Mark Stoyle (2002) and Brian O. Murdoch (1994) devote more attention to Cornish, even if they do not provide an extensive and comprehensive analysis of the treatment of Cornish characters, and their cultural and linguistic representation.

92  Cristina Paravano In this essay I will investigate the presence of Cornish characters in a number of plays from the early modern period. Through a search in the English drama database in EEBO, I firstly identified the plays5 featuring the adjective “Cornish” (14) and the noun “Cornwall” (13; the term is used to identify both the English county and characters, like the Duke of Cornwall in Shakespeare’s King Lear). In an attempt to evaluate the actual relevance of the presence of Cornish language and culture, I made the same search for the adjectives and nouns related to the other Celtic languages, and retrieved the following data: “Irish” recurs in 58 plays and “Ireland” in 46; “Welsh” in 53 and “Wales” in 31; “Scottish” in 20 and “Scotland” in 29. A quick comparison of the results suggests that Cornish is the least represented among the Celtic languages. After a thorough analysis of the occurrences of “Cornish” and “Cornwall,” I selected those plays whose investigation may shed light on the cultural and political implications of the representation of Cornishness: Shakespeare’s Henry V, John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck, John Middleton and William Rowley’s A Fair Quarrel, two plays by Ben Jonson, The Staple of News and The Magnetic Lady, and four comedies (The Northern Lass, The City Wit, The Demoiselle and The Court Beggar) by Richard Brome, the playwright who showed more interest in the representation of Cornishness than all his contemporaries. I mainly focused on plays which offer specimens of Cornish, while analysing how their occurrence, albeit sporadic, makes them significant and incisive.

5.2 Cornish in the Early Modern Period In the late Middle Ages, “Cornwall was the English county least known by medieval kings and medieval cartographers and the most foreign in its language and beliefs” (Campbell 2004, 169). So much so that in the early modern period Cornwall and England were still regarded as different countries, as confirmed by tags such as “Anglia” and “Cornubia” found in several maps produced in the period.6 The English considered Cornwall as a land apart, “an Ultima Thule,” whose inhabitants were “uncivilized roughnecks” (Stoyle 2002, 66). Consequently, the Cornish language, perceived as a remote and foreign “dialect of the unlettered, a language of ignorance” (Blank 1996, 82), brought about a generally contemptuous attitude on the part of the English. Among the passionate users of the language, the Cornish antiquary Richard Carew (1555–1620) stands out as “the one, true, early modern champion of regional English” (Blank 2006, 218). In his Survey of Cornwall (1602), he discussed the distinctive qualities of Cornish, while providing a sharp social and linguistic portrayal of the county. He saw Cornish as one of the antiquities of the region which should be promoted to a national status. Nevertheless, while praising it, he also expressed some veiled criticism, by pointing out that a

“Peden bras vidne whee bis cregas”  93 Cornish accent may well sound “broad and rude,” despite the goodness and purity of the speaker’s English: The English which they speak is good and pure, as receiving it from the hands of their own gentry and the eastern merchants, but they disgrace it in part with a broad and rude accent, somewhat like the Somersetshire men, especially in pronouncing the names. (Carew 1953 [1602], 127) Cornish never acquired the status and dignity of a literary language. As Simon Evans remarks, “at no period were its words and constructions cultivated by the literary artist as were those of Welsh and Irish” (Evans 1969, 296). Also, Carew in fact bemoans that Cornish words needed “but another Spenser to make them passable” (Carew 1953 [1602], 127). The language was never employed to express profound experiences and concepts in poems, plays or prose works, but was mainly used in literary texts only meant for spiritual edification. This lack of a wellestablished literary tradition may be one of the reasons why, unlike other regional languages, such as Somersetshire, Lancashire and Northern dialects, which enjoyed popularity on the early modern stage, Cornish was rarely employed. Moreover, other factors may have had an impact, such as the playwrights’ imperfect knowledge of the language, the audience’s appreciation of other dialects, the unavailability of actors able to speak Cornish, and the political relationship with Cornwall in the specific hic et nunc of England. Finally, it is also plausible that Shakespeare and his contemporaries alluded to areas of England whose influence and impact they perceived as more relevant and intriguing for their audience or especially topical. As Dirk Delabastita and Ton Hoenselaars remarked, “the linguistic and interlinguistic choices of playwrights were always also part of a more serious – politically and morally charged – negotiation of ‛self’ and ‘other’, of ‘home’ and ‘abroad’” (2015, 8). On the other hand, early modern playwrights may have had limited knowledge of Cornwall or of its national language and culture, also owing to the marked decrease in the number of Cornish speakers, which profoundly affected the spread of the language and its use in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As Ken George clarifies, the number of speakers plummeted dramatically in the early modern period, halving from 40% in 1550 to 26% in 1600 and 15% in 1650, till the death of Cornish as a community language at the beginning of the nineteenth century ([1993] 2009, 489). As Stuart Dunmore remarks, the Cornish “distinctive cultural identity remained strongest in the districts where the most in use” (2011, 93–94), that is, western Cornwall, while in the eastern part of the county the Cornish language had almost disappeared by the beginning of the fourteenth century. The English cartographer and antiquary John Norden presaged the decline in the use of this language: in the western part of the

94  Cristina Paravano country “the Cornishe tounge is moste in vse amongste the inhabitantes, [...] [b]ut it seemeth that in few yeares the Cornishe language wil be by litle and litle abandoned” ([1610] 1728, 26–27). As a matter of fact, the Cornish language progressively retreated westwards and was confined to that area. Alan M. Kent (2006, 489) traces the beginning of the decline of the language back to Wars of the Roses (1455–1485) and identified the events which played a more crucial role: the ending of the performances of the Cornish miracle plays;7 the Renaissance and the Reformation, which spread English as the language of the new faith, and “did much to kill Cornish” (Jenner 1904, 12); but also six main revolts against the English in 1450, 1549, 1554, 1643, 1645 and 1648, seen as Cornish attempts to defend their distinctive identity and their religious beliefs.8 The Cornish language played a pivotal role “in preserving Cornish ‘otherness’ in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (Dunmore 2011, 93), and became a way to express resistance to the English domination. Cornish people refused to be subordinated to the English, politically but also linguistically, as Carew explains: Most of the inhabitants can speak no word of Cornish, but few are ignorant of English, and yet some so affect their own, as to a stranger they will not speak it [English], for if meeting them by chance you inquire the way or any such matter, your answer shall be, Meea navidna cowzasawzneck, I can speak no Saxonage. (1953 [1602], 127) As is now widely accepted, a more proper translation of the Cornish sentence that Carew included in this extract is “I will speak no Saxonage,” which clearly expresses hostility but also suggests ability to speak an enemy’s language. The reference to “Saxonage,” moreover, marked “the alien status of the English as descendants of the Saxon invaders of the British Isles, in contrast to the Cornish who claimed descent from the native inhabitants” (McClain 2004, 185). Nonetheless, the event that definitely fostered the decline of the Cornish language was the English Civil War, since Cornwall was the only county that openly supported the royal cause of Charles I. When the Parliamentarian forces entered Cornwall, they found a “strange, alien land inhabited by people who were both dangerously royalist and separatist, possessing a robust sense of their unique ethnic identity” (Cramsie 2015, 93), but whose language was doomed to die out.

5.3 Cornish and the Early Modern Stage In his Specimens of Cornish Provincial Dialect (1846), the antiquarian Jan Treenoodle (pseudonym of William Sandys)9 quoted several words of supposed Cornish origin used by playwrights such as William Shakespeare

“Peden bras vidne whee bis cregas”  95 and Ben Jonson. The most well-founded assumption is that the term “hoddy-doddy,” from Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour (1598), may derive from the Cornish “hoddy-mandoddy,” meaning “simpleton” (Jago 1882, 188): “Well, goodwife Bad, Cob’s wife, and you/ That make your husband such a hoddy-doddy” (Jonson 2001 5.1.56–57).10 Cornish is in this instance merely used for comic purposes, to ridicule a character by suggesting his coarseness and gullibility rather than to mark his rural origins. Jonson is among the playwrights that expressed more interest in Cornwall and its inhabitants, as the references to Cornish culture in some of his works prove.11 Nevertheless, despite his sophisticated mastery in the representation of several regional languages, his plays do not feature characters speaking Cornish extensively.12 Shakespeare never portrayed Cornish-speaking characters; the adjective “Cornish” recurs twice in the whole corpus, and only in Henry V (1599). This may suggest that the playwright did not have enough knowledge (or none at all) of this regional language. In the following extract from Henry V, a comic situation is generated when Pistol meets the disguised monarch on the eve of the battle of Agincourt. Yet he fails to recognize his king and takes him for a Cornishman, probably relying either on his name or his accent: PISTOL:  [...] What is thy name? KING HENRY:  Harry le roi. PISTOL:  Leroi? A Cornish name. Are KING HENRY:  No, I am a Welshman.

thou of Cornish crew?

(Shakespeare 2005 4.1.49–52) Le Roi clearly denotes a mispronunciation of the French “le roi,” and can’t be related to Cornish. The claim of Cornish origin for the king, who was actually born in Monmouth, Wales, may allude to a now-lost play entitled Harry of Cornwall, performed around 1592 by Lord Strange’s Men (Wiggins and Richardson 2013, 133), apparently very popular at that time. In the play, as Paola Pugliatti remarks, the king confronts “the ‘dialects’ of the components of his regionally variegated militia” (1993, 243). Interestingly, Shakespeare portrayed a Welshman, Fluellen, a Scotsman, Jamy, and an Irishman, Macmorris, but did not depict any Cornishman, as if Cornwall were not part of Henry’s reign.13 On the other hand, Pistol’s remark reminds the audience that the English forces also included Cornish soldiers. In a bid to represent and celebrate the unity of the English army, Shakespeare portrayed it as a linguistically uniform group: Henry V’s soldiers do not speak their native Celtic languages, but their words are spelled so as to evoke the regional English accents typical of their home regions.14 “The representation of dialects and regional languages in literature,” Görlach argues, is “limited to certain conspicuous

96  Cristina Paravano phonetic or lexical features which are enough to signal to the audience that a speaker is of either southern or northern origin” (1991, 14). Images of Cornishmen are much more frequent in the Stuart age. Stage plays, especially in this period, “helped to keep the image of the rebellious Cornishman current” (Stoyle 2002, 45). In John Ford’s Perkin Warbeck (1634), King Henry VII asks for news about the Cornish uprising (referring to the rebellion of 1497): HENRY:  The news? DAUBENEY:  Ten thousand Cornish,   Grudging to pay your subsidies, have gather’d. ­­  A head. Led by a blacksmith and a lawyer,   They make for London, and to them is join’d LORD AUDLEY:  As they march, their number daily INCREASES; THEY ARE − HENRY:  Rascals! − Talk no more.   Such as not worthy of my thoughts tonight.

(Ford 1986 1.3.128–35) While the king quickly dismisses them as “rascals,” later in the play the Scrivener Astley, among Perkin Warbeck’s supporters, uses an animal image to refer derogatorily to the Cornish rebels: “We/ Will pell-mell run amongst the Cornish choughs/ Presently and in a trice” (4.2.58–60). Choughs are red-billed crows, a species common in Cornwall (OED).15 “Every time an Englishman referred to the Cornish as ‘choughs,’ he simultaneously reminded his listeners of the alleged Cornish national characteristic of boorishness” (Stoyle 2002, 38). Anglo-Cornish tensions were made visible onstage and often rendered in comic terms. In A Fair Quarrel (1617), John Middleton and William Rowley used the term “chough” as the name of one of their characters, “a simple Cornish gentleman of great estate, suitor to Jane,” actually a conceited boor, who comes to London to learn fashionable speech and woo a lady. As Richard Dutton suggests, besides ridiculing Cornish people, the name may have had a political resonance at court, since in 1617, before being made Prince of Wales, Prince Charles was also Duke of Cornwall (Dutton 2016, 115). The Cornish clownish gentleman is accompanied by a servant named Trimtram, whose name hides a comic pun on Tristan/Tristran, the Cornish knight who joined the mythical quest for the Holy Grail. The play provides a limited and stereotypical representation of the Cornish identity through the references to some Cornish clichés, such as “the Cornish hug” (5.1.107), a type of wrestling hold, which highlights the popularity of this sport in Cornwall, and “Cornish diamonds” (5.1.122), quartz crystals, which evoke the thriving Cornish mining industry. The Cornish language

“Peden bras vidne whee bis cregas”  97 becomes synonymous with unintelligibility when the rich citizen Russell expresses his bewilderment at Chough’s sudden unwillingness to marry his daughter: RUSSELL:  Good sir, speak English to me. CHOUGH:  All this is Cornish to thee. I say

thy daughter has drunk

bastard in her time. (Middleton and Rowley 2007 5.1.165–67) When Russell asks the knight to speak English, he does not imply that Chough has been speaking Cornish, but merely requires a clear explanation of his odd change of mind. Chough’s reply, “All this is Cornish to thee,” reveals that the character’s cultural horizon is restricted to Cornwall but that he is, nonetheless, aware that to non-Cornish people his language may be almost incomprehensible. Some years later, in The Staple of News (1625), Ben Jonson highlighted similar cultural aspects related to Cornishness, while comically hinting at the contemporary situation. In the play, the prodigal Pennyboy Junior sets about courting the beautiful and wealthy Lady Pecunia, as her surname suggests: PENNYBOY JUNIOR:  A Cornish gentlewoman,   Mistress Pecunia Do-all. PICKLOCK:  A great lady   Indeed she is, and not of mortal race,   Infanta of the Mines.

I know her,

(Jonson 1988 1.6.39–42) The wealth of Aurelia Clara Pecunia originates from the precious mineral and metal mines in Cornwall. Even though, as Anthony Parr remarks, the term “infanta” came also “to be used more loosely, and often ironically, to describe a great lady” (Jonson 1988, 62 n14), in this context it undoubtedly alludes to the failure of the negotiations for the marriage between Charles and the Spanish Infanta, a diplomatic disaster, the memory of which was still vivid in the popular imagination. Here Jonson draws a fascinating connection between Cornwall and Spain, which is explored by Richard Brome in his comedy The Northern Lass (1629), as I will discuss later. One of the most intriguing references to Cornish culture is in Jonson’s The Magnetic Lady (1632): DAMPLAY:  What’s your name Sir? Or your Country? BOY:  John Trygust my name: A Cornish youth, and the Poet’s Servant. DAMPLAY:  West-country breed, I thought, you were so bold.

98  Cristina Paravano BOY:  Or rather saucy: to find out your palate, Master Damplay. Faith,

we do call a spade a spade, in Cornwall. If you dare damn our play i’the wrong place we shall take heart to tell you so. (Jonson 2000 1 Chorus 63–69) As was common, especially in the early modern age, characters on stage would allude to real people in contemporary London. Peter Happé (2000), who edited The Magnetic Lady, conjectured that the boy, defined as “the Poet’s Servant,” is a fictional version of the playwright Richard Brome. He was actually a former servant and apprentice to Jonson,16 and, at the time of the performance in 1632, was a well-established and successful dramatist. The boy’s fictitious surname features the common prefix tre-, distinctive of surnames of Cornish origin. Many Cornish surnames and place names have the prefixes tre-, pol- or pen-, as the old saying quoted from Tilley confirms: “By Tre, Pol and Pen you shall ye know all Cornishmen” (Tilley 1950). Even though this reference may hint at Brome’s Cornish origins, the evidence Happé put forward was inconclusive (2000, 221). In a bid to explain Brome’s knowledge of stage dialects and regional languages, and his ability to dramatise them,17 Catherine Shaw, one of Brome’s biographers, argues that “the skill with which he handles country dialects might suggest that, although he certainly knew the city well, he was not originally a Londoner” (Shaw 1980, 18). It is likely that the playwright was not from London, yet there is no evidence that he was from a specific area of England. Some scholars argued that Brome worked as an actor, like Shakespeare, Jonson and Heywood at the beginning of their careers. Therefore, he may have been exposed to provincial languages while touring through the country. Brome showed indisputable mastery in the representation of some specific regional languages, such as Lancashire, Somerset and Yorkshire, which were portrayed more consistently and skilfully than Cornish. On the other hand, Brome is the dramatist who portrayed the highest number of Cornish characters in his comedies and, remarkably, one of the few specimens of Cornish in early modern drama is in his comedy The Northern Lass. Cornwall and its language seem to accompany Brome throughout all his career, from the early The Northern Lass (1629), with a Cornish gentlemen named Master Salamon Nonsense, to The Court Beggar (1640), featuring the country gentlemen Swain-Wit from Penzance. On the early modern stage, very few characters employ Cornish words, and most of them are the fruit of Brome’s pen. In The City Wit, the Cornish widow Tryman, actually an Englishman in disguise, makes up fictitious names for her supposed heirs in her pretended will. They are all consistent with her presumed Cornish origin: “I, Jane Tryman of Knockers Hole, in the county of Cornwall, widow, sick in body, but whole in mind, and of perfect memory, do make my last will and testament, in manner and form following” (Brome 2010a 3.1 speech

“Peden bras vidne whee bis cregas”  99 368). Knockers Hole is the ancient name of a real location in Cornwall, near Plymouth. Alongside the geographical relevance, the name provides a pun: one of the possible meanings of “Knockers” is “person of striking appearance” (OED 1c), whereas a common usage of hole was “orifice,” often in the vulgar sense referring to female genitals. The joke is quite explicit and suggests that Tryman is from a place meaning “orifice of an attractive person” (Schafer 2010, CW n7390). The names of her family members, coherent with her Cornish origin, concur to give consistency to her character. One of Tryman’s nephews is Sir Marmaduke Trevaughan of St. Miniver, a coastal town in northern Cornwall; another is Master Francis Trepton, and her niece is Barbara Tredrite. According to Elizabeth Schafer (2010, CW n7406), “tread” could also suggest another pun as the word was used for the copulation of birds (OED, v.8. a, b). Therefore, the name combines both the idea of the character’s Cornish origin and a sexual connotation, which is fitting for Tryman. The actor performing Tryman, like the one playing the Cornish gentleman Swain-Wit in The Court Beggar, may have delivered his lines using a heavy stage Cornish accent, yet there is no reference to this in the text.18 Neither do the other characters comment on their way of speaking, nor does the text indicate this. Their words are actually rendered in standard English and do not feature any Cornish words. In The Sparagus Garden (1635), instead, Brome portrays a woman from the Low Countries named Martha, who runs the pleasure garden of the title. Even though she does not speak Dutch, her English shows some signs of her native language. In the case of The City Wit and The Court Beggar, we may suppose that Brome’s inadequate knowledge of the language prevented him from experimenting extendedly with it.19 Yet, even though Tryman and SwainWit are not actual Cornish speakers, Brome’s depiction of this supposedly rich widow from Cornwall and of the Cornish country gentleman, contributes to enhancing the antagonism between city and countryside that characterizes plays like these, in which people try to climb the social ladder in spite of their rural origin. Brome shows much more interest in Cornwall and its language in The Northern Lass (1629). The play depicts a real Cornish gentleman called Master Salamon Nonsense, who briefly speaks his native language. He is a suitor to Constance, the northern lass of the title, a young woman recently settled in London from the North of England. His surname is appropriate for a character who has poor education and scarce communication skills. He seems to embody the idea that “provincial speakers often talk ‘nonsense’ in Renaissance literature” (Blank 1996, 70). In the following extract he is central to a comic “intercultural” situation when the lecherous Justice of the Peace Squelch takes on the persona of a Spaniard. Even though Squelch never speaks a single word of Spanish, when he talks, the other characters pretend not to understand him. His presence and his supposed inability to speak English generate a great deal

100  Cristina Paravano of humour when Nonsense tries to interact with him and offers to help as an interpreter: BULFINCH:  Alas, what

shall we do then? Gentlemen, have any of you any Spanish to help me to understand this strange stranger? TRIEDWELL:  Not a rial, sir, not I. LUCKLESS:  Not a rial’s worth amongst us of any language but sheer English. BULFINCH:  What shire of our nation is next to Spain? Perhaps he may understand that shire’s English. TRIEDWELL:  Devonshire or Cornwall, sir. NONSENSE:  Never credit me, but I will spout some Cornish at him. Peden bras vidne whee bis cregas. SQUELCH:  Am I transformed utterly? Is my language altered with my apparel, or are you all mad? What unspeakable misery is this? BULFINCH:  I see we shall never understand, nor do good on him till he be instructed in the English tongue. (Brome 2010d 5.1, speeches 1017–24) Nonsense assumes that Cornish will be more intelligible to the Spaniard since Cornwall is geographically closer to Spain. Cornish had “a certaine grace and reddynes of speach not unlike to that of the Biscaies,” which also suggests a larger consonance between Spain and England (Antonio Ortiz qtd in Highley 2008, 178). Moreover, Cornwall was seen as a Catholic stronghold, and its language was associated with Catholics. Since the Prayer Book Rebellion in 1549, Cornish was “stigmatized as a ­‘backward’ language and the language of Catholics potentially allied to enemies of England” (Mills 2010, 200). This profound connection may have increased the hostility between Cornwall and the rest of the country.20 The anti-Spanish sentiments, shared and fuelled by the other characters on stage, take the form of an insult in Cornish, a soft, subtle xenophobic outburst which is part of a wider network of references to Spain. Nonsense’s brief sentence in Cornish is actually an accurate version of the language, “presumably recorded likewise from natural speech” (Chaudhri 2007, 65).21 It means ‟Ass, you will be hanged” (Sanders 2010a n4225) or, more appropriately, “fat head, you will be hanged,” as translated by Henry Jenner (1929, 249–50). This reinforces the idea of Cornish as “a badge of social, indeed cultural and perhaps intellectual, inferiority” (Price 1992, 306) since, despite their higher social position, characters like Nonsense are held up to ridicule. The above exchange also underlines the arrogance and presumption of the English who already expected people from other nations to speak English. Finally, in The Demoiselle (1637/8), Brome delineates the Cornish knight Sir Amphilus, named after a Platonist philosopher, and his servant Trebasco, whose name features one of the typical Cornish prefixes. They

“Peden bras vidne whee bis cregas”  101 recall Chough and Trimtram in Middleton and Rowley’s A Fair Quarrel but also Tom and his servant Coulter from Brome’s The Sparagus Garden, two rural comic characters who speak southwestern dialect.22 In a bid to show his affection for his pony, Sir Amphilus employs the word “gonhelly,” a Cornish term meaning pony, to identify his horse: “my little poor gonhelly, that would have carried me on this little iron from Penzance to St Columb on a day” (Brome 2010c 2.1, speech 280). His memory of the pony is related to some happy experiences he lived in Cornwall, his homeland, as the reference to two Cornish locations testify: Penzance is an important town in West Cornwall, which prospered in the seventeenth century thanks to the local mining industry. With St Columb Major, he probably refers to a town to the east of Newquay, around 40 miles from Penzance.23 One scene in this comedy seems to demolish the hypothesis that Brome might have a Cornish origin, and opens up a new and more plausible possibility. When the stage directions indicate that the servant Trebasco replies in Cornish, three dots are inserted. Unable to render this regional language, Brome may have relied on the actor’s knowledge of it, so that the dots here signal that it is up to the player to improvise in performance: Enter [Sir] AMPHILUS [and] TREBASCO. AMPHILUS:  Trebasco, skip-kennel. TREBASCO:  [Replies in Cornish.] AMBROSE:  It speaks, methinks. OLIVER:  Yes, and its shadow answers it in Cornish. VALENTINE:  I know him: ’tis the wise western knight that should   Have married Vermin’s daughter. AMPHILUS:  Skip-kennel, you shall turn footman, now, skip-kennel.   I’ll ne’er keep horse more— TREBASCO:  You must be footman then yourself, sir. AMPHILUS:  No, nor mare neither. (2.1, speeches 245–52) Lucy Munro, who edited the text for the Richard Brome Online Edition, explored the comic possibilities of this scene in workshops with actors: she mainly focused on the accent employed by the characters. The actor playing Trebasco was provided with a brief speech in Cornish, in which he reminds his master of the death of his dearly loved horse, as if the climactic emotional moment of the passing of a beloved should be expressed in the language that best represents his identity (“Soweth, syrra, agas marghyúmarow,”“Alas, sir, your horse is dead” (Brome 2010c, n6086). Interestingly, Brome depicts three Cornish characters of different social standing (Sir Nonsense, Sir Amphilus and Trebasco) who rely on Cornish words to express their innermost feelings. Yet, in The Demoiselle, written less than a decade after The Northern Lass, Brome

102  Cristina Paravano seems to portray a moment of decline of the Cornish language, when it “was given up by upper classes, and remained [...] among the lower classes” (Wakelin 1975, 99), since the main Cornish speaker is the servant Trebasco rather than his master, who probably employs a heavy accent but only a few Cornish words. At the end of The Northern Lass, the Cornish knight Salamon Nonsense claims he will make a stage play out of the story of the Northern Lass, perhaps suggesting a possible revival of the Cornish theatrical tradition, so popular in the Middle Ages: “Never credit me, but I have had sport enough o’ conscience, and if I do not make a stage play on’t when I come into Cornwall, I protest and vow then fay there was nonsense in this” (5.3, speech 1094). Unfortunately, his line in Cornish is the last surviving example of the dramatic use of this language. In a quotation from The Demoiselle analysed earlier, we see that the Sir Amphilus’s pony carried him from Penzance to St Columb. Unexpectedly the revival of Cornish started from there, from St Columb, the birthplace of Henry Jenner (1848–1934), whose preeminence in the preservation of Cornish language earned him the nickname “father of the Cornish Revival.” His effort “helped to put Cornwall on the map, linguistically, idiosyncratically and culturally” (Williams 2004, 14). It was his Handbook of Cornish Language (1904) which provided the linguistic basis for the revival. Interestingly, on the frontispiece of the volume the epigraph which stands out is from Brome’s The Northern Lass: “Peden bras vidne whee bis cregas” (5.1, speech 1022). The quote, which vividly evokes Cornish spirit, also reminds us of the importance of Brome who, more than any of his contemporary playwrights, contributed to keep the Cornish language alive on the early modern stage.

Notes 1 See Billington (2006) and Kirwan (2012). 2 It is worth pointing out the distinction between Cornish language and AngloCornish dialect. The present essay investigates Cornish language, “one of the three living members of the Brythonic family, the other two being Welsh and Breton,” whose appearance as a distinct language can be traced back to around 600 AD (Ferdinand 2013, 199). The expression Cornish dialect (or Anglo-Cornish) identifies an English dialect spoken in Cornwall. Some scholars, like Wakelin (1975), claim that the English dialect of Cornwall “is generally considered to show but few traces of the Cornish substratum; these are mainly to be found in its vocabulary” (Filppula, Klemola and Paulasto 2008, 164); it is also generally thought that it was mainly influenced by Standard English rather than Cornish. 3 For general studies on regional languages and dialects, see Blake (1981 and 2004), Blank (1996 and 2003), Carlson (2006) and Görlach (1991); in particular, for the use of northern dialects, see Ruano Garcia (2010), Wales (2006), and Beal and Cooper (2015); for southern dialects, see Wakelin (1975, 1984 and 1986) and Paravano (2017 and 2018); for Welsh, see Lloyd (2007); for Welsh and Irish, see Bartley (1954).

“Peden bras vidne whee bis cregas”  103 4 The best introduction to the history of the language is Wakelin (1975). For the history of Cornwall, see Halliday (1959) and George [1993] 2009. 5 I took into consideration only plays written for commercial theatres, not entertainments, interludes and courtly masques. 6 See Murdoch (1994). 7 This is one of the sixteen reasons for the decline of the Cornish language provided by the antiquary William Scawen (1600–1689) in his Antiquities Cornuontanic: The Causes of Cornish Speech’s Decay (1680). See Stoyle (2002) and Spriggs (2005). 8 For a detailed analysis of the unsuccessful attempts made by the Cornish people to assert a separate status, see Stoyle (2002). 9 William Sandys (1792–1874) was a solicitor and member of the Society of Antiquaries of London and the Percy Society. He is also remembered for his Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern (1833). 10 The OED (A.3) cites this passage and marks the word as obsolete, and of unspecified dialectal origin. Only in A.4 the same word, but with the meaning of “revolving light,” is associated to Devon. 11 See The New Inn, The Magnetic Lady, The Staple of News, Bartholomew Fair. 12 Helen Ostovich (Jonson 1997, 640) identified the wrestler Puppy’s speech from Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614) as stage Cornish (probably due to the popularity of wrestling in Cornwall), and associated it with Edgar’s accent in King Lear. Nevertheless, most of the scholars (Blank 1996 and Wakelin 1986, to mention the most significant) consider both of them as examples of southwestern dialect rather than Cornish 13 For an investigation of the derogatory sense of “crew” in this context, see Kent (1996). 14 See Delabastita (2002). 15 The word often recurs in Shakespeare’s corpus in different contexts. See All Well’s that Ends Well 4.1.19, Hamlet 5.2.89, King Lear 4.5.21, Macbeth 3.4.124, A Midsummer Night’s Dream 3.2.21, The Tempest 2.1.271, and The Winter’s Tale 4.4.617. 16 See Steggle (2004). 17 For the examination of Brome’s treatment of regional languages, see Blank (1996), Sanders (2010a and 2010b), Ostovich (2010), Ruano Garcia (2010), and Paravano (2017 and 2018). 18 In The Court Beggar, despite the presence of a Cornish character, the relevant allusions to Cornish culture and language are limited to two references to Penzance which do not contribute to the characterization of Swain-Wit as Cornish. “Fare ye well, pray tell your Lady I came not from Penzance to grow here” (2.1, speech 201); “Cit-wit: [Aside] Would he were at Penzance again! Swain-wit: Didst not thou tell my Lady that I was a coward in my own country, and kicked out of Cornwall?” (5.1, speeches 858–59). 19 For a more extended investigation see Paravano (2018). 20 See Ferdinand (2013). 21 As Chaudhri remarks, this brief sentence “shows the second person plural of the same auxiliary verb, as well as the further change /penn/ [pedn] > /pedƏn/ that seems to be a common feature of stressed monosyllables in Late Cornish. The schwa vowel /Ə/ appears to have been inserted by epenthesis, causing / dn/ < /nn/ to become /dƏn/ and the unexploded stop to be realised as a full ­plosive. The phoneme /dn/ would then disappear, replaced here by the separate phonemes /d/ and /n/, with which it would consequently fall together. In the process, the monosyllable would become a disyllable” (Chaudhri 2007, 65).

104  Cristina Paravano 2 See Paravano (2017 and 2018) and Sanders (2010a). 2 23 Also Swain-Wit from Brome’s The Court Beggar comes from Penzance.

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106  Cristina Paravano Jenner, Henry. 1929. “Some miscellaneous scraps of Cornish.” Annual Reports of the Royal Cornish Polytechnic Society 6: 238–255. Jonson, Ben. 1988. The Staple of News, Edited by Anthony Parr. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Jonson, Ben. 1997. Jonson. Four Comedies. Edited by Helen Ostovich. London and New York: Routledge. Jonson, Ben. 2000. The Magnetic Lady. Edited by Peter Happé. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Jonson, Ben. 2001. Every Man in His Humour. In The Roaring Girl and Other City Comedies. Edited by James Knowles. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lloyd, Megan S. 2007. “Speak it in Welsh”: Wales and the Welsh Language in Shakespeare. Lanham, MD/Plymouth: Lexington Books. McClain, Lisa. 2004. Lest We Be damned. Practical Innovation and Lived Experience among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559–1642. London and New York: Routledge. Middleton, John. 2007. A Fair Quarre. In Thomas Middleton. The Collected Works. Edited by Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mills, Jon. 2010. “Genocide and ethnocide: The suppression of the Cornish language.” In Interfaces in Language. Edited by John Partridge, 189–206. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Murdoch, Brian O. 1994. “The Cornish medieval drama.” In The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre. Edited by Richard Beadle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Norden, John. [1610] 1728. Speculi Britanniae Pars: A Topographical and Historical Description of Cornwall. London: William Pearson. Ostovich, Helen. 2010. “Critical introduction.” In The Late Lancashire Witches. Edited by Helen Ostovich, Richard Brome Online. January 17, 2010, 1–48. Accessed November 20, 2019. http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome. Paravano, Cristina. 2017. “‘Youle zee zuch an altrication in him as never was zeen in a brother’: Somerset Dialect in Richard Brome’s The Sparagus Garden.” Status Quaestionis 11, “North and South: British dialects in fictional dialogue.” Edited by Irene Ranzato, 104–21. Accessed November 20, 2019. http://ojs.uniroma1.it/index.php/statusquaestionis/article/view/13834/13601 Paravano, Cristina. 2018. Performing Multilingualism in the Plays of Richard Brome. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Price, Glanville. 1992. “Cornish language and literature.” In The Celtic Connection. Edited by Glanville Price, 301–314. Gerard Cross: Colin Smythe. Pugliatti, Paola. 1993. “The strange tongues of Henry V.” The Yearbook of English Studies 23: 235–253. Early Shakespeare Special Number. Ruano Garcia, Javier. 2010. Early Modern Northern English Lexis: A Literary Corpus-based Study. Bern: Peter Lang. Sanders, Julie. 2010a. “Introduction.” In The Northern Lass. Edited by Julie Sanders. Richard Brome Online. 17 January 2010, 1–45. Accessed November 20, 2019. http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome. Sanders, Julie. 2010b. “Critical introduction.” In The Sparagus Garden. Edited by Julie Sanders. Richard Brome Online. 17 January 2010, 1–38. Accessed November 20, 2019. http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome.

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6 “Aw’m Lancashire, owd cock, and gradely hearty” Enregistered Lancashire Voices in the Nineteenth-Century Theatre Javier Ruano-García SUGARSTICK:  What a strange dialect! Who is this party? MRS. ANG. MEAD:  Aw’m Lancashire, owd cock, and gradely

hearty;

How’s thysen? (Layne 1864–65)

6.1 Introduction On 31 December 1864, The Manchester Guardian published a review of Mother Goose, one of the three Christmas pantomimes that were presented that year to the Manchester public. It had been premiered only a few days before at the Prince’s Theatre, and, as was customary after the first night performance of such popular plays, the review acknowledged that some revisions and changes had been made afterwards. “It now runs very smoothly, with some additions and some omissions from what was originally intended,” the reviewer wrote (Anonymous 1864). Whilst alterations were made to the stage set and the vocal music, the reviewer qualified the acting itself as “scarcely subject to criticism” and praised the performance of Mr Frederick Maccabe, who had produced “a capital imitation of the Lancashire dialect” when impersonating Mrs Angel Meadow, a native of Newton Heath. Such observations on the staged dialect were not uncommon in newspaper reviews. Dialect was indeed a regular feature of Manchester pantomimes and other forms of popular drama, which reviewers were quick to criticise on account of a poor performance. Mr Elton’s characterisation of Dame Nursery, the Lancashire speaker of the Queen’s Theatre pantomime Little Boy Blue (1868–69), was advertised in the Guardian as “unable to speak the Lancashire dialect” (Anonymous 1868b) as Mr Elton’s performed voice did “not possess the brogue” (Anonymous 1868a). Nevertheless, his “clog dance at the end of the first scene” minimised an otherwise “harsh portrait of a Lancashire schoolmistress in the coarser days of old” (Anonymous 1869). Critical acclaim largely rested then on the successful voicing of accent and its interplay with references to traditions and related meanings, which playwrights should be careful

“Aw’m Lancashire, owd cock, and gradely hearty”  109 enough to draw from identifiable inventories, and actors perform as recognisable social types. The Lancashire dialect, like other dialect varieties, was “particularly well configured for stylized performance” as it “generally constitute[d] known repertoires with known socio-cultural and personal associations” (Coupland 2001a, 350). Of course, the fact that dialect imitation was reviewed as (in)accurate implies awareness of what the Lancashire dialect was like, one that the audience were able to read within the framework of prevailing socio-cultural as well as linguistic norms. This chapter places theatrical performances of the Lancashire dialect into the context of enregisterment, which Agha (2003, 231–32) defines as “the processes through which a linguistic repertoire becomes differentiable within a language as a socially recognized register of forms.” In other words, it refers to the process “whereby distinct forms of speech come to be socially recognized (and enregistered) as indexical of the speaker attributes by a population of language speakers” (Agha 2005, 38). Although “work in enregisterment has reawakened scholarly interest in literary texts” (Hodson 2016, 28), this type of evidence awaits further and detailed examination, especially in the case of plays, which have rarely been explored within this framework, if at all. This chapter analyses a selection of plays represented in Manchester and London in the late nineteenth century, including pantomimes, drolleries, comic sketches, and melodramas. Because access to contemporary voices is impossible, I examine dialect performance in written form, considering both published and unpublished material, some of which remains in manuscript. The Lancashire dialect is scrutinised here to determine, on the one hand, the repertoire of linguistic features that were voiced on stage. On the other, I aim to ascertain whether such a repertoire varied on account of the target audience and the fact that the text of the performance was aimed for publication. The analysis engages with recent research that sees staged performance “to often be linguistically stylized” (Bell and Gibson 2011, 558). I invoke Coupland (2007, 146–76) and look at these plays as instances of high performance in which the dialect acts as a “semiotic resource… for constructing personal identities” (Coupland 2009, 312) and is thus best understood as a “social practice rather than as variation” (Coupland 2001a, 348) alone. My interest does not lie, therefore, in reconstructing nineteenth-century Lancashire speech in the light of the dialect performed. Rather, this paper frames the dialect within the context of theatrical practices in which the performance of enregistered linguistic forms and associated indexical meanings makes stylisation possible. In fact, as Bell and Gibson (2011, 561) note, “[s]taged performance plays a central role in the enregisterment of styles and associated characterological figures.” While this is stated in relation to “mediated and digitalized environment of the 21st century” (561), the analysis suggests that historical evidence of dialect performance can be read in much the same light.

110  Javier Ruano-García This chapter is divided as follows. I first provide an overview of Agha’s theory of enregisterment in relation to recent work on dialect stylisation and sociolinguistic approaches to staged performance. Then, I look at nineteenth-century performances of the Lancashire dialect, paying special attention to pantomimes, which have rarely been explored from a linguistic angle (Coupland 2009 is the exception). Section 6.4 provides some methodological remarks along with the analysis and discussion of the data. This chapter aims to contribute to recent third-wave historical sociolinguistic studies where the analysis of self-reflexive, performative speech has gained prominence in “the broad sociolinguistic research on intra-speaker variation in public” (Hernández-Campoy 2016, 160). So far, this framework has not been applied to historical performances of dialect speech, and is here addressed for the first time in relation to Lancashire.

6.2 Enregisterment, Stylisation, and the Performance of Dialect Over the past few years, sociolinguistic research has witnessed an increasing interest in the agentive use of language whereby speakers “might design their speech production instrumentally to subtly but continuously change their image and their social world as a particular communicative strategy” (Hernández-Campoy 2016, 148). Unlike traditional deterministic and system-oriented approaches, the focus has turned to investigate how speakers make stylistic choices in unfolding discourse in order to enact stances, personae, and identities; that is, to create social meaning.1 Schilling (2013, 328) notes that such a socio-constructionist and speakeroriented approach has “become central not only in discussions of intraspeaker variation per se but variation analysis more generally.” This shift, she goes on to explain, correlates with the third wave of variation study (see Eckert 2012), so that the first and second waves of sociolinguistic research are best represented by early approaches to style, namely Labov’s Attention to Speech (1972) and Bell’s influential Audience Design theory (1984), respectively. In this framework of stylistic variation, the study of self-reflexive and performative speech has gained considerable attention. This is essentially because, as Johnstone (2013, 198) writes, “all language is performance in the sense that we are putting some sort of persona, playing some sort of part.” Paradoxically enough, this is the kind of language that has traditionally been excluded from sociolinguistic enquiry, as performance builds upon intentional and self-conscious speech; in other words, because it is non-vernacular, non-everyday language. Coupland (2007, 146–49) draws a distinction between two types of performance. While “mundane performance” designates performancelike speech that is spontaneously produced in the context of everyday language, “high performance” comprises institutionalised events that are

“Aw’m Lancashire, owd cock, and gradely hearty”  111 public and pre-planned. It refers to instances of language produced in such settings as onstage theatre, radio broadcasts, and political speeches. It is worth noting that high performance involves communicative focusing concerning different dimensions. Amongst them, we may refer to form (i.e., it shows a degree of metalinguistic awareness), meaning (i.e., the audience assume that the language and action produced are significant), situation (i.e., the audience gather to see the performance), and relation (i.e., performance is for the audience, not to the audience) (see further Coupland 2007, 147–48).2 Put differently, as Thornborrow (2015, 38) explains, high performance involves a series of relationships between “what is said and how it is said, who it is said to, in what context and by whom, how it is evaluated and what kind of performance it is.” It is thus rehearsed and self-reflexive, while at the same time it draws attention to its performativity, both socio-cultural and linguistic. In this sense, language is performed agentively to evoke values and enact social personae, which performers put on to convey specific outcomes. Meanings are thereby constructed and negotiated, allowing performers to do identity work drawing on significant creative language. This suggests that identity is not simply inherited or given. Instead, it is dynamic, fluid, and created “intersubjectively rather than individually produced and interactionally emergent” (Bucholtz and Hall 2005, 587). However, Bell and Gibson (2011, 561) claim that it is a combination of structure and agency; identity is seen rather as both process and product. Schilling (2013, 342) highlights in this respect that identities cannot be crafted “out of nothing” as “we are all bound by structures and norms.” As such, the linguistic forms deployed to create meaningful identities embody a wide range of pre-established linkages and references the audience are aware of. The plays discussed in this chapter support Schilling (2013) and suggest that the configuration of Lancashire identities in the nineteenthcentury theatre drew upon such pre-existing associations that were negotiated and (re)shaped attending to the context of performance where dialect took centre stage. High performance is thus coupled with stylisation, which Coupland (2001b) defines as “a knowing and self-aware performance of a style or genre drawn from a pre-established repertoire” (422) (see further Coupland 2007). In this framework, as already noted, the performance of dialect transcends the recreation of linguistic variation. Speaking “in altera persona” (Coupland 2001a, 349) is not only concerned with imitating another person’s speech. Also, and as a result, it is critically intended to perform another persona linked with speaking in a specific way. Dialect is understood as a useful resource able to fabricate identities and evoke meanings, which are in turn drawn from common linguistic and socio-cultural references that the audience are able to interpret against the backdrop of prevalent values and mores. Dialect stylisation in high performance is therefore metalinguistic, metacultural, and markedly

112  Javier Ruano-García indexical in that it rests upon a recognisable inventory of forms and associated meanings which are reflexively (re)worked and circulated in front of an enculturated audience. Agha’s (2003, 2005) influential framework of enregisterment is relevant here. In fact, Johnstone (2013, 198) defines stylisation as “[p]erformance of enregistered varieties of speech like language and dialects.” As already noted, enregisterment refers to the process whereby specific linguistic forms become associated with particular ways of speaking that are indexical of social values. Drawing on Agha’s definition, HernándezCampoy (2016, 150) remarks that it “accounts for how meaning gets attached to linguistic forms and how these indexicalized forms metapragmatically circulate and reproduce in social interaction, permeating discourse.” Enregisterment is thus critically grounded in Silverstein’s (2003) orders of indexicality, which comprise the three levels at which linguistic forms take on social significance. Enregisterment works at the third order, where socially meaningful linguistic forms are the object of overt comment and public representation, being thus “deployed as part of deliberate and reflexive identity performances” (Bucholtz and Lopez 2011, 681). Performance thus relies on and contributes to the process of enregisterment, whilst enabling stylisation. In other words, dialect stylisation builds on enregisterment and at the same time adds to the process by consciously performing and circulating linkages that, as I have pointed out, may be reshaped before the audience. Interestingly, Johnstone (2013, 197) underlines in this regard that oral performance may be seen as a “centrifugal force in the process of enregisterment,” which can “also expand the inventory of possible local forms and loosen the semiotic links between local-sounding speech and particular social meanings.” This way, performance may open up a reflexive and dynamic space where the pre-existing associations between language and social meanings are liable to be reinterpreted within a fluid indexical field (see Eckert 2008). Like other types of historical evidence, dialect performance of older dialects has only survived in the form of written representations of speech. This is not a minor disadvantage, as “[t]he question thus arises as to how stylistic variation is reflected in written documents” (Auer 2015, 134). Historical sociolinguistic studies on style remain so far characteristically scarce as a result. Of special relevance are a few very notable exceptions that have examined written discourse (e.g., correspondence) in the light of third-wave sociolinguistic frameworks that include speaker design (see Conde-Silvestre 2016; Hernández-Campoy and García-Vidal 2018) as well as enregisterment and indexicality. The important implications of Agha’s and Silverstein’s concepts have underlain recent sociolinguistic work on literary recreations of dialect, showing that such materials further our understanding of past dialect identities and related meanings. The major concern of these studies has been northern British English, considering representations of the “northern” dialect generally

“Aw’m Lancashire, owd cock, and gradely hearty”  113 (Beal and Cooper 2015; Ruano-García 2012a, 2020c), as well as of localised varieties, such as those of Newcastle and Sheffield (Beal 2009, 2018), Yorkshire (Cooper 2013, 2020), and Lancashire (Ruano-García 2020a, 2020b). This chapter aims to go beyond this body of historical sociolinguistic work by combining the key concepts of enregisterment and indexicality with dialect stylisation in the context of high performance. The type of evidence that I describe in the following section provides useful insight to identify Lancashire repertoires and indexicalised voices that may enable us to uncover patterns of style in the nineteenth-century theatre.

6.3 Staging Lancashire Unlike fiction and poetry, theatrical representations of the Lancashire dialect have gained comparatively little linguistic attention. There seems to be scanty surviving evidence of the dialect in the form of such representations before the twentieth century, “although [they] certainly existed,” Russell (2004, 150) notes. He points out that “[t]he nearest thing to a ‘northern school’ in this period is a thin strand of mainly Lancashirebased factory melodramas, not necessarily written by indigenous writers” (150).3 This largely explains that linguistic research looking at literary recreations of the dialect has been chiefly interested in ‘standard’ renditions circulated in mainstream genres, including novels and verse often written by well-known and leading native dialect authors. Examples are John Collier (1708–86), Edwin Waugh (1817–90), and Benjamin Brierley (1825–96). Many of their works, especially those that saw the light in the social and cultural milieu of industrial Lancashire, were expensive editions published by prominent provincial houses such as Abel and John Heywood in Manchester, as well as by London publishers like William Nicholson and Sons. Beetham (2009, 25) stresses that “[l]ocal publishers, notably Abel and John Heywood, were shrewd business men, well able to exploit the public’s appetite for local and especially dialect writing.” They targeted “a select, higher-class market” (Joyce 1991, 263) in which Waugh and Brierley, amongst others, had their dialect writings circulated and produced. Joyce (1991) rightly claims that “[d]isproportionate historical attention has been given to this form of dialect” (263). Minor forms of writing and entertainment that include popular performances such as pantomimes, burlesques, and the music hall likewise represent key contributions to the social, literary, and linguistic heritage of Lancashire not only for their massive social appeal, but also because they enshrined and staged a dialect that worked as a meaningful resource for the configuration of identities (see Vicinus 1974, 185–285). As elsewhere in the country, pantomimes were major forms of popular entertainment in Victorian Lancashire, which were nearly i­ nstitutionalised as a central ritual of Christmas. Often premiered on Boxing Day, pantos, as they are commonly known, built on plots that combined fairy tale

114  Javier Ruano-García and magic elements with comedy and farcical devices, while blending songs and dance with spectacular effects within a rather predictable yet ­changing format (see Sullivan 2011a, 26–32). More often than not, the names of leading artists of the burlesque and the music hall featured in the cast of performers in the attempt of theatre managers to attract audiences, which at the same time witnesses the versatility of actors and actresses to take on different personae when acting in different places and thus speaking to different audiences. For example, Frederick Maccabe (?-1904), the Lancashire speaker of Mother Goose (1864–65), was a Liverpool-born ventriloquist and actor of the music hall well known to British audiences, with fame in the US and the colonies too. During a tour to New Zealand, he was advertised as “the renowned character, d ­ elineator, and vocal illusionist” (Anonymous 1883b, 2) that Public Opinion had previously defined as particularly able to display “his versatility in the ­delineation of various characters” (Anonymous 1872, 666). Of course, the incorporation of such stars not only worked as a strategy to promote the successful quality of the performance. It also catered to the appetite of an audience avid for Christmas pantos which, in the case of Lancashire, were often performed in Manchester theatres: the Prince’s Theatre, the Queen’s Theatre, the Theatre Royal, and the Comedy Theatre. As already noted, pantos appealed to people of all ages and different social classes who sometimes came from other localities and counties. Sullivan (2011a) finds evidence in provincial newspapers reporting that “Christmas trips to Manchester were advertised from Sheffield and Liverpool, the manager of the Theatre Royal in the 1890s boasting audiences ‘from as far south as Swansea…Carlisle in the north, and Hull in the east’” (7). In spite of this, and as in other urban centres, Manchester pantos were often written by local authors, who targeted local audiences that they engaged through topical referencing which responded to people’s expectations and built on communal experience.4 For instance, the Manchester Guardian review of Forsyth’s Jack and the Beanstalk (Anonymous 1877) noted that its chief merit was that its tone and colouring throughout are local, and that it deals with contemporaneous and recent incidents; and consequently every hit that is made tells at once, and is caught up by the audience readily and responded to with hearty cheers and laughter. This colouring was accomplished through the naming of places, for which real names of locations in and around Manchester were frequently included: for example, Deansgate in Forsyth’s play, whereas St Ann’s Square is referred to in one of scenes of Shepley’s Little Boy Blue (1868–69), and Little Red Riding Hood (Anonymous 1883a) features a lass from Shudehill. Often, they were framed within contemporary events like the Salford election, as well as traditions that spoke to the audience’s

“Aw’m Lancashire, owd cock, and gradely hearty”  115 local knowledge. Clog dancing and the Knott Mill Fair were thus instrumental in shaping the Lancashire taste of The House that Jack Built (Anonymous 1862), while appealing to the spectators, who were able to read the meaning of rural traditions like rush-bearing and morris dancing alluded to in Layne’s Mother Goose (1864–1865). Such pertinent references aligned the audience, testifying not only to their awareness of Lancashire facts, locations, and events, but also, and more importantly, to their sense of belonging, their sense of place. The vernacular did play a pivotal role in this process of identity performance and construction. Sullivan (2011a, 116–17) notes that it was usually a distinctive feature of the Dame character, a comic maternal figure that spoke in the dialect, especially in those plays produced at the Queen’s. In fact, dialect performance was more often associated with this theatre, which, Sullivan adds, points at “a largely working-class audience, for whom the accent would have signified their shared and inherited regional identity, maintained in the urban environment” (116). The pantos scrutinised here suggest that dialect was utilised as a missing link between the city and rural Lancashire, evident in the settings where the strong-willed Dame is often placed: a farm in The House that Jack Built (Anonymous 1862) and a cottage “in the Village of Treaclesfield” (fol. 2v) where we find Dame Daw in Jack and the Beanstalk (Forsyth 1877). Dialect likewise marks social distinctions being allocated to some servants, while on occasion employed as a resource for framing values of self-esteem and solidarity linked with the region: (Enter SALLY IN OUR ALLEY, with pail and mop) SALLY:  (Striking attitude with mop) I’m your man! BARON:  What you? SALLY:  Yes, me! I’m Sally in our Alley. DAME:  Looks like the front row of the corps-de-ballet. SALLY:  I’m Lancashire, tha’ knows. BARON:  Well, lass, what then? SALLY:  You’ll find that I’m a match for twenty men.   A gradely lass from Shudehill. Dash my cap! (throws down cap)   Watch how I’ll polish off this lawyer chap. (Anonymous 1883a, fol. 11v) Only rarely can we find explicit metalinguistic commentary on the use of dialect. Those cases in which it is attested reveal sensitive awareness of the Lancashire dialect as a distinct variety, which is in fact evaluated as strange by a “candied member of the aristocracy” (5) named Sugarstick in Mother Goose (Layne 1864–65) and by the King in Little Boy Blue (Shepley 1868–69): KING:  From

your appearance, I did not expect That I should hear so strange a dialect.

116  Javier Ruano-García Who are you? yo’re honor’s deigned to ax, well I’s a ‘umble follower of Missis Maxwell. (13)  

DAME:  As

Passages like this one encourage us to assume that neither writers nor audiences were unfamiliar with the dialect circulated in other forms of published literature produced by acclaimed authors. Waugh and Brierley, for example, wrote pantos and songs for the Prince’s in the 1860s and the 70s (Sullivan 2011a, 118–19) in which the dialect built on linguistic inventories displayed in the rest of their work. The following extract from the song that Brierley wrote for Puss in Boots (1878) makes it clear: I’ll tell yo’ in rhyme Of a very quare time This owd England of eaur’s i’th’ year seventy-eight, For what we’re o’ gone through An’ what we’re goin’ on to, Is enough to make ony mon strip him to fight. We’ve pinin’ an’ clemmin’, … (cited in Sullivan 2011a, 175) It would not be striking, therefore, that pantos echoed such linguistic forms known to Manchester audiences. Unfortunately, the written evidence of the dialect employed in these popular works is not particularly abundant. A few surviving books of words constitute the only source of information to revive the performance of the vernacular. As is known, these versions of the script that were on sale to the audience “represented the pantomime prior to the first night performance,” so they are “closer to the author’s text than to the performance the audience witnessed” (Sullivan 2011b, 109). This naturally implies that the available dialect is essentially a reflection of the writers’ stylistic repertoires, which prevents any access to possible shifts and adjustments made by performers in the course of acting. Nevertheless, because books of words functioned as subsidiary, yet necessary, elements that helped spectators follow what was being spoken, they move “necessarily to centre stage as a research tool” (Sullivan 2010, 156) when it comes to the study of dialect. This likewise applies to the remaining evidence of other forms of popular theatre that include drolleries and comic sketches. Unlike ­ ­pantos, however, these were sometimes published, and the surviving texts ­constitute the full version of the intended performance. Pieces like Ralph Parr’s Wanted a Wife (1880) and native James Augustus  Atkinson’s (1832–1911) Merry  Andrew o’Manchester (1884) show that dialect is equally employed as a device that unites rural and urban Lancashire, and which writers allocate to recognisable social personae that take different shapes. On the one hand, Parr links the dialect with a “straightforward

“Aw’m Lancashire, owd cock, and gradely hearty”  117 Lancashire woman. Wearing a big bonnet and print dress” and a manservant “full of wit and fond of fun” (1). On the other, Atkinson exploits it for comic purposes in the characterological type of the merry Andrew, here a clownish Manchester-born man who prides himself on his own foolishness: “Aw’m Merry Andrew. I conno’ help foolin’. Aw’m nobbut a foo’!” (15) The Lancashire dialect delineates social distinctions between, for example, a manservant and a retired gentleman in Parr’s play, which recreate the hierarchy of the time (see Joyce 1991: 279–304). Interestingly, the use of dialect here is not concerned with underscoring working-class pride and solidarity. As a matter of fact, these two instances of popular entertainment do not touch upon social criticism nor the affairs of the working classes, which were major subject matters of the melodramas referred to above. As already noted, many of them were written by outsiders and represented in London and Lancashire. An example is Dion Boucicault’s The Long Strike (1866) where we can find working-class characters like Noah Learoyd, a delegate from the workmen, and Jack o’Bob’s, a working man. The evidence suggests that the dialect employed in them differed from the repertoires deployed in pantos and published comic plays both regarding the sense of linguistic detail and the localisedness of the forms voiced on stage. At the same time, the analysis undertaken in the following section goes some way to indicating that the vernacular circulated in comic plays was more closely aligned than in the case of pantos with the linguistic inventories attested in other forms of published Lancashire literature.

6.4 Analysis 6.4.1 Methodological Remarks As already pointed out, the aim of this study is to identify the set of Lancashire forms that were associated with particular social meanings in stylised performances of the dialect. I endeavour to show that such pre-established linkages and references were reshaped on account of the audience and the context of the representation, while suggesting that the repertoire of linguistic features varied if the text of the performance was aimed for publication. The analysis is thus based on a selection of high performances of the Lancashire dialect. They have been chosen according to two criteria. Firstly, I have considered plays produced for and performed in front of local audiences. Instances of published and unpublished performance have been taken into account. The sample comprises, on the one hand, the books of words of three pantos represented at the Prince’s, the Queen’s, and the Theatre Royal, all of which were presumably written by local authors. They were printed for sale before their performance and are preserved as such in Manchester Central Library. On the other, I examine

118  Javier Ruano-García Table 6.1  Selection of Lancashire plays analysed Date

Title

Type

Theatre

Locality

Form

1861 1862

Mary Barton The House that Jack Built

melodrama pantomime

Grecian Th. Royal

London Manchester

MS printed

3483 682

1864–65

Mother Goose

pantomime

Prince’s

Manchester

printed

417

1866

The Long Strike

melodrama

Lyceum

London

published

5666

1868–69

Little Boy Blue

pantomime

Queen’s

Manchester

printed

1227

1880

Wanted a Wife

comic sketch unknown

Manchester

published

1443

1884

Merry drollery Andrew o’Manchester

Manchester

published

1537

Total

unknown

N words

14455

a drollery and a comic sketch written by secondary Lancashire writers, which were issued and circulated by the local publishers Abel and John Heywood. They are now part of the Salamanca Corpus.5 Secondly, the selection has considered plays including performances of the dialect written by outsiders that were not necessarily produced for and staged in front of local audiences. The analysis thus looks at two melodramas that were represented in London: they are held at the British Library in the Lord Chamberlain’s Collection, one of which is only preserved in manuscript form. The sample excludes dramatised versions of Lancashire novels written by leading native writers (e.g., Brierley’s The Layrock of Langleyside, performed at the Queen’s in 1866), mainly because they reproduce the set of features used by these writers in their fictional works. As shown in Table 6.1, the selection comprises seven texts, which amount to c.14500 words representing the performance of the dialect, thus considering the speech of dialect speakers alone (e.g., the Dame character, Merry Andrew, Jack o’Bob’s, etc.). The sample contains a balanced number of different types of high performance, which may help us ascertain enregistered Lancashire voices in the nineteenth-century theatre.

6.5 Data and Analysis Table 6.2 displays the repertoire of dialect forms that are commonly found in the pantos scrutinised. As in Tables 6.3 and 6.4, they have been identified thanks to a wordlist retrieved with the Corpus Presenter suite

“Aw’m Lancashire, owd cock, and gradely hearty”  119 Table 6.2  Repertoire of Lancashire features: pantos (N = 2326 words) Features and examples 1p pronoun Aw MOUTH 2p pronoun thou, thee, etc. DAR l-vocalisation ME /ɛ:/ hoo “she” /a/ + nasal FACE verbal -n FOOT-STRUT gradely “proper” j-formation brass “money” preterites reflexive pronoun

“Aw have a dawter—but hoo’s not much use” ceawncil “council,” neaw “now” “Get forrud with thy tale— thou’st not dun yet” “Th’ owd cat gets up when t’ kitlins start to purr” kawve “calf,” tould “told” cleon “clean,” theer “there” “Hoo would’nt be her, if hoo no lad were wooing” connot “cannot,” stond “stand” mak’ “make,” tak “take” they lick’n “lick,” they looken’ “look” coom “come,” sum “some” “Aw ses to’t droiver, yo’res ar gradely tits” yed “head,” yezzy “easy” “Sum nat’ral brass, ut shoines eawt ow his face” come’d “came,” cotch’d “caught,” seed “saw” eawrsels “ourselves,” thysen “yourself”

Tokens

NF / 1,000

79

33.9

47 46

20.2 19.8

42

18.05

30 13 12

12.9 5.6 5.1

12 12 12

5.1 5.1 5.1

10 8

4.3 3.4

7 5

3.09 2.1

3

1.3

3

1.3

(Hickey 2003), which I have classified according to the linguistic features they represent.6 They include traits that have been reported as characteristic of traditional Lancashire speech, as I discuss in more detail below. As regards morphological features, Beal (2004, 118) explains that “In most of the North, excluding Tyneside, Northumberland and Liverpool, singular thou and thee are retained in more traditional dialects,” which the Survey of English Dialects (1962–71) (SED) documents for Lancashire with different realisations of “thou” in stressed position: [ðæ:], [ðɛ:] and [θaʊ] (Upton et al. 1994, 486). Indeed, Wright’s English Dialect Grammar (EDG) (1905, §173) records th-forms for the second person singular pronoun across the county. Similarly, Upton and Widdowson (2006, Map 34) find hoo “she” in an area comprising most of Lancashire and adjacent districts of South-West Yorkshire, Derbyshire, and Cheshire, which the EDG (406) and the SED confirm, as Upton et al. (1994, 487) show. Of interest are also Definite Article Reduction (DAR)

120  Javier Ruano-García Table 6.3  Repertoire of Lancashire features: published comic plays (N = 2980 words) Features and examples 1p pronoun Aw PRICE DAR /a/ + nasal 2p pronoun thou, thee, etc. MOUTH /l/-vocalisation past tense BE verbal -n ot / ut “that” ME /ɛ:/ GOAT nowt “nothing” FACE mi “my” j-formation clitics summat “something” OE /ü/ reflexive pronoun owt “anything” FOOT-STRUT lengthening ME /e/ -ong > -ung w-formation

“Aw should think aw have, by gum!” surproise “surprise,” toneet “tonight” “Aw’m noan th’ foo’ folk tak’ me for” hont “hand,” onyone “anyone” “Gi’ me howd o’ thi leg, I’ll put it reet, mon” heaw “how,” witheaut “without” aw “all,” gowd “gold” “It wur on’y a marlock, owd mate” “Aye, who else don yo’ think aw am?” “sir, aw fund th’ papper ut yoa want” deol “deal,” wheere “where” boath “both,” gooin “going” “ther’s nowt to sup—nayther tay nor ale” mak’ “make,” takkin’ “taking” “aw couldna keep up mi pranks” unyezzy “uneasy,” yerb “herb” didner “did not,” wilto “will thou” “Didsto ax me to have summat to ait” mich “much,” sich “such” hissel’ “himself,” yoursels “yourselves” “Aw wouldna ax yo’ to gi’ me owt” amung “among,” somebudy “somebody” weel “well” amung “among,” wrung “wrong” (a)whoam “home”

Tokens

NF / 1,000

122

40.9

55

18.4

50

16.8

48 38

16.1 12.7

29 28 25

9.7 9.4 8.4

21

7.04

20

6.7

17 16 14

5.7 5.4 4.7

12 12

4.02 4.02

11 10

3.7 3.3

10

3.3

9 7

3.02 2.3

6

2.01

3

1.01

3 3

1.01 1.01

2

0.7

“Aw’m Lancashire, owd cock, and gradely hearty”  121 Table 6.4  Repertoire of Lancashire features: melodramas (N = 9149 words) Features and examples 2p pronoun thou, thee, etc. uninflected BE FOOT-STRUT clitics reflexive pronoun mun “must” l-vocalisation preterites naught “nothing”

“Thou wert a workman thysen once” “Jane, she be in Filler’s Lane, wi’ young Radley” Lunnon “London,” oop “up” munna “mun not,” tellee “tell thee” mysel “myself,” thysen “thyself” “Then I mun go elsewhere!” cowld “cold,” ould “old” know’d “knew,” seed “saw” “and so we be naught to do, but despair and die!”

Tokens

NF / 1,000

68

7.4

17

1.8

17 12

1.8 1.3

7 5 5 3 2

0.7 0.5 0.5 0.3 0.2

(see Ruano-García 2012b), as well as the first person singular subject pronoun Aw “I.” Ellis (1889, 333) reports on various pronunciations of stressed “I,” which include the low monophthongs “A”, “aa,” and “A`” in the western localities of Skelmersdale, Burnley, and Westhoughton; the forms “a” and “A” are recorded in unstressed position. Evidence available from the turn of the century points in the same direction. Taylor (1901, s.v. a) notes that “I” was “[p]ronounced ‘ah’” in the South of the county, whereas Hargreaves (1904, 79) refers to “ā” and “a” respectively as the stressed and unstressed forms in the southern locality of Adlington. As regards lexis, a distinctive feature of the dialect is the epithet gradely “fine, proper,” whose recurrent use in vernacular writing “creates and confirms a community’s self-image,” as Wales (2006, 133) states. The widespread distribution of this word in nineteenth-century Lancashire is also witnessed by the large number of works in which it was glossed. Heywood (1861, s.v.) describes it as “a very common word,” whereas Morris (1869, s.v.) highlights that it was a “word of almost universal application.” Contemporary records likewise provide valuable qualitative insight into the phonological features identified. By way of illustration, Milner (1874), refers to l-vocalisation (i.e., “aw” instead of “all,” “howd” instead of “hold”; see Wells 1982, 313). He observes that “in place of ‘au’ in ‘fall’ and ‘all,’ we get the broad and open ‘o,’ as in ‘fo’ and ‘o,’” (32) a sound which, Heywood (1861, 28) notes, was “both archaic and not partially colloquial.” Such observations also emphasised the old pedigree of the dialect in relation to forms like mon “man” and lond “land.” As Heywood (1861, 25) explains, they were “firmly retained amongst us,” pointing out that the rounding of /a/ + nasal “although a common archaism it is in the present day one of the distinctive characteristics of the dialect.” The archaic connotation indexed by the rounded vowel sound

122  Javier Ruano-García was underlined by Gaskell (1854, 12), who understood it as “nothing more than Anglo-Saxon.” Actually, Picton (1865, 29) relies on similar examples to illustrate the ancient heritage of “the rough pronunciation of Lancashire” which includes other peculiarities as well. We may refer to the “tendency to retain the diphthongal pronunciation in words where modern English uses only a single vowel…Meeons [for] Means” (30), as well as the realisation of the MOUTH diphthong that he qualifies as “the South Lancashire shibboleth” (32) often represented : eawer “our,” neaw “now.” This was a prominent trait that Heywood (1861, 28) also notes and that had variant pronunciations (see Maguire 2012; EDG: §170). It remains a salient feature until today of a more restricted area that includes Wigan and Greater Manchester. Some of these forms are shared by the published comic plays analysed. Table 6.3 shows that they commonly drew upon an inventory that was comparatively more detailed in linguistic terms. Not only did it comprise features such as l-vocalisation, the development of ME /u:/ in MOUTH words, and second person thou, but also a number of traits that occur consistently in both works and that have likewise been documented in the dialect. Amongst them, we may refer to the [ʊ]-type realisations of the GOAT diphthong, which Bamford (1854, 182) and Axon (1870) illustrate with gooa “go” and nooàs “nose” (see EDG, §§93, 120; Ellis 1889, 330, 353). Also, the stylisation of the dialect builds upon clitics that, according to Heywood (1861, 19), were “one of the greatest causes of the unintelligibility of the dialect” to outsiders. Interestingly, this repertoire is closely aligned with that found in other forms of published literature, including prose fiction and verse dialogues. I have shown elsewhere that the dialect circulated in such works during 1700–1900 was enregistered as a commonly occurring set of traits that includes nearly the same linguistic forms (Ruano-García 2020a). This would suggest that performances of the dialect aimed for publication drew upon the features that had been conventionalised in and thanks to the works of leading authors, thereby catering to the expectations of potential readers and performers. The fact that some of these traits were not employed in stylisations of the dialect performed in pantos does not seem to indicate, therefore, that they did not exist, nor that Manchester audiences were unaware of them. The evidence from pantos is not ample enough for reliable generalisations and, as already noted, it represents the actual performance only partially. Yet it is likely that some writers of pantos may have not seen these traits as immediately relevant to their spectators either because they were understood as forms peculiar to published literature, or because some of them were not specifically localised to Lancashire and were not thus seen as particularly salient. In this regard, forms such as mich “much” and sich “such” (both showing OE /ü/ > ME /i/) were found in Northern Englishes more widely, whereas summat “something” was also common in other northern and Midland

“Aw’m Lancashire, owd cock, and gradely hearty”  123 dialects according to Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (1896–1905) (s.v. somewhat, sb).7 This also applies to the realisations of the PRICE diphthong (i.e. [ɔɪ], [i:]), neither of which were localised to Lancashire alone, as I have shown (2020a). The degree of localisedness of the linguistic traits may also explain the differences observed in the repertoire found in melodramas. Table 6.4 shows that these differences are clear concerning the sense of linguistic detail of the features performed and their distribution. Whilst building upon identifiable traits like l-vocalisation, melodramas comprised other features that were widely employed in Northern dialects (e.g., mun) and/ or other varieties (e.g., uninflected BE; see Britain 2007, 87–88; Upton et al. 1994, 494). Clark (2019, 6) stresses that it is not “accidental that in closely knot communities the more local the audience…the more dialect features are enregistered that are in tune with the locality in which they are being performed. It is also evident that in performance contexts, the further away from the region, the fewer are drawn upon by the performers.” The pre-established linkages between dialect and related meanings that pantos and other comic plays relied on were thus reworked in London theatres and for London audiences for whom these features may have indexed the meanings associated with what they knew or imagined as the Lancashire persona. As such, the values of comicality and strongmindedness linked to the figures of the Dame character and clownish Andrew performed through the vernacular in Manchester plays were reshaped outside Lancashire where the dialect was most commonly associated with ideas of working class. Indeed, the evidence suggests that the working-class characterological figure circulated in factory melodramas was not necessarily activated on the basis of localised forms shared and expected by local audiences (e.g., MOUTH). The data rather suggest that the stylisation of the dialect outside Lancashire was reworked and adapted to the context of the performance. It drew on a changing set of enregistered traits that took different shapes, evoked different meanings in front of different audiences, and were voiced by performers who aligned themselves with the characterological figure performed through the dialect that those audiences recognised. In this sense, the plays scrutinised here testify to the “centrifugal force” (Johnstone 2013, 197) of performance in the process of enregisterment insofar as performance acts as a dynamic space where the repertoire of dialect forms is expanded and the links between Lancashire speech and related meanings reinterpreted, as we have seen.

6.6 Concluding Remarks In this chapter, I have examined the enregisterment of the Lancashire dialect by looking at nineteenth-century performances of the dialect in the

124  Javier Ruano-García context of stylisation and the sociolinguistics of performance. By combining the notions of enregisterment and indexicality within such frameworks, I have been able to identify shifting patterns of style that drew upon varying linguistic inventories linked with different characterological types. The comparative analysis undertaken here has shown, first, that while the Lancashire persona associated with the dialect in Manchester pantos and published comic plays often embodies comicality and recreates social distinctions, the set of traits deployed to perform such a characterological type differs. In the case of comic plays, I have identified a repertoire that is largely comparable to that found in other forms of Lancashire literature written by leading native dialect authors and published by influential local houses. As noted, this goes some way to suggesting that the Lancashire dialect performed in these plays drew upon forms that had been enregistered in and thanks to the publication of such popular works.8 Pantos relied on a more restricted set of items that yet seem to have been more localised. Second, the analysis has revealed that the speech of the working-class Lancashireman circulated in factory melodramas performed outside Lancashire was crafted through a set of linguistic traits that combined forms traditionally associated with the dialect, as well as other non-standard features that were more widely employed in the North and elsewhere in England. Limited though the evidence explored is, the analysis suggests that stylised performances not only relied on but also contributed to the enregisterment of the dialect. It was not circulated as a static repertoire of linguistic features indexical of a set of pre-established meanings, but rather took the form of a dynamic inventory that playwrights and performers adapted to the place of the representation, the audience, and their shared ideas about the social persona associated with such forms. In the process of social circulation through performance, the enactment of Lancashire identities through the dialect was therefore reworked, which would attest to the fact that “register models undergo various forms of revalorization, retypification, and change” (Agha 2005, 38). By exploring hitherto unresearched material, the analysis thus hopes to have opened the way for further scrutiny of historical dialect performance given the implications that such intentional speech has for the broad study of sociolinguistic style both past and present. All in all, this chapter has sought to enhance our understanding of dialect enregisterment as a dynamic process of immediate relevance to historical third-wave sociolinguistic enquiry.

Notes 1 The concept of style, as it has been and is used in sociolinguistics, is explored in detail by Hernández-Campoy (2016) from a wide range of perspectives. 2 They show some correspondence with the dimensions described by Bell and Gibson’s (2011) sociolinguistics of performance: identities, reflexivity, audience, authenticity, genre, etc.

“Aw’m Lancashire, owd cock, and gradely hearty”  125 3 They include pieces such as Douglas Jerrold’s (1803–57) Factory Girl (1832), John Walker’s The Factory Lad (1832), and Watts Phillips’s (1825–74) Lost in London (1867), all of which were performed in Lancashire and London. Of interest are also two dramatisations of Elizabeth Gaskell’s (1810–65) industrial novel Mary Barton (1848) that are explored in this chapter: William Thompson Townsend’s (1806?–1870) Mary Barton (1861) and Dion Boucicault’s (1820–90) The Long Strike (1866). 4 Of special mention are J.J.B. Forsyth and John Fox Turner (pseud. Pyngle Layne). According to Robinson (2015, 22) other authors writing for Manchester audiences between 1880 and 1903 are John Wilton-Jones (1853– 97), George Dance (1857–1932), William Wade, and Thomas Finnellan Doyle (1838–?). Doyle wrote mainly for the Theatre Royal, whereas Wade did it chiefly for the Comedy Theatre, Jones being credited as the writer of pantos performed at the Prince’s, Queen’s, and Comedy theatres. Not all of them were local writers (e.g., Doyle was born in Ireland, whereas Dance was original from Nottingham). 5 The Salamanca Corpus: Digital Archive of English Dialect Texts is the first electronic corpus of texts containing literary representations of dialect from the sixteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, which is available at http://www. thesalamancacorpus.com (García-Bermejo Giner et al., 2011–). It includes instances of both literary dialects and dialect literature from all over England, as well as examples of prose, verse, and drama, many of which are otherwise hard to access. The plays analysed here are two examples: both of them have been transcribed from rare copies held at the University of Manchester Library. 6 Following the usual practice in related studies, John Wells’s (1982) lexical sets are employed in this paper to identify some of the features found in the corpus, namely the FACE (i.e. /eɪ/), GOAT (i.e. /əʊ/), and MOUTH (i.e. /aʊ/) diphthongs, along with the lack of split between FOOT and STRUT words (e.g. foot /ʊ/, strut /ʌ/), which is “[o]ne of the most salient markers of northern English pronunciation” (Beal 2004, 121). OE and ME are used respectively for Old English and Middle English. 7 Little Boy Blue (1869) has these two instances of OE /ü/ > ME /i/, whereas summat is not employed in any of the pantos. 8 This opens the path to explore the linguistic practices of the community of publishers that produced Lancashire works so as to determine any possible impact on the crafting of the textual dialect and thus on the enregisterment of Lancashire written styles.

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Part III

Voices on Screen

7 Some Observations on British Accent Stereotypes in Hollywood-Style Films* Patrick Zabalbeascoa 7.1 Introduction This chapter looks at the use of British accents in US television and cinema productions and asks how important it is to take this factor into account in audiovisual translation, following Voellmer & Zabalbeascoa’s 2014 study of the presence of German in US film productions. Translating has often been said to involve a deep or special kind of reading. It brings out an awareness of textual features that may be less apparent when there is no requirement to render them in a new version for text users with different linguistic and sociocultural profiles. Thus, any discussion, such as this one, on the perception of certain combinations of language variation can be influenced, and most likely enriched, by translational considerations. For native English speakers, any code-switching or change of accent from British English (BRE) to American English (USE) is usually fairly easy to notice, and the discussion for film lovers may revolve around when BRE accents are used in US films and whether American actors and actresses can do good BRE accents. But when the need arises to consider these phenomena as translation problems, then a different approach must be taken, focusing primarily on “how is and how can BRE (best) be dealt with in the audiovisual translation of US film and television?” If this is the case, then there is a distinction to be drawn between justifying the use and quality of BRE in US productions (and vice versa) for film reviews and analyses, as opposed to the relevance of language variation for the case of BRE varieties vs USE varieties to be considered when dubbing or subtitling into Spanish, for instance (Zabalbeascoa and Corrius 2012).

* This study is part of the MUFiTAVi Project, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, registered under PGC2018-099823-B-I00.

134  Patrick Zabalbeascoa If for a moment we leave aside texts that have no verbal elements (e.g., wordless novels, cartoons, some silent films, pictorial assembly instructions, or the textual communicative quality of the visual arts) then one feature of any text is that it has a main language. The notion of main language(s) of a text seems better suited to the field of translation than an oversimplified idea that texts are essentially monolingual. Just as multimodality is also a more adequate baseline approach than the oral vs written binary division for the case of audiovisual translation, and, increasingly, other modes of translation. From the reception perspective of interlingual translation, the main language is always the intended target language (L2), regardless of the precise nature of the main language (L1) of the source text. For example, for the case of Spanish-language audiences, it does not matter whether a film (as source text, ST) is in English of one variety or another, it will necessarily be a case of L1-English translated into L2-Spanish. So, from the perspective of translating into Spanish or Italian, etc. it does not matter whether a film is mostly in USE from California, Texas, Boston, New York, MidAtlantic, or BRE from London, Birmingham, Manchester, Cardiff, or Glasgow. The fact that the L2-Spanish of the dubbed or subtitled version is Iberian, Mexican, Mid-Atlantic Spanish, or Neutral depends on the target text (TT) audience’s language profile, not the ST version. It does matter, however, when the audiovisual text is interpreted as having a relevant combination of different types of English (dialects, sociolects, or idiolects), in terms of stylistic variation, ideological intent, cultural diversity, humour, topic, narrative technique, use of stereotypes, character portrayal, etc. A historical perspective of the evolution of English-language cinema and television, mostly in the United States, may help to understand why certain linguistic trends prevail at certain times in US audiovisuals, such as the development from Mid-Atlantic or Transatlantic accents to selective uses of BRE accents in US productions as Mid-Atlantic waned. These factors and changes are highly revealing towards a better understanding of traditional American film practices and trends but may have little bearing on how US audiovisuals are translated today. What is relevant to any translator’s task at hand, and only when carefully considered, is the deliberate use of language variation, such as US English opposed to other languages that might be scripted into the film. If the main language of the ST can be referred to as L1 and the main language of any of its translations as L2, then any other language, in either ST or TT can be labelled L3, ST (for the purpose of this chapter) being the US audiovisual production and TT its foreign-language dubbed or subtitled version. Linguistic variation can be annotated as L1+L3 for the source text, and L2+L3 for the translation (TT). The focal point of this chapter, then, is to discuss

Some Observations on British Accent Stereotypes  135 L3-BRE combined with L1-USE in a given film or TV series, and how this particular combination is and can be rendered in audiovisual translation, if at all, when deemed relevant. British English, and in particular Received Pronunciation (RP), has had a special status in American film making for many years. There are many diverse factors that help to explain this. The first obvious reason is that BRE and USE are historical branches from the same original language tree. Secondly, there has been a constant (one-sided) migration of actors and actresses from the UK towards the USA (just to name a few: Cary Grant, Patrick Stewart, Ian McShane, Emily Blunt, Christian Bale, Keira Knightly, Naomi Watts, Jason Statham). Thirdly, Hollywood has always been interested in foreign markets, including the English-speaking countries of the former British Empire, and British productions also strive to be appealing to US audiences, in different degrees. Mid-Atlantic, or Transatlantic accent is a constructed way of speaking, especially developed for twentieth century film making, as part of an effort to produce a prestigious version of USE, with numerous features of RP included in the mix, that no American actually spoke unless specifically trained to. It was adopted in the early twentieth century mostly by US “aristocrats” and Hollywood actors (Fletcher 2013). More recently, “Mid-Atlantic accent” can also refer to any accent with a perceived mixture of both USE and BRE varieties. In a historical development after WWII, with the United States appearing as the new superpower (empire), Hollywood moved away from a standard practice of using Mid-Atlantic accent towards an acceptance of a more local General American English (Queen 2015). A new purpose was found for Mid-Atlantic, BRE, or pseudo-British accents, restricting the use of this accent to characters belonging to ruling classes of empires, spanning from ancient Egypt and Rome to the Galactic Empires of the Star Wars franchise, or fantasy worlds (Lord Farquaad in Shrek, as opposed to Princess Fiona’s General American in the same film). In any case, the development was to use BRE accents in Hollywood productions more and more like foreign languages, namely to create, evoke, or reinforce certain stereotypes and stock characters, or some form of narrative tension. And this is where it becomes relevant to translation, to the extent that translators may be interested in rendering, or at least dealing somehow with, stock characters (Ranzato 2018, 2019), stereotypes, clichés, discourse communities, and character portrayal and style, as well as an awareness of prefabricated orality (Baños and Chaume 2009) and how this type of orality plays out in audiovisual fiction in source texts, or in “dubbese,” or in stylistic features and the norms of subtitling.

136  Patrick Zabalbeascoa When we are dealing, then, with (the translation of) late twentieth century and early twenty-first century audiovisuals, we are no longer as interested in early film history as in the variability of factors that account for British accents in Hollywood-style productions. In this respect, casting is something to be considered. Is the performers’ mother tongue some form of BRE or did they live in Britain? Has the performer been coached in accents, and how good is the resulting command of an acquired accent? Have the performers been cast because of or despite their elocutionary, articulatory attributes and native dialect? Is a British accent an essential requirement of the script?

7.2 Observations on Particular Samples Anthony Hopkins’s accent, playing Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), is an interesting case in point. Actually, pinpointing his accent in this film is no straightforward matter. It seems somewhat Mid-Atlantic, in the sense that it is a cross between fake British and fake American. The character is meant to be from Baltimore but bears no resemblance to the characters in The Wire (2002–08). The situation is saved somewhat by the character having spent time abroad in Lithuania and France, and there is no mention of him ever having been near the UK despite occasional features of BRE in his speech. To complicate matters further, Lecter is capable of imitating South US American English, and despite this, many viewers and critics put the peculiar accent down to the fact that the actor, Anthony Hopkins, is Welsh and not good at accents. If this were so, he quickly fixed that shortcoming to do an excellent American accent in Nixon (1995). The Silence of the Lambs is a psychological horror film, and it is not far-fetched to venture that the film director, Jonathan Deeme, raised no objections to a British twang in Lecter’s diction, even though there is no connection to the British Isles anywhere. This incongruity in particular, and this case in general, seem to lend credence to the idea that British accents are often associated with villains and evil characters, and they do not get any more psychopathic than Hannibal Lecter. Another example, reinforcing the same idea from a different angle, is Hugh Laurie playing Dr House in House M.D. (2004–12). Like Hopkins, Laurie is British born, but unlike Hannibal Lecter, Dr House speaks with what is clearly meant to be a distinct USE accent. Despite his flaws, House is perceived as a hero, doing much good and saving many lives. The point here is that there does not seem to be anything in the premise of House’s fictional biography and character that would have prevented the character from having a British heritage. So, it does not matter that House and Lecter have no particular linguistic quirk in their dubbed or subtitled versions broadcast in Spain. It does not seem reasonable to demand that the translator become fixated on somehow

Some Observations on British Accent Stereotypes  137 rendering the accents in productions like these two, unless there is some special interest in providing a colourful or exotic-sounding variety as a form of highlighting character portrayal or adding suspense. In any case, I think such cases do shed some light on Hollywood scripting and casting practices and policies regarding the potential and actual relationships between real-life performers’ linguistic backgrounds and the roles they play. A screenwriter may wish to distinguish two character groups (Zabalbeascoa and Corrius 2012), depending on whom they can identify with: the in-group characters and the out-group. In-group membership is partly due to coming from the same country as the audience, and it is frequent practice for Hollywood out-group characters to be from other countries (Bleichenbacher 2008). Out-group membership and cultural otherness are features that can potentially account for the presence and use of L3. Dialect variations like British English can indeed show cultural otherness, often just as well as more dissimilar foreign languages. Di Giovanni (2003, 208) refers to cultural otherness as “the depiction of cultures which are distant in space or even in time from the familiar cultural background.” A further example can be found in Jeremy Irons’s filmography and some of the roles he is best known for, including his work as a voice

Example 7.1  Aladdin JAFAR:  You ... are late. GAZEEM:  A thousand apologies, O patient one. JAFAR:  You have it, then? GAZEEM:  I had to slit a few throats to get it. (Jafar reaches out for it,

but Gazeem yanks it back.) Ah, ah, ahhh! The treasure! me, my pungent friend. You’ll get what’s coming to you.

JAFAR:  Trust

actor in animated films, constantly called upon to display his archetypical RP accent, almost inextricably connected to evil villains. The highly suspicious, dissolute European aristocrat Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune (1990), the evil Scar in The Lion King (1994), and the equally evil Jafar in Aladdin (1992), Simon Gruber in Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), and the evil wizard Profion in the film Dungeons and Dragons (2000). Just as we might say that Jeremy Irons epitomises British English – posh RP in particular, defined as a popular stereotype of the British upperclass and aristocracy – at the service of portraying evil, we might equally claim that actors like Hugh Grant (Mickey Blue Eyes 1999, or Charles

138  Patrick Zabalbeascoa in Example 7.2) and Colin Firth (Love Actually 2003) RP tends to be used to signal an American stereotype of British men as stuck-up, selfconscious prudes, wimps who can sometimes be forgiven in part because they can also be seen as more endearing than macho types. Diction and word usage are of paramount importance in character portrayal both in the source text and any of its translations. Butlers are frequently derided, and for the American stereotype, they must be British, just as Geoffrey is in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. The Spanish dubbed version of this show compensates for a total lack of British accent by making his speech somewhat effeminate, thereby developing the opposite-to-jock American stereotype of Englishmen.

Example 7.2  Four Weddings and a Funeral MATTHEW:  She’s

a pretty girl. The one you can’t take your eyes off. Is it love at first sight? CHARLES:  Good Lord, no! lt’s the bloke she’s dancing with. I played rugby with him at school. I’m wondering what position he played. Though, let’s say, for the sake of argument, one did take a fancy to someone at a wedding. Do you think there really are people who can say “Hi, babe. My name’s Charles. This is your lucky night”? MATTHEW:  Well, if there are, they’re not English. CHARLES:  Quite. In Example 7.2, Hugh Grant plays wimpish Charles, and the point for translation is that the joke in the dialogue hinges quite a bit on the fact that Matthew is not English, but Scottish. However, the Spanish audience have no way of knowing this at this point in the film because his Scottishness is only manifested in his accent. Example 7.6 is quite similar to Example 7.2 in relying entirely on a character’s accent and nothing else (in the ST) to “tell” the audience where a character is from, often as a crucial ingredient of humour or some other aspect of the script. Apart from casting constraints or priorities, and the portrayal of evil villains or endearing wimps, two additional factors to be considered are foreignness and comprehensibility. Foreign characters can easily stand out by speaking foreign languages (i.e., L3), in a device called vehicular matching, as proposed by Sternberg (1981). Depending on the reason why a foreign out-group character is introduced in the story, the next consideration is whether or not the character’s utterances are meant to be understood by (a) other characters, or (b) the audience, or

Some Observations on British Accent Stereotypes  139 (c)  comprehension is not really the issue, but rather highlighting some metalingual aspect of the dialogue. If the need to understand is important or irrelevant, then a dialect or different standard serves exactly the same purpose as a “more foreign” language, with the added advantage of being comprehensible. In this respect British English (BRE) in American films works rather similarly to non-native utterances, let’s say English spoken imperfectly with a French accent and typical instances of interference from the character’s native French language, including tell-tale uses of words and register, etc. A case in point is the Merovingian character in The Matrix Reloaded, “cursing in French is like wiping your arse with silk” (2003). There are two noteworthy points in the Merovingian line. One is that his French accent is quite randomly chosen for the script (i.e., he could have been posh British or Russian, etc.) given that there is hardly any mention of geographical locations in the script, set as it is in a virtual world. The other is that the observation the character makes about cursing in French is ironically probably only true from the perspective of certain native speakers of English and other non-French communities. On the other hand, for dramatic or comic purposes, BRE might be the director’s choice when looking for a language that is impossible or hard to understand by other characters or by the audience, as in Example 7.3, appealing possibly to both US and British audiences even if the US audience is closer to Avi’s viewpoint than the British.

Example 7.3  Snatch TONY:  Where was he last seen? DOUG:  At a bookies. TONY:  Bookies? [to Susi] Pass us

the blower, Susi. [to Avi] Bookies got blagged last night. AVI:  “Blagged”? Speak English to me, Tony. I thought this country spawned the fucking language, and so far nobody seems to speak it. TONY:  [explains] Blagged, robbed. Dubbed version in Spanish: TONY:  Anoche fangaron una casa de apuestas. AVI:  ¿Fangaron? Háblame en cristiano, Tony. Los ingleses tenéis fama de ser finolis y habláis fatal. Hablar bien no cuesta una puta mierda. Spanish subtitles: TONY:  Una fue chorizada anoche. AVI:  ¿Chorizada? Este país es cuna del inglés y nadie parece hablarlo.

140  Patrick Zabalbeascoa Some films are not “purely” British or American, but are either coproductions, or are carefully produced to appeal to British and American audiences, for example, in the cast. This is the case of Four Weddings and a Funeral (casting Andie McDowell) and Snatch (developing ideas not used in Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, a more genuinely British production with no US characters), casting Brad Pitt, Benicio del Toro, and Dennis Farina (as Avi; see Example 7.3). In this example, Tony and his Cockney gang do not fall neatly into the same evil category as Hannibal Lecter, Jafar, or Scar (although they are not exactly nice); it is rather a US-UK rivalry dynamic whereby each side of the Atlantic often accuses the other of speaking a poor version of the English language. In the Spanish versions of this scene there is no L1-L3 opposition that would warrant such a metalinguistic comment, but this is compensated for by Avi saying that he cannot understand Tony’s slang or vulgar expressions to refer to robbery (fangaron, an infrequent colloquialism in the dubbed version), and that Tony should speak better to fit in with the image Avi had of Englishmen all speaking posh, in the dubbed version. The subtitled version is somewhat incoherent as the word used is actual Spanish slang for robbed (chorizaron), but the comment Avi makes is about England being the birthplace of the English language, and the connection is hard to make for any Spanish viewer reading the subtitles. The translator for the dubbed version, however, seems to have picked up on the requirement to introduce a joke at this point, and does so rather creatively, and more coherently than the subtitles, by saying that “to talk properly is not at all fucking hard.” The dubbed version also manages to throw in another humorous quip in the form of háblame en cristiano, a common expression in Spanish which means “talk to me in a way that I can understand and follow you,” therefore quite fitting for this context, and bypasses the tricky dilemma of making an explicit reference to either Spanish or English. One of Snatch’s most memorable features is Brad Pitt in the role of an Irish Traveller. He introduces himself by saying “Call me Mickey. Not Irish, not English.” His speech is repeatedly portrayed as incomprehensible to all of those around him except the group who travel and live with him. The rivalry theme between the USA and the UK is illustrated in Examples 7.4 and 7.5. In Example 7.5, it seems that this rivalry can be talked about at least among the characters, even if it cannot be reflected in Spanish by any accent. Example 7.4 is taken from a scene involving what might be regarded as a case of Charles’s love at first sight for Carrie; he is caught gazing in her direction by Fiona, who teases him by exploiting his shyness and inability to share his feelings. The stereotype of British acute sense of embarrassment is almost a theme of the film and is personified in Charles. In Example 7.4, the UK-US rivalry is also there but the important element to be kept in translation could be the fact that everything Fiona says about Carrie is teasingly meant to put Charles off Carrie, first by

Some Observations on British Accent Stereotypes  141

Example 7.4  Four Weddings and a Funeral FIONA and CHARLES look across at Carrie who is listening ­considerately to a grandmother. FIONA:  Name’s Carrie. CHARLES:  Pretty. FIONA:  American. CHARLES:  Interesting. FIONA:  Slut. CHARLES:  Really? FIONA:  Used to work at Vogue. Lives in America now: only goes out with very glamorous people: out of your league. CHARLES:  That’s a relief.

pointing out Carrie’s negative traits, and when that does not work, by saying that Carrie is too good for Charlie, not worried in the least about this apparently blatant contradiction. A good joke in the script, then. In this analysis Fiona’s utterance of the word “American” is meant as an insult, partly achieved through voice pitch and facial expression, and I think a

Example 7.5  A Fish Called Wanda OTTO:  You

English, you think you’re so superior, don’t you? Well, you’re the filth of the planet. A bunch of pompous, badlydressed, poverty-stricken, sexually-repressed football hooligans. [aiming a gun at him] Goodbye, Archie. ARCHIE:  At least we’re not irretrievably vulgar. You know your problem? You don’t like winners. OTTO:  Winners? ARCHIE:  Yeah. Winners. Winners like... North Vietnam? OTTO:  Shut up! We did not lose Vietnam! It was a tie! ARCHIE:  [in a fake American accent] I’m tellin’ ya, they kicked some ass there. Boy, they whupped your hide real good! OTTO:  No, they didn’t. ARCHIE:  Yes, they did. OTTO:  Oh, no, they didn’t. ARCHIE:  Oh, yes, they did. OTTO:  Oh, no, they... Shut up! Goodbye, Archie. ARCHIE:  Gonna shoot me? OTTO:  Er, yes. [in a fake British accent] Yes, ’fraid so, old chap. Sorry!

142  Patrick Zabalbeascoa

Example 7.6  Pulp Fiction PUMPKIN:  I’m

not saying I wanna rob banks. I’m just illustrating that if we did it’d be easier than what we’ve been doing. HONEY BUNNY:  And no more licor stores? PUMPKIN:  What’ve we been talking about? Yeah no more licor stores. Besides, it ain’t the giggle it used to be. Too many foreigners own licor stores. Vietnamese, Koreans. They don’t even speak fucking English. You tell ’em “empty out the register,” they don’t know what you’re fucking talking about. They make it too personal. We keep on, one of these gook fuckers, gonna make us kill ’im.

foreign audience would appreciate that insulting effect in their translated version, even if Carrie’s American accent could not be rendered. An aspect that makes the exchange in Example 7.4 so effective is the staccato rhythm of single-word turns. A Spanish translation that provides fuller sentences with verbs, for example spoils the effect somewhat, as “she’s American” sounds like volunteering information, unlike “American” carefully uttered to sound disgusted. The humorous irony in Example 7.6 relies on the fact that Pumpkin sounds foreign, i.e., he has a British accent. If and when his accent is “lost in translation,” as indeed is the case in the Spanish dubbed version, the irony and the humour are lost with it if no compensatory techniques are resorted to. This character does not look foreign in any way so his foreignness comes entirely from his accent. A problem probably shared by dubbing practices in Spain and in Italy, as Bonsignori points out: We can conclude that, although the various strategies for compensation in Italian dubbing may appear quite efficient in conveying diastratic and diaphasic variation to some extent, they are less convincing for expressing diatopic variation and the values that are attached to it. (Bonsignori 2009) Could Family Guy’s Stewie (Example 7.7) be a caricature or parody of Hollywood’s abuse of their stereotypes of the British, especially the “evil alien” one? This stereotype often combines with that of English people or characters being verbally more convoluted and using high registers quite incongruently. Stewie’s BRE seems based on a combo of Hannibal Lecter, as played by Anthony Hopkins, and the evilest characters played

Some Observations on British Accent Stereotypes  143 by Jeremy Irons, with the added evil feature of being evil from the word go, from birth, in a jestful jab hinting that it is some sort of British DNA. So, if you’re born evil in America then you must be British, or at least speak with a British accent, even if nobody else in your family was ever near the British Isles. This sociolinguistic bizarreness is the common denominator of Family Guy, Aladdin, and The Lion King (at least), where the person (or animal) speaking in British English has no good (sociolinguistic) reason to speak British English. Jafar is an Arab and his henchmen and other minor Arab characters all speak non-native English with Arabic accents. The heroes, Aladdin and Jasmine, speak with General American accents, and Jasmine’s father, who is an old fuddy duddy, speaks with a British accent a-la-wimp. In The Lion King, matters are very similar to Aladdin but slightly more egregious because we are dealing with animals … in Africa. In both of these Disney films, despite an array of different US accents and non-native English voices, the upper-class RP is always reserved for the worst villain. Stewie, then, follows in this incongruous tradition, which strongly challenges frequent

Example 7.7  Family Guy S01E03 “Chitty Chitty Death Bang” STEWIE:  I

say, am I to spend the entire day wallowing around in my own feces? A little service here! STEWIE:  Dear Diary... It seems the domestic overseers are plotting against me. … Their plans somehow relate to the anniversary of my escape from the womb. … I’m still haunted by the memories of how I was incarcerated... in that amniotic Attica. [Epic instrumental music] … As I recall, it was every potential man for himself. [Whooshing] … I alone had reached the target objective, thanks to the intrepidity... I developed at testicular boot camp. But it was a trap! … I was imprisoned in that uterine gulag for nine grueling months. … Day 171. I’ve sprouted another finger, counting the one from yesterday. I’m up to 11. … As the months of solitude passed, I began to go insane. … It seemed my prison cell was getting smaller and smaller. … I was quite sure that soon I would be dead. … But then, a miracle! There was a light at the end of the tunnel. … I rushed to freedom, but suddenly I was ambushed by a mysterious man in white! … The man in white. Of course. He must be the hired professional of whom they spoke. He failed to thwart my escape into the outside world. And now, one year hence, he’s returning to rectify his mistake and... put me back in the womb!

144  Patrick Zabalbeascoa claims to linguistic authenticity when foreign languages and dialects are used in audiovisual fiction, and goes one-up on it by using a one-year-old character. Mercifully, so bizarre is the premise that it can be interpreted as a parody of Hollywood’s British-speaking villains, or should we say xenophobia in the light of examples like Dexter in Dexter’s Laboratory (Cartoon Network 1996–2003), like Stewie in so many ways, except that his accent is more Eastern European, in a typical Hollywood stereotype of scientists (e.g., the grown-up scientist in The Hudsucker Proxy 1994). The character of Stewie touches on different topics and issues that might be assigned to taboo or offensive humour. All the more so as it involves a one-year-old child. There is no particular accent in either of the Spanish dubbed versions, for Spain, or for South America. In Example 7.8, Sydney shows Irving (her partner in crime) at one point in the film how she can take on a fake identity as a British aristocrat as an effective means of doing their stings. And that goes on for a large part of the film, but suddenly there is a key moment when she feels she cannot keep faking her identity because the ploy is interfering with her relationship with Richie. As she gets more deeply involved with Richie, something clicks inside her and she drops her British accent. To the extent

Example 7.8  American Hustle SYDNEY extends her hand to IRVING in a royal fashion. SYDNEY:  [British accent] Would you like to meet Lady Edith Greensly? [Irving looks stunned.] I have royal banking connections in London. I’d love to help you with your loan but of course I have to be very selective. IRVING:  That was fucking fantastic. SYDNEY:  Thank you. Did you like it? BUSINESSMAN:  [falling for the British accent] Lady, your ladyship, thank you again. IRVING:  [off screen] These are the roles that we were meant to play. SYDNEY:  We are going to need another move, trust me. And you’re going to be thanking me. [shifts to British accent] The key to people is what they believe and what they want to believe and I want to believe that we were real, and I want to believe that a man could want me. And I’m gonna take all of that heartbreak, and all of that sorrow, and I am going to use it. And I’m going to make Richie think that I want him, and that I like him, and I’m going to be very convincing. And I’m pissed at you. RICHIE:  [still believing Sydney to be Lady Edith] I love you. I love you. Look at me. I’m in love with you. It is real now. I just said it so now’s the time.

Some Observations on British Accent Stereotypes  145 EDITH:  [kissing him] You want the truth? You want real? RICHIE:  I’m ready for real. SYDNEY:  [drops her British accent] OK, this is real. Do you

hear my voice? This is real. This is real. What you hear is real. RICHIE:  What? SYDNEY:  This is me. RICHIE:  What do you mean? What are you doing, an accent? An American accent? EDITH:  No. There is no English. There’s only American. There is no English. RICHIE:  [confused and flustered] What are you talking about? Stop it. You’re Edith. You’re Edith Greensly. I checked your records. SYDNEY:  I falsified my records back to birth. I falsified them. My name is Sydney Prosser, and I’m from Albuquerque, New Mexico. I’m not Edith Greensly. There is no Edith Greensly. RICHIE:  You’re freaking me out. No, you said in the stall that we were going to be real and that we weren’t going to fake it. SYDNEY:  I’m being real now. This is who I am. I’m Sydney Prosser. Ok? RICHIE:  So, why did you do an English accent after that? SYDNEY:  I’m sorry I didn’t tell you in the stall. I created Edith because I needed her to survive, okay? But I’m done with that now.

that this key turn of events is not reflected in a dubbed or subtitled version is to omit an essential element of the film’s plot more than character portrayal. This feature of disguise being switched on at one point of the film and then turned off at another must stay or be compensated for somehow, simply so the audience can follow when Sydney is in disguise as Lady Edith, and, crucially, when she is letting her mask slip away, thus revealing her true identity to the police officer who is trying to entrap her and Irving. Nothing particular is conveyed in the manner of speech in the dubbed version for Spain (entitled La gran estafa americana), that is, there is nothing different in Sydney’s Spanish from the Spanish spoken by the characters she interacts with, like Richie and Irving, nor in her voice or accent nor is there any apparent attempt to include a particular compensatory idiolect. However, the Spanish version of these utterances could have involved the use of a completely different language, under the guise of non-native speaker of (US) English. Lady Edith’s disguise consists of being European with connections to big bankers. The Spanish version could have plausibly made her disguise a central or eastern European

146  Patrick Zabalbeascoa

Example 7.9  Community S01E01 “Community” WINGER:  [referring to Duncan] I’m just using regular psychology on

a spineless British twit. DUNCAN:  I’m a professor. You can’t talk to me that way. WINGER:  A six-year-old girl could talk to you that way. DUNCAN:  Yes, because that would be adorable. WINGER:  No, because you’re a five-year-old girl and there’s

a peck-

ing order. DUNCAN:  Fine! I’ll do it! WINGER:  Thank you. DUNCAN:  Yeah. Pleasure. aristocratic non-native speaker of TT Spanish in lieu of ST English, and it could have worked just as well as BRE did for the audiences in the USA, just as the somewhat randomly chosen French worked for The Matrix Reloaded. The television series Community is more recent than the other examples, and goes much more out of its way to convey political correctness than, say, the Disney films of the 1990s, and in direct opposition to Family Guy. In this respect, the fact that Duncan is English does not lean so heavily on one sort of stereotype or another, and Duncan’s character portrayal can come across, as nearly every other main character in the series, as being a sample of some ethnic minority or foreign group and having other shortcomings which are more to do with personal background or psychological issues. From this angle, if the Spanish version does not reflect Duncan’s Englishness then very little is really lost. Duncan’s wardrobe and general demeanour could also be ambiguously interpreted as either a hallmark of Britishness or an individual quirkiness. This was my point in commenting on House M.D. In this respect, Dr House and Professor Duncan are both played by English actors and have very particular personal traits that do not necessarily have much to do with where they are from. So, it stands out that in one series the character should be British and not in the other. And in both cases, there is not a trace of ethnicity in the Spanish versions.

7.3 Concluding Remarks What I have attempted to show above is that US English(es) and British English(es) used in opposition to each other in audiovisual fiction, as combinations of L1 and L3 in the same source text, present similarities and differences with traditional problems of dialects and multilingualism in fiction when they are to be rendered in translation. Of course,

Some Observations on British Accent Stereotypes  147 British English is not a dialect of US English, or vice versa, certainly not in the way African-American English, Baltimorese, or Texan Southern are. Nor is British English a straightforward case of a foreign language in the United States, as French or German are. However, BRE is foreign in the USA in the sense that its speakers are associated with a foreign country (UK), but it also has a dialectal flavour in the linguistic traits of its pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. Also, the UK and the USA have a special relationship and particular history with many episodes. For the purpose of audiovisual translation, then, it is important to get a full grasp of what the BRE–USE opposition is in aid of the nuts and bolts of the screenplay, the cast, the semiotics, the cultural elements, and all the other factors that come into play in audiovisual production and reception (Delabastita 2010). Sometimes, in translation, it seems impossible to reflect how some characters speak with a particular accent. In some of these cases it may not matter (The Silence of the Lambs and Community), or may be compensated for (Family Guy), and in other cases it may even be regarded as a good thing (e.g., omitting the xenophobic overtones in Aladdin and in The Lion King that Spanish children would otherwise have to grow up with). Then there are times when language variation is a key element (Corrius and Zabalbeascoa 2011) of character portrayal (Four Weddings and a Funeral) or humorous effect (Pulp Fiction) or plot development (American Hustle). In the case of language variation there still remains the question, for the translator, as to whether any kind of language can substitute the ST combination of BRE and USE, or if it has to be British, and if so how can that be conveyed in subtitles or dubbing. Explicit attribution (Sternberg 1981) – saying that the character is from Britain – is one way. Another way is to compensate for a virtual impossibility of conveying the idea through British accent by compensating through style, register, and discourse, and this actually what happens so often in Spanish audiovisual translation. For the particular case of dubbing, especially when the comic intent is really obvious, funny voices can be resorted to, or noticeable changes in pitch, intonation, volume, tempo, or voice type can and are used as well (e.g., Buzz Killington in Family Guy). Another factor to consider is to what degree the character is flat, and has no depth, changes, or inner conflict, or whether the character is meant to be round and more complex, and, of course, what role does Britishness play in that complexity, if any. We have seen, for example, certain recurrent patterns in Hollywood-style audiovisuals, some so recurrent as to cast the same actors as much as possible in different films just to make the stereotype easier to grasp immediately. Basically, there is the evil villain, often compounded with aspects of immorality, or psychopathy, combined with conceit and superior intelligence or education (usually wasted in futile or evil projects). Then there is the reverse image of the American hero: the British wimp, nerd, or endearing cutie. Thirdly, we may find

148  Patrick Zabalbeascoa instances of BRE simply to signal the funny foreigner, who acts or speaks oddly, in the same mixed bag as foreigners from many other strange lands with weird habits, manners, and tastes, some hilarious, others creepy, and some terrifying. The norm in Spanish audiovisual translation is either not to distinguish (linguistically, especially in pronunciation) between the main language of a film and any others, or to leave the L3 untouched, and in the case of BRE the first of these strategies is extremely frequent, and the latter is seen as impossible or implausible. Clearly these trends are not effective when BRE has an important function to play. In all of the examples shown above, the translator who seems most resourceful is the one who did the translation for the dubbed version of Snatch (Example 7.3). I have not been able to find any examples where BRE as L3 in an American ST is changed to a different language (French, German) even though this strategy is occasionally resorted to in Spanish dubbed versions when the L3 is any language other than English. I personally think that this type of solution might work, or be worth considering at least, when BRE serves a very particular purpose that has nothing to do with UK–US rivalries, or when UK–US relations can be adapted or changed for the benefit of comic effect or important twists in the plot, which is the case, in my mind, of Lady Edith in American Hustle.

References Baños, Rocío, and Frederic Chaume. 2009. “Prefabricated orality. A challenge in audiovisual translation.” in TRAlinea. Special Issue: The Translation of Dialects in Multimedia. http://www.intralinea.org/specials/article/1714. Bleichenbacher, Lukas. 2008. Multilingualism in the Movies: Hollywood Characters and their Language Choices. Tübingen: Francke. Bonsignori, Veronica. 2009. “Translating English non-standard tags in Italian dubbing.” in TRAlinea Special Issue: The Translation of Dialects in Multimedia. http://www.intralinea.org/specials/article/1709. Corrius, Montse, and Patrick Zabalbeascoa. 2011. “Language variation in source texts and their translations: The case of L3 in film translation.” Target 23(1): 113–130. doi: 10.1075/target.23.1.07zab. Delabastita, Dirk. 2010. “Language comedy and translation in the BBC sitcom ’Allo ’Allo!.” In Translation, Humour and the Media: Translation and Humour Vol. 2. Edited by Delia Chiaro, 193–221. London: Continuum. Di Giovanni, Elena. 2003. “Cultural otherness and global communication in Walt Disney films at the turn of the century.” The Translator 9: 207–223. Fletcher, Patricia. 2013. Classically Speaking, Dialects for Actors. Lulu Enterprises Online publishing. Queen, Robin. 2015. Vox Popular. The Surprising Life of Language in the Media. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Ranzato, Irene. 2018. “The British upper classes: Phonological fact and screen fiction.” In Linguistic and Cultural Representation in Audiovisual Translation.

Some Observations on British Accent Stereotypes  149 Edited by Irene Ranzato and Serenella Zanotti, 203–227. New York/London: Routledge. Ranzato, Irene. 2019. “Talking proper vs. talking with an accent: The sociolinguistic divide in original and translated audiovisual dialogue.” Multilingua Volume 38(5): 547–562. De Gruyter. eISSN 1613-3684. Sternberg, Meir. 1981. “Polylingualism as reality and translation as mimesis.” Poetics Today 2(4): 221–239. Voellmer, Elena, and Patrick Zabalbeascoa. 2014. “How multilingual can a dubbed film be? Language combinations and national traditions as determining factors.” Linguistica Antverpiensia No 13 (2014): Multilingualism at the cinema and on stage: A translation perspective. https://lans-tts.uantwerpen.be/ index.php/LANS-TTS/article/view/72. Zabalbeascoa, Patrick, and Montse Corrius. 2012. “How Spanish in an American film is rendered in translation: Dubbing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in Spain.” Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 20(3): 1–16.

Audiovisual References Aladdin. 1992. Ron Clements and John Musker. USA. American Hustle. 2013. David O. Russell. USA. Community. 2009–15. Dan Harmon. USA. Dexter’s Laboratory. 1996–2003. Genndy Tartakovsky. USA. Die Hard with a Vengeance. 1995. John McTiernan. USA. Dungeons and Dragons. 2000. Courtney Solomon. USA. Family Guy. 1999–2020. Seth McFarlane. USA. A Fish Called Wanda. 1988. Charles Crichton. UK/ USA. Four Weddings and a Funeral. 1994. Mike Newell. UK. The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. 1990–96. Andy Borowitz and Susan Borowitz. USA. House M.D. 2004–12. David Shore. USA. The Hudsucker Proxy. 1994. Joel Coen and Ethan Coen. USA. The Lion King. 1994. Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff. USA. Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. 1998. Guy Ritchie. UK/ USA. Love Actually. 2003. Richard Curtis. UK/ USA/ France. The Matrix Reloaded. 2003. Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski. USA. Mickey Blue Eyes. 1999. Kelly Makin. UK/ USA. Nixon. 1995. Oliver Stone. USA. Pulp Fiction. 1994. Quentin Tarantino. USA. Reversal of Fortune. 1990. Barbet Schroeder. USA. The Silence of the Lambs. 1991. Jonathan Demme. USA. Snatch. 2000. Guy Ritchie. UK/ USA. The Wire. 2002–08. David Simon. USA.

8 The Accented Voice in Audiovisual Shakespeare Irene Ranzato

8.1 Introduction The reflections contained in this chapter take the cue from the evidence, sustained with various nuances by more than one author, that, in Elizabethan times, there was not a dialect literature so understood and that “dialects, for Renaissance authors, have nothing to do with ‘home’” (Blank 1996, 3). The lack of connection between dialectal features and regionality arguably applies also to the plays of William Shakespeare: the voices of his non-standard characters are mainly portrayed in terms of class dialects rather than regional dialects (Delabastita 2002, 305) and draw on stereotypes as means to construe individual characterisations and create humorous situations. As Blank goes on to state, “juxtaposing a peasant dialect with the King’s English was, often enough, played for laughs” (Blank 1996, 3). It would then be arguably appropriate to state that non-standard varieties in Shakespeare are used as idiolects, more than dialects: traits chosen to confer an individual and peculiar linguistic aura, rather than indicate a geographical provenance. In a way which is perhaps counter-intuitive, given the premises, this chapter will not be concerned with the comparatively few examples of non-standard varieties included in Shakespeare’s plays. This is rather the starting point of an investigation which involves some of the plays’ contemporary afterlives – namely film and television adaptations – and which could be summarised in the following research query: what happens when Shakespearean texts are adapted into audiovisual narratives in which accents and dialects are consistently and sometimes unexpectedly used?1 Audiovisual adaptations, not only of Shakespeare’s plays, but of the classics in general, often showcase characters speaking with marked accents and/or in dialect even when in the original texts these same characters are not identified by any distinct regional trait. Contrary to their use by Renaissance authors, accents and dialects in contemporary fictional dialogue are certainly featured also for characterisation and humour, but they build on a network of references and allusions which are deeply embedded in a precise regional and social context

The Accented Voice  151 which is exploited by authors (directors, script writers) who may use them to perform a function which may even go against the grain of the play as traditionally interpreted. In this chapter I will consider some significant adaptations from both cinema and television in order to highlight some relevant typecastings and understand the function of a given variety in the audiovisual texts, even when, as is generally the case, there is no indication of regionality in the respective Shakespeare’s plays. The latter ‘originals’ have in fact been chosen as a privileged site for investigation exactly because of their comparative lack of non-standard varieties with respect to other more diatopically varied examples in English literature. The addition of regional voices in the relative audiovisual adaptations, conspicuous as it is, renders their function arguably more revealing to the scholar’s eye. Conversely, the use of dialects has rarely been foregrounded in the analysis of these Shakespearean afterlives, neither in relation to the source text nor to their contemporary import. The adoption of this viewpoint will hopefully add facets and further problematise the topic of multilingualism in Shakespeare. The type of texts analysed in this chapter falls within the domain of Shakespearean film texts, an area which will be briefly introduced in the next section.

8.2 Audiovisual Shakespeare Film studies scholars and historians have usually treated telecinematic adaptations based on Shakespeare’s plays as works forming a distinct genre (Keyishian 2000). According to Keyishian, they were at least once perceived as prestige works whose language made them different from the standard mass-market film product. There is a past era of what film historians call “direct” or “straight” Shakespeare, a model they associate with the efforts of Laurence Olivier, Franco Zeffirelli, and Orson Welles (Boose & Burt 2001), succeeded by a period in which “the playwright couples creatively with popular culture” (Keyishian 2000, 72), with the films by Kenneth Branagh straddling successfully, I would argue, the sometimes fine line between the two groupings. Keyishian himself rightly doubts that there ever was such a thing as a direct Shakespeare. The scholar’s discourse on the importance of assessing Shakespeare’s films within the wider picture of the film genres they respectively fall into – so not only from the perspectives of auteur theory or adaptation studies, but of film studies proper (see also Pennacchia Punzi 2012, 155–56) – is also relevant to the analysis proposed in this chapter. Trying to understand the function of dialect in this type of films and TV shows can benefit from a preliminary evaluation of the film genre which may, in many cases, not coincide with the one of the play. The use of dialects as conceived by the authors may vary significantly if the work is a comedy or the parody of

152  Irene Ranzato an originally tragic tale, or if it is a film which offers a naturalistic, even documentarist reading in order to resonate with present concerns. On the one hand, Shakespeare’s plays have functioned as myths and sources, “they materialise repeatedly and often unnoticed through allusions and parodies on cinema and television screens” (Howard 2002, 295; Ranzato 2016). As Boose and Burt state, “even films which adapt the Shakespeare script faithfully as Branagh’s […], speak within a metacinematic discourse of self-reference” (Boose and Burt 2001, 11). This has sometimes encouraged an inventiveness in the adaptation of dialogue, and the use of omissions and interpolations which has aimed at fitting Shakespeare’s dialogue into the parameters of an assigned genre. On the other hand, and perhaps especially on television, other authors and directors have portrayed Shakespeare’s characters in more realistic or more intimate shades, using dialogue which often presents linguistic traits which deviate from the standard. The television frame, perceived as a reflection of the living, constantly changing present (Zettl 1978, 5), as a scholar of television aesthetics wrote some time ago, encourages this type of more intimate interpretation and fruition of the plays: A large cinemascope image is definitely “louder” aesthetically than a small television screen; yet the image on the small television screen can nevertheless be more intense. While the large movie screen presents a spectacle, not only physically but also psychologically, on the small television screen it is mostly people, not things, that supply content and carry the show's impact. (5) Moreover, as this medium, much like the theatre, “lives off dialogue” (5), any abridgements, adaptations, departures from Shakespeare’s original lines is all the more conspicuous. This may result in Shakespeare on the small screen working perhaps differently from Shakespeare on the big screen and encouraging a different relationship with the Shakespearean ‘product.’ Viewed in this light, and thanks to the intimate bond that television can establish with its audience, the didactic function of Shakespeare on TV has not escaped educators: the BBC Shakespeare Plays series (1978– 1985) revolutionised the teaching of Shakespeare in schools (Rothwell 2004, 107) by pointing the way to alternative solutions of conveying the plays to younger audiences. In Britain, Shakespeare on television began one Friday afternoon, February 5, 1937, at 3.55 pm with an 11-minute scene from As You Like It from Alexandra Palace (Rothwell 2004, 91). Ironically Shakespeare landed on this popular medium at the same time when the London critics had been writing very harsh reviews of Hollywood’s Midsummer’s Night Dream (Max Reinhardt, 1935) and Romeo and Juliet (Gorge Cukor, 1936), for the lèse majesté of adapting Shakespeare for the cinema

The Accented Voice  153 screens (Rothwell 2004, 91). The close interconnection between the two media has been punctually registered by films over the years, notably in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996), which opens and ends with a television turning on and turning off, and by Michael Almereyds’s Hamlet (2000) which closes with a television broadcast of the epilogue. It is on this rich and highly stratified discourse to which different authors have given their contribution that the present analysis will focus in order to detect the function that accents and dialects carry out in some audiovisual adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays.

8.3 The Function of Dialects If the few examples of dialectal speech in Shakespeare have received due attention,2 the subject of regional accents in the adaptations, while explored several times in theatre performance (see for example Hoenselaars 2014; Joseph 2018; Lombardo 2004; Massai 2005 and 2020) has been underexplored in both cinema and television, despite their pervasiveness in these two media (but see Bruti and Vignozzi 2016; Calbi 2014; Minutella 2016). It is important to emphasise, however, that the paucity of accented voices in Shakespeare has been recently problematised (Massai 2020). We know very little of how non-standard accents may have been used in performance on the Elizabethan stage. The playscript does not usually give indications of prosodic features which are often decided at the moment the actual performance takes life. One could hypothesise that much was perhaps entrusted to the individual choices and linguistic personas of the actors involved, and that, as with film screenplays today, the fact that a particular character would speak with a marked regional accent was not necessarily scripted beforehand but decided when the actual performance was rehearsed and acted out. Even contemporary plays may, or more frequently, may not give indications that characters speak in standard language or deviate from it. The influential taxonomy devised by Sarah Kozloff (2000, 33) on the functions of dialogue in film has been a useful reference point to detect which function non-standard accents or dialects perform in the ­adaptations. According to the scholar, film dialogue in general ­performs one of these functions (my italics): anchorage of the diegesis and ­characters; communication of narrative causality; enactment of narrative events; character revelation; adherence to the code of realism; control of viewer evaluation and emotions; opportunities for star turns; exploiting the resources of language; thematic messages/authorial commentary. I have already argued elsewhere (for example Ranzato 2019) that, as one of the linguistic features attributed to this or that character, dialects, too, can be thought of as having been devised by authors to achieve one or

154  Irene Ranzato more of the ends listed in the taxonomy which can thus be applied to the analysis and interpretation of accented dialogue. If all the functions in the taxonomy are useful to analyse film (and TV)3 dialogue, those in italics are the ones that are arguably more relevant to the analysis of non-standard accents. It is my contention, in other words, that non-standard accents are used especially to these ends: they provide the necessary context for the character (anchorage of the diegesis): they can tell us where the story is set and the origins of the character, their regional and social milieu; and they are used to make dialogue sound more realistic (adherence to the code of realism) and perhaps more relevant to our current social, even political concerns. Dialects give some actors the opportunity to showcase their distinctive, and usually native, accent (opportunities for star turns); they are used sometimes in ways that are at the opposite end of realism, even unnaturally, dissonantly, in a blatantly ‘fake’ way to construct an idiolect which provides very often, but not always, a comic relief (exploitation of the resources of language). In addition to those borrowed from Kozloff, I would add two more functions to this list: the first considers the accented voice as part and parcel of the sound aesthetics of a film (something different from the aesthetic verbal quality considered by Kozloff in her “exploitation of the resources of language”); the other function is performed by non-standard accents when they are used to make characters fit into the mould of a particular film genre. Instances from some of the audiovisual texts considered below will illustrate these points. Though essentially qualitative, the analysis carried out in this chapter has availed itself of a substantial number of case studies,4 which were ordered by the function that the non-standard accents perform in them, with an eye to the text type. By text type, I mean (a) films that use only the original dialogue of the play, with cuts (Shakespeare’s plays are rarely unabridged), but with no or few interpolations; (b) films that use Shakespeare’s dialogue partially (with generous interpolations, integrations, and omissions); and (c) films that reinvent the dialogue with only an allusion to Shakespeare’s text. It is my contention that the use of dialogue with an accent falls within the realm of sound aesthetics. Its development in the respective national traditions is difficult to trace because, as Beck (2016, 12), in his study on sound design, puts it, “the lines of creative exchange do not mirror the same patterns.” The British Free Cinema movement of the 1960s, started by directors Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson, tapped into a strain of documentarist realism which owed much, in its turn, to the theatre of the ‘angry young men.’ At this time, Britain’s stages came to incorporate non-U, non-upper-class accents. This type of research is epitomised by Nicol Williamson’s intentional lower-class Northern accent in his exceptional interpretation of Hamlet, both on stage and in  the film by Tony Richardson (1969). Playing the role in

The Accented Voice  155 the spirit of the 1950s ‘Anger’ (Shaughnessy 2006, 72), Williamson was of “the generation of actors who came in after the Osborne breakthrough which established non-U English on the English stage as an idiom for central characters” (Esslin 1969). It was the first important performance to impose the counter-regionalism of a Northern accent and escape from Gielgud’s Southern regionalism (Shaughnessy 2006, 72). Affected by the zeitgeist of the moment, British film directors developed an approach to sound which included a foregrounding of dialogue (of the ‘sound’ of dialogue) which became their trademark and was “due to an unstated belief that the spoken quality of speech is as significant as its semantic function” (13). Strongly fascinated by “the accented voice as a marker of difference” (14), Free Cinema directors and audio technicians such as Gerry Humphries, Stephen Dalby, Leslie Hodgson, Peter Handford, and Don Challis started a tradition of emphasising local accents as a way to make a social commentary on the regional and class differences of the characters. In the next sections I will illustrate some relevant examples, highlighting the function that non-standard accents perform in the audiovisual texts that I have analysed.

8.4 Cockney Comic Reliefs Accents in Shakespearean films are sometimes used for what I call – following Kozloff (2000) who applied the term to film dialogue in general – the possibility for a “star turn,” a sometimes (though not necessarily) ‘out of context’ use of one’s peculiar accent linked to the actor’s persona. The accent that is most readily associated to them, which is easily their native accent. In 1978, BBC producer Cedric Messina began putting all 36 plays from the 1623 Folio plus Pericles into a six-year series for television. The BBC Television Shakespeare marked a watershed in the history of Shakespeare on screen and revolutionized, as mentioned earlier, the teaching of the bard (Rothwell 2004, 107) by offering audiovisual renditions of the plays which could be more easily appreciated and comprehended by school students. Within the series, Jonathan Miller’s 1981 Othello concentrated on the story of a marriage destroyed by jealousy and evil. Casting Anthony Hopkins as a conspicuously pale Othello, Miller consciously avoided the issue of colour and barely marked Othello’s racial difference from the Venetians, even by the choice of costumes. Hopkins’s low-key performance, “suggesting an oddly withdrawn, sometimes ironic, sometimes slightly neurotic personality left the screen to be dominated by Bob Hoskins’s gleeful Cockney Iago” (Neill 2006, 92). Influenced by Miller’s reading of the celebrated W.H. Auden essay, “The Joker in the Pack” (“What Shakespeare gives us in Iago is a portrait of a practical joker of a peculiarly appalling kind,” Auden [1963] 1989, 466), Hoskins’s was a

156  Irene Ranzato performance “full of comic relish and sniggering asides” (Neill 2006, 92), perfectly in line with the interpretation of Iago as someone who breaks an established social convention. “Practical jokes are a demonstration that the distinction between seriousness and play is not a law of nature but a social convention which can be broken, and that a man does not always require a serious motive for deceiving another” (Auden [1963] 1989, 467–68). As far as accents are concerned, it is the Othello character who is generally played with an accent. In Oliver Parker’s 1995 film version, for example, Lawrence Fishburne, the actor in the title role, adopts a Caribbean voice with some Arabic hues, a way to express linguistically his cultural otherness and to contrast him with Kenneth Branagh’s British Iago. This is in line with classical readings of the play (see for example Leslie Fiedler 1972, 139–96). Not in this instance. In this BBC version, Iago is a Cockney, a stereotype usually applied to knaves, prostitutes, and petty criminals in film and television narratives, but also associated with a sort of cheeky and funny linguistic bravado. In performing with his native accent, Hoskins projects his typical linguistic persona and thus exploits his Cockney accent for a star turn which sets the tone for his malevolent comic villain. This function intertwines, as highlighted above, with the need to familiarise the play to wider audiences for educational purposes, a goal which the use of this popular variety certainly helped to achieve. In another rendition from the same BBC series, The Who lead singer Roger Daltrey, doubling as the Dromios in The Comedy of Errors (Jones 1983), plays his roles with a marked non-standard accent. Thickening his own West London accent, Daltrey does a good job of capturing the music and sense of Shakespeare’s words in an energetic and generous performance. He was generally praised for his acting and, according to Rothwell (2004, 113), “went over smashingly” with students who could relate to him more easily than to standard-accented actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company.

8.5 The Function of American Accents in a RP Context The British character in a mostly American context (speaking with a RP or sometimes with other non-standard accents, most often Cockney) or, vice versa, an American character in a British context, are common contrastive topoi in films and on television. In this section I will refer to how this contrast has been exploited in a celebrated adaptation of Richard III. I will also expand, more in general, on the casting of American actors to play such quintessentially British texts as Shakespeare’s plays and on the significance of this casting choice by film directors and producers. The presence of US actors in Shakespearean films, especially those playing with their own American accents, is felt as problematic by some of the most conservative commentators. In Richard III by Richard Loncraine

The Accented Voice  157 (1995), actors from both sides of the Atlantic integrate the cast headed by Ian McKellen in the title role. The US contingent includes Annette Bening as Queen Elizabeth and Robert Downey Jr as her brother, Rivers. In a departure from most Shakespearean transpositions, their characters are distinctly portrayed as Americans. In his generous introduction to the screenplay published on his website, McKellen (n.d.) recalls the complex process which brought Richard Eyre’s stage version of the play to the film adaptation which McKellen would write with Loncraine: “I told Meryl Streep [who played the role in Eyre’s production] that the film Queen Elizabeth would be played as an American heiress who had married into the British Royal Family. I asked her whether she could do an American accent.” In the Notes to the film (ibid.), McKellen elucidates: I wanted Queen Elizabeth and her brother to be played as Americans for several reasons. In the original story, they are strangers to the social camp of the King and Richard. A modern equivalent for the 1930s setting seemed to me in contrasting the British royals with a couple of Americans whose manners and voices are different, and of whom the Brits would be suspicious. It is evident from McKellen’s words how the casting choice was consciously made to emphasise contrasts: the manners and voices of the Americans “are different” and the British would be naturally suspicious of them. And he adds: “Far too often American actors copy an English accent in order to do Shakespeare. That really is such a pity because Shakespeare's own accent was probably closer to a North American one than to a modern English accent.” Executive producer Ellen Little sheds further light on the reasons for this typecasting: There is a strong parallel to Wallis Warfield Simpson, for whom Edward VIII abdicated the throne in the 1930s. It is commonly known that, upon his abdication, Edward visited Adolf Hitler, and that one of his best friends was Sir Oswald Mosley, the head of England’s Fascist party. Intelligence reports only now being published show that, had Hitler conquered England, he might have put Edward back on the throne. (ibid.) We remember how the film, as the original poster and related publicity show, strongly invites associations between Richard III’s reign and the Nazi dictatorship. Interestingly, this visual representation was toned down in Italy, a country where the topic of fascism is particularly

158  Irene Ranzato sensitive and one which could hurt a great part of the audience’s sensibilities. American actors assuming a British accent is of course a very common practice and one which may go smoothly even with more or less iconic English characters (see for example Bridget Jones or even Jane Austen’s Emma played by American actresses with acceptable results for the refined palate of the British press and audiences). In the case of Shakespeare, however, assuming a British accent may result in a challenge for the actor. It is well known, for example, that Marlon Brando studied on the taped voices of the likes of Laurence Olivier and John Barrymore and that he asked John Gielgud to make him a recording of Antony’s speeches, complaining that “the genteel result made him sound more like June Allyson” (Roth Pierpont 2008). Although Brando admired the British actor, there is no resemblance between Gielgud’s stylised vibrato and his reading of the part: To accord with the rest of the cast, Brando adopted a British accent, but the way he inflected his lines was so unexpected and so commonsensical that the most familiar phrases took on a natural urgency (“Lend me your ears!”) and much of the rest seemed nearly made up on the spot, as when the hint of a stutter causes him to falter in his plea: “Bear with me, my heart is in the coffin there with Caesar and I must p-pause till it come back to me.” (ibid.) It is intriguing to read between the lines of this article from The New Yorker: in tune with a very common stereotype in film narratives, according to which the British are cold and detached and Americans are warmer and unassuming, its author seems to imply that even when adopting a haughty British accent, Brando managed to preserve the immediacy and the fresh common sense of a true American. Opinions on Americans playing Shakespeare, however, from both the critics and the general audience, can be harsh. On the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), for example, one can read the following review of Michael Almereyda’s Cymbeline (2014). Tellingly titled “CymbelineVapid pretentious tripe,” the commentator states that: Playing Shakespeare with various NY accents is like playing Moliere [sic] with “Allo Allo” [sic] accents. It’s just crap. The original Shakespeare, performed at the Globe in London, is a lot like Irish English. It is nothing like the squawky dialects of the colonies. Words like “Thou took’st a beggar; wouldst have made my throne a seat for baseness” sound credible in either the original Early Modern English or in standard Oxford English but in Bronxese, Jerseyese, or Manhattenese they sound simply like ludicrous crap . (agitpapa-562-144113, March 2015)

The Accented Voice  159 It is noteworthy that the perception of the most genuine pronunciation of Shakespeare’s English is fuzzy even for British people. For Ian McKellen, quoted above, Shakespeare’s English was more “similar to North American” while the IMDb comment refers to Irish English. For both commentators, the salient characteristic of a ‘true’ Shakespearean delivery is probably rhoticism, a feature that both variants share and that is also common in the declamatory style typical of more old-fashioned acting traditions. Crystal (2005, 25), however, corroborates McKellen’s statement that American is one of those accents which, with their sounded /r/, is probably closer to the way the plays were delivered in Shakespeare’s time than today’s RP (although what colour that /r/ used to have is still debated). As regards another film by Almereyda, his 2000 Hamlet, actor Liev Schreiber is acknowledged in The Guardian for doing “an honest job as Laertes,” although “he seems to be trying for a rather chi-chi quasiBritish Shakespearian [sic] accent and Sam Shepard himself has some mangled country-ish vowels, worryingly similar to those used by Michael Keaton in his dire performance as Dogberry in Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing” (Bradshaw 2000). It is customary for the more conservative British critics to look down on the accents of American actors and on Shakespeare played with a fake British accent. However, the reverse can also be true and British actors, too, are sometimes criticised when they try to put on a US accent. King of Texas (Uli Edel 2002), for example, reworks the Shakespearean hypotext of King Lear, setting the story in nineteenth-century Texas and turning it into a Western. Generally praised for his performance in the title role, Shakespearean thespian Patrick Stewart was nonetheless criticised for his less than spot-on Texan accent: Good performances all around, especially by Stewart. It is unfortunate, however, that nothing could be done about his accent. Stewart has a fine voice. Trouble is he’s, well, English. I think they would have been better off leaving things as they were. The Southwestern overlay sometimes distracted from the dialog by generating unintentional humor. (rickz-63, June 2002) What follows, on the other hand, is a praise from a blog which expresses an interesting interpretation of the contribution of the accented voice in this film: Instead of (abstract) France, the uneasy (and very real) treaty with Mexico looms across the border, and instead of Received Pronunciation (RP), everyone speaks with a Texan drawl. Which, honestly, I love about this movie. It’s glorious. And it’s not just that it’s

160  Irene Ranzato an unexpected and thus at first funny break from the expected convention. The effect was much stronger than that for me. Instantly, the accent underscores the setting, implies family ties and both warmth and pride, and grounds the characters in their culture. As ridiculous as it sounds at first, there is some strange magic going on there. (Elster n.d.) This commentator effectively expresses the importance of accents in anchoring the diegesis, in setting the context and projecting an atmosphere of family bonding (however torn this family is!). Perhaps more importantly, King of Texas showcases what is another fundamental function that may be performed by accents in film adaptations of Shakespeare: they can be a vehicle to make the narrative fit into the mould of a definite genre, a Western in this case.

8.6 The Accent of the Outsider in a World of Chaos Coriolanus (Ralph Fiennes 2011) is a film characterised by a variety of accents. Shot in Serbia, minor characters mostly feature local accents to anchor the diegesis in a historically connoted place and time and automatically invoke the war that led to the disintegration of Yugoslavia. For what concerns the leading characters, however, accents follow the welltrodden path of the North/South of England polarity stereotype (Ranzato 2016). The establishment, including Caius Martius Coriolanus, played by Fiennes, speaks RP, while the rebellious antagonist, the leader of the Volscians, Tullus Aufidius, played by Scottish actor Gerard Butler, speaks with his marked native burr. One convention of the Hollywood Roman sword-and-sandal epic is what Silveira Cyrino (2005) refers to as the linguistic paradigm. In these films, the protagonists, who are often oppressed Jews or Christians, have American accents, while the Romans have posh British accents (see also Woźniak and Wyke 2020). This allows American audiences to identify themselves with the ‘underdogs,’ fighting for their freedom against the imperialist Romans. Connecting the Romans with the British is an obvious choice and one which was followed even by a British director such as Fiennes, who thus followed another well-known topos, that of the villain speaking RP,5 the accent of the upper classes (Ranzato 2018, 223). In a similar way to Coriolanus, Titus by Julie Taymor (1999) is another film which follows closely Shakespeare’s text, but one where its lines are spoken in a variety of inflections, probably to depict a world of chaos and unruliness. The Balkans war, still raging at the time, is a major source of inspiration also in this case, but other visual echoes are just as relevant: [Taymor’s] horizon stretched far beyond Fascism to the theater of violence of Roman antiquity: genocide and mutilations in the early

The Accented Voice  161 1990’s; and contemporary high school shootings and drug crime in the United States. Particularly resonant throughout her film is the Balkans war. Its putative combatants and victims literally enter the film in the Coliseum scenes, which were shot in Croatia just before a renewed flaring-up of the conflict, using members of the Croatian police academy as Titus’ victorious army. (Aebischer 2006, 122) Most of the primary actors in the film are British, but there are some actors who do not conform, notably those playing Aaron the Moor and Tamora, queen of the Goths, arguably ‘the outsiders.’ As the sole black character, Aaron (played by Harry Lennix) is especially important and features a distinctly contemporary African-American accent which, in contrast with that of most of the establishment which is about to kill him, amplifies what can already be found in Shakespeare’s playtext: Aaron (and Tamora) function “as two alien, exotic, powerfully sexualized creatures onto whom evil can be comfortably displaced” (129). Among the films that, unlike the former, reinvent Shakespeare’s text, but similarly use a non-standard accent to convey otherness, I would like to mention the case of another televised Othello, this time the ITV rendition by Geoffrey Sax (2001), made in the spirit of the extremely enjoyable ShakespeaRe-Told BBC series (Nicholls et al. 2005): The implicit claim is that the Shakespearean language is not universal but the plots, narrative conflicts, and/or character issues are. Yet plot and character are what traditionally was taught as inessential, borrowed, not-Shakespeare. Popularization does not return us, then, to the fuller, original and essential Shakespeare; it is the essence of Shakespeare. (Burt 2003, 18) Set in Manchester and interweaving Shakespeare’s plot with a parallel story of an incident in which the police beat and kills a black man, celebrated TV author Andrew Davies “fashions a double narrative – half Shakespeare half police procedural – that resituates Othello’s story within a racially saturated field of visibility” (Hodgdon 2003, 95). The Iago of the show, police officer Ben Jago, is portrayed with the distinctive, fierce Manchester accent of Christopher Eccleston, an actor who never misses a chance to make comments on the English strict social class system and how this affects the acting profession with relative ghettoisation of actors like himself – successful as he is on both sides of the Atlantic. He umbrageously states that “people like me can’t be classical” and blames the fact of not being offered enough Shakespearean roles to his working class, northern background: “I think the people who run some of the big established theatres, particularly in London, they associate Shakespeare

162  Irene Ranzato with white, middle-class men. It’s discrimination and I loathe it.” (cited in Jones 2018). For this TV adaptation, Eccleston created a natural northern Iago who undermines the RP establishment (including Othello). As in Miller’s BBC Iago discussed above, the outsider here is not the Moor, but Iago, depicted as a man who is constantly frustrated in his career, who brandishes his accent as angrily as Williamson did on stage and screen, and perhaps as angrily as Eccleston feels towards the London theatres.

8.7 Indigenisation Through Translation Much has been written on the 2012 film Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die) by Paolo & Vittorio Taviani from various perspectives (see for example Bassi 2016, 181–201; Bini 2014; Calbi 2014; Tempera 2017, 265–76), except, to my knowledge, on the way it was translated. The film chronicles the real work of theatre director Fabrizio Cavalli on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, performed by the inmates of the Roman prison of Rebibbia. The film is not so much a record of the play as performed in its integrity, but of the many rehearsals in several spaces of the prison, mingled with some episodes of the daily life of the inmates. Shakespeare’s lines are spoken in their Italian translation with various regional accents and many dialectal twists: the dialects used are mainly those of central and southern Italy. Cavalli, after translating and reshaping Shakespeare’s text, assigned roles to the actors and asked them to speak the lines using their own dialects. Probably because the lines follow a ‘faithful,’ albeit abridged, translation of Shakespeare’s play into Italian, audiovisual translation scholars have not focused on the English subtitles, which do not retranslate the Italian version but transcribe a simplified version of Shakespeare’s original lines. Although this does seem like the obvious choice to make, it is one that does not take into account the several dialectal ‘twists’ that I mentioned.6 Selecting one example from this richly layered audiovisual text which would deserve a chapter of its own, I will mention an excerpt from Marc Antony’s monologue, one of the most celebrated moments of the play: Italian Original Dialogue Amici, romani, io sono venuto per seppellire Cesare, non per lodarlo. Il nobile Bruto ha detto che Cesare era ambizioso. Se era accussì, fu grave colpa e Cesare con pena l’ha scontata. Accussì dice Bruto, e Bruto e i suoi amici, song’uommini d’onore. English Subtitles Friends, Romans / I come to bury Caesar, / not to praise him. / The noble Brutus has said Caesar was ambitious. / If it were so, / it was a grievous fault, / and grievously has Caesar paid for it. / Brutus said so, / and Brutus and his friends/ are honourable men.7

The Accented Voice  163 These few lines, spoken with a Neapolitan accent, contain dialectal expressions, namely accussì (standard Italian così = so, then, thus) and, especially remarkable, song’uommini d’onore (standard Italian sono uomini d’onore = they are men of honour). The fact is that song’uommini d’onore does not actually translate Shakespare’s “are honourable men”; what the phrase does say is that they are “men of honour,” an expression which carries with it all its inevitable mafia and organised crime associations. Taviani’s film is effectively an indigenisation of Shakespeare’s play, a process which, according to Friedman (2006, 430), is “a form of making native or indigenous something from elsewhere,” absorbing it into another cultural system: The terms indigenization and nativization additionally suggest a kind of cultural cannibalism, if you will, an ingestion of the other which transforms both the cannibal and the cannibalized. This association of modernity with indigenization, nativization, and cannibalism appears to fly in the face of the conventional association of these terms with the traditional and primitive. But because I regard tradition as the invention of modernity, as part of modernity’s fashioning of its own rupture from the past, I like the contradictions these terms suggest. (431) This nuanced operation of transplanting Shakespeare’s text into another linguacultural milieu, of transposing Shakespeare’s Britishness into another linguistic system, is not acknowledged in the subtitles which transcribe Shakespeare’s text with some simplifications but no dialectal interpolations, thus failing to convey what is perhaps the substantial meaning of Taviani’s and Cavalli’s endeavour.

8.8 Concluding Remarks This study has aimed to investigate the use of non-standard voices in a selection of Shakespearean film and TV adaptations, by assessing character representations through the function that accents and dialects perform in the respective audiovisual narratives, revealing how the stereotypes fulfil specific narrative purposes which may become topoi across genres. Some of the examples illustrated show how even high-end audiovisual texts such as Shakespearean films follow an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ ideology (Wales 2002, 61) when it comes to the use of dialect for characterisation. The North vs South/RP polarisation or the ‘genuine’ American vs the ‘stuck-up’ British RP speaker often find expression in the contrast between the rebellious outsider and the establishment. This arguably Manichaean dualism is happily complicated, however, not only by the creative interpretations of the Shakespearean plays offered by the authors of the respective adaptations, but also by the audiences’

164  Irene Ranzato reception and expectations. Exploiting the traditional penchant that British cinema, theatre, and television have demonstrated for nonstandard varieties of English, at least, or most notably, from the 1960s, regional and social dialects have been used by authors also to focus the audiences’ attention and sympathy on a particular character. This way they have contributed to reinforce the view that RP speakers are not ‘us,’ thus inviting an identification with the accented, non-standard character, often the ‘underdog’ or even the villain.

Notes 1 The umbrella term of “dialect” is used in this chapter to include all deviations from standard; “accent” is used more specifically in relation to the phonological features of a given variety, usually more relevant than the morphosyntactic and, to an extent, even lexical features in audiovisual characterisations. 2 The use of non-standard varieties in the original Shakespeare plays has been investigated mainly in relation with Henry V. As well as the cited Blank 1996 and Delabastita 2002, see for example Martina 2019. 3 This taxonomy has been effectively applied to TV dialogue, for example, by Richardson 2010. 4 Apart from the titles mentioned in the body of the article, the other films analysed for the purpose of this research were: 10 Things I Hate About You (Gil Junger, 1999); Bollywood Queen (Jeremy Wooding, 2003); David & Fatima (Alain Zaloum, 2008); Get Over It (Tommy O’Haver, 2001); Gnomeo and Juliet (Kelly Asbury, 2011); Hamlet (Gregory Doran, 2009); The Hollow Crown (Rupert Goold et al., 2012 & 2016); Macbeth (Justin Kurzel, 2015); Macbeth (Roman Polanski, 1971); ShakespeaRe-Told (David Nicholls et al., 2005); La stoffa dei sogni (Gianfranco Cabiddu, 2016); The Tempest (Julie Taymor, 2010); Twelfth Night (Trevor Nunn, 1996). 5 Although identifying Coriolanus with the villain can certainly be debatable, I think that anyone who watches the film can recognise the polarisation at play. 6 The DVD that I analysed is a copy, subtitled into English, that RAI cinema (one of the companies which produced the film) sent to the European Film Academy to be distributed to its members for voting purposes. 7 The English subtitles simplify Shakespeare’s lines by ‘translating’ “Brutus has said” for “Brutus hath told you” and “Caesar has paid for it” for “hath Caesar answered it.”

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The Accented Voice  165 Bini, Daniela. 2014. “‘Cesare ha da muri’ or ‘Cesare deve morire’…in Neapolitan.” Esperienze letterarie 39(1): 19–31. Blank, Paula. 1996. Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings. London and New York: Routledge. Boose, Linda E., and Richard Burt, eds. 2001. “Totally Clueless? Shakespeare Goes Hollywood in the 1990s.” In Shakespeare The Movie: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, and Video. Edited by Lynda E. Boose and Richard Burt, 8–22. London and New York: Routledge. Bradshaw, Peter. 2000. “Fresh Prince of Denmark.” The Guardian, December 15, 2000. https://www.theguardian.com/friday_review/story/0,3605,411288,00. html. Bruti, Silvia, and Gianmarco Vignozzi. 2016. “Voices from the Anglo-Saxon World: Accents and Dialects Across Film Genres.” Status Quaestionis 11: North and South: British Dialects in Fictional Dialogue, edited by Irene Ranzato, 42–74. Burt, Richard. 2003. “‘Glo-Cali-Zation,’ Race, and the Small Screens of PostPopular Culture.” In Shakespeare The Movie II: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, Video, and DVD. Edited by Richard Burt and Lynda E. Boose, 14–36. London and New York: Routledge. Calbi, Maurizio. 2014. “‘In States Unborn and Accents Yet Unknown’: Spectral Shakespeare in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Cesare deve morire (Caesar must die).” Shakespeare Bulletin 32(2): 235–253. Crystal, David. 2005. Pronouncing Shakespeare: The Globe Experiment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Delabastita, Dirk. 2002. “A Great Feast of Languages: Shakespeare’s Multilingual Comedy in ‘King Henry V’ and the Translator.” The Translator 8(2): 303–340. Elster, Annika. n.d. https://elsterwords.com/adapting-king-lear-king-of-texas Esslin, Martin. 1969. Reflections: Essays on Modern Theatre. New York: Doubleday. Fiedler, Leslie A. 1972. The Stranger in Shakespeare. London: Croom Helm. Friedman, Susan Stanford. 2006. “Periodizing Modernism: Postcolonial Modernities and the Space/Time Borders of Modernist Studies.” Modernism/ modernity 13(3): 425–443. Hodgdon, Barbara. 2003. “Race-ing Othello, re-engendering whte-out, II.” In Shakespeare The Movie II: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, Video, and DVD. Edited by Richard Burt and Lynda E. Boose, 89–104. London and New York: Routledge. Hoenselaars, Ton, ed. 2014. Shakespeare and the Language of Translation. London: Bloomsbury. Howard, Tony. 2002. “Shakespeare’s Cinematic Offshoots.” In The Cambridge Companion of Shakespeare on Film. Edited by Russell Jackson, 295–323. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jones, Rebecca. 2018. “Christopher Eccleston: Northern Accent Held Me Back.” BBC News, February 21, 2018. https://www.bbc.com/news/ entertainment-arts-43139805. Joseph, Paterson. 2018. Julius Caesar and Me. Exploring Shakespeare’s African Play. York: Methuen. Keyishian, Harry. 2000. “Shakespeare and Movie Genre: The Case of Hamlet.” In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film. Edited by Russell Jackson, 72–81. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

166  Irene Ranzato Kozloff, Sarah. 2000. Overhearing Film Dialogue. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lombardo, Agostino. 2004. Eduardo e Shakespeare. Parole di voce e non d’inchiostro. Roma: Bulzoni. Martina, Enna. 2019. “The Use of Dialects and Foreign Languages in Shakespeare’s King Henry V – Characteristics of the Fool Explored.” English Studies 100(7): 767–784. Massai, Sonia, ed. 2005. World-wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance. London and New York: Routledge. Massai, Sonia. 2020. Shakespeare’s Accents: Voicing Identity in Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McKellen, Ian. n.d. https://www.mckellen.com. Minutella, Vincenza. 2016. “British Dialects in Animated Films: The Case of Gnomeo & Juliet and its Creative Italian Dubbing.” In Status Quaestionis 11: North and South: British Dialects in Fictional Dialogue, edited by Irene Ranzato, 222–259. Neill, Michael. 2006. “Introduction.” In Othello. Edited by William Shakespeare, 1–180. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pennacchia Punzi, Maddalena. 2012. Shakespeare intermediale: i drammi romani. Spoleto, PG: Editoria & Spettacolo. Ranzato, Irene. 2016. “‘Danes Do it Melancholy’: Allusions to Shakespeare in Films and TV.” Memoria di Shakespeare 3: The Shape of a Language. Edited by Iolanda Plescia, 83–106. Ranzato, Irene. 2018. “The British Upper Classes: Phonological Fact and Screen Fiction.” In Linguistic and Cultural Representation in Audiovisual Translation. Edited by Irene Ranzato and Serenella Zanotti, 204–227. London and New York: Routledge. Ranzato, Irene. 2019. “The Cockney Persona: The London Accent in Characterisation and Translation.” Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 27(2): 235–251. Audiovisual Translation: Intersections. Edited by Irene Ranzato and Serenella Zanotti. Richardson, Kay. 2010. Television Dramatic Dialogue. A Sociolinguistic Study. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Roth Pierpont, Claudia. 2008. “Method Man: How the Greatest American Actor Lost His Way.” The New Yorker, October 20, 2008. https://www.newyorker. com/magazine/2008/10/27/method-man. Rothwell, Kenneth S. 2004. A History of Shakespeare on Screen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shaughnessy, Robert. 2006. “Stage, Screen, and Nation: Hamlet and the Space of History.” In A Concise Companion of Shakespeare on Screen. Edited by Diana E. Henderson, 54–76. Malden, Oxford, Carlton: Blackwell Publishing. Silveira Cyrino, Monica. 2005. Big Screen Rome. Malden, Oxford, Carlton: Blackwell Publishing. Tempera, Mariangela. 2017. “Shakespeare Behind Italian Bars: The Rebibbia Project, The Tempest, and Caesar Must Die.” In Shakespeare, Italy, and Transnational Exchange. Edited by Enza De Francisci and Chris Stamatakis, 265–276. London and New York: Routledge. Wales, Katie. 2002. “‘North of Watford Gap’: A Cultural History of Northern English (from 1700).” In Alternative Histories of English. Edited by Richard J. Watts and Peter Trudgill, 45–66. London: Routledge.

The Accented Voice  167 Woźniak, Monika, and Maria Wyke, eds. 2020. The Novel of Neronian Rome and its Multimedial Transformations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zettl, Herbert. 1978. “The Rare Case of Television Aesthetics.” Journal of the University Film Association 30(2): 3–8.

Filmography Cesare deve morire. 2012. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. Italy. The Comedy of Errors. 1983. James Cellan Jones. UK. Coriolanus. 2011. Ralph Fiennes. UK. Cymbeline. 2014. Michael Almereyda. USA. Hamlet. 1969. Tony Richardson. UK. Hamlet. 2000. Michael Almereyda. USA. Julius Caesar. 1953. Joseph Mankiewicz. USA. King of Texas. 2002. Uli Edel. USA. Midsummer’s Night Dream. 1935. Max Reinhardt. USA. Othello. 1981. Jonathan Miller. UK. Othello. 1995. Oliver Parker. UK/ USA. Othello. 2001. Geoffrey Sax. UK. Richard III. 1995. Richard Loncraine. UK/ USA. Romeo and Juliet. 1936. George Cukor. USA. Romeo + Juliet. 1996. Baz Luhrmann. USA. The BBC Television Shakespeare. 1978–1985. Cedric Messina. UK. ShakespeaRe-Told. 2005. David Nicholls, Peter Moffat, Sally Wainwright, and Peter Bowker. UK. Titus. 1999. Julie Taymor. UK/ Italy/ USA.

9 Bastard from the North or Kingg in th’ Nohrth? /ˈbɑː.stəd/ /frɒm/ /ðə/ /nɔːθ/ or /kɪŋg/ /ɪn/ /ðə/ /nɒːθ/ Lydia Hayes 9.1 Introduction: Memes and Dialectal Memes Accent tends to be inherent in one’s speech, conditioned by the auditory environment of the speaker. It is therefore unlikely that a speaker would intend to convey semiotic signs through the accentual nuances of their speech; however, the chain of events that takes place in the psyche of the listener, who perceives the accentual layer coating the speaker’s message, ultimately means that accent does make meaning, if only in its perception. In fictional texts, however, the intention to make meaning through accent is present: screenwriters, directors, and dialect coaches prefabricate their characters’ speech, directing the use of linguistic varieties by actors in order to forge the identity of their characters. For example, when we hear a Northern English accent, we might automatically assume the speaker will be “defiant and bolshy” (Beal 2019), especially where accentuated against the backdrop of non-Northern English accents. Because accents carry such connotations, their utterance can be thought of as units of cultural transmission or, in other words, “memes” (Dawkins 1976). The term “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins (1976) to embody cultural ideas as well as to describe the processes by which these spread and become commonly held. In an intended rhyme with “gene,” Dawkins drew an analogy between memes and genes, memetics and genetics, the meme pool and the gene pool, and so forth. He maintained that as genes propagate through fertilisation in the human body, memes propagate by a kind of imitation through cerebral pathways. This is not to say that ideas are robotically accepted as truths, but rather that once an individual comes into contact with an idea, it will be imprinted on their memory. And given the individualistic nature of memory – much like the uniqueness of DNA – no one person’s meme will be identical to that of another. Just as new genotypes emerge from genes in sexual reproduction, variation is a necessary condition for meme propagation. Nonetheless, there must be something in common in order for people, and ideas, to be related genetically or conceptually, respectively. Chesterman (1997, 5) maintained that

Bastard from the North or Kingg in th’ Nohrth?  169 what is common to ideas is the meme, and that any particularities beyond the common denominator are idiosyncrasies. As regards the ideas around cultural identities that are tied to accents, a specific type of meme, called a “dialectal meme” (Hayes 2019) can be conceived. Whereas genes carry alleles whose combination will determine the physical characteristics of an individual, dialectal memes carry cultural connotations that lead to the perceived identity of the speaker. In this sense, accent can be thought of as the phenotype of cultural identity. With respect to Chesterman’s assertion that memes are the common ground between individuals’ conceptualisations, I posit that dialectal memes encompass all of an individual’s stored perceptions, or memory, of different accents along with their associations. Nonetheless, that which is common to a collective’s memes are the conventional, if not stereotypical, elements of the meme, often employed in textual representations of speakers with any given accent. Such an example that I notice, being Irish, is the frequent use of Irish accents in fictional texts to connote low social class, depict criminals, or create a humoristic effect. Given the multifaceted layers of meaning that can be evoked by accents, dialectal memes can be broken down into four parts: diatopic, diastratic, idiosyncratic, and diachronic signs. Depending on any given person’s prior exposure to a particular accent, these signs will vary in dimension: A Liverpool working-class accent will strike a Chicagoan primarily as being British, a Glaswegian as being English, an English southerner as being northern, an English northerner as being Liverpudlian, and a Liverpudlian as being working-class. (Wells 1982, 33) The science of epigenetics endeavours to elucidate the triggers of gene expression – why are some genes more likely than others to be expressed as phenotype? It is extremely complex, not necessarily systematic, and subject to change. In the case of dialectal memes, however, the element of randomness is erased as screenwriters play the role of “epimemeticists,” handpicking linguistic variants and varieties that will awaken an array of memetic markers in the minds of the audience and, therefore, create their characters’ identities. The concept of a dialectal meme is a useful theoretical tool for the analysis of linguistic variation in fictional texts, especially in audiovisual texts in which oral features of language are most prevalent and most authentically realised (cf. “eye dialect” in written texts). When it comes to translated texts in general, and dubbed versions in particular, the use of different accents and dialects can be compared by analysing diatopic, diastratic, idiosyncratic, and diachronic signs evoked by the use of linguistic variation in the source and target texts. At this point, it is worth recalling the necessary change required in order for memes to propagate: as dialectal memes move across the translational frontier, they

170  Lydia Hayes evolve. For this reason, the aim of conducting a memetic analysis is not to establish equivalence between the identities created through dialectal memes in original and translated versions; rather, it is to explore the various memetic signs in order to discern whether their connotations are comparable (i.e., whether they have a common denominator).

9.2 Northern- and Southern-English Dialectal Memes Although there is a multitude of accents throughout England, and indeed the United Kingdom, the “North-South divide” (Wales 2000) is notably one of, if not the most, pronounced linguistic and, more broadly, cultural dichotomies prevailing in England. Interestingly, many of the iconic phonetic realisations we so often associate with the North-South divide only manifested approximately 300 years ago; or, more accurately, the Southern deviations that emerged around that time and the Northern resistance to these resulted in linguistic differences that accentuated the cultural gap already apparent. The characteristic variations in question are the “footstrut split” and “bath broadening” (Wells 1982). The former describes the evolution of the /ʊ/ pronunciation, which, for some words, changed into an /ʌ/ sound, meaning that whereas “foot” and “strut” had rhymed in mediaeval English and continued to do so in the North, in the South, “strut” was now pronounced with a new English vowel instead (Wells 1997). As regards “bath broadening,” this refers to the Southern shift from a short-vowel /æ/ realisation in “bath” to a long-vowel /ɑː/. This phoneme elongation is typically used when the vowel precedes /f/, /s/, and /θ/ voiceless fricatives (Wells 1997). These and many other distinctive traits of Northern and Southern accents, which will be explored in the case study to follow, are markers of the Northern and Southern dialectal memes. The “processes through which a linguistic repertoire becomes differentiable within a language as a socially recognised register of forms” have been termed by Agha (2003, 231) as “enregisterment.” There are various levels at which a linguistic variety is indexed with social value and linked to a social persona, which Silverstein (2003) has referred to as orders of indexicality. The first order reflects the initial metalinguistic and metapragmatic links drawn by language users between a given accent or dialect and a set of social connotations, or memetic signs: for example, Received Pronunciation (RP) perceived to be posh. Second-order indexicality happens when “speakers come to rationalise and justify the link between the linguistic form and some social category” (Beal 2020, 10): for example, Labovian (1966) style-shifting by an individual to adapt to a context or redefine oneself. The third and final order refers to metalinguistic commentary on or “non-codified” (Mayoral Asensio 1999, my translation) use of linguistic variation, such as prescriptive manuals on proper and improper pronunciations, or jokes made at the expense of a variant or variety’s memetic signs and/or phonological traits. The

Bastard from the North or Kingg in th’ Nohrth?  171 instructional agency behind accent, or epimemetics – as screenwriters use accents with a view to creating a character’s identity – is also a case of third-order indexicality. Through these processes, accents have acquired social meaning and been linked to social personae, although, diachronically, that meaning has been enregistered differently. The difference in values indexed by an accent can be illustrated by the evolution of RP’s memetic signs at different moments of enregisterment: whereas from the mid-nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries this accent was enregistered indexing high social class, propriety, a good education, and intelligence, it currently connotes pretentiousness, privilege, and even callousness. It should be noted that this accent is now diachronically marked, as it is no longer taught at institutions of higher education in the UK and, given that it is an artificial, or received, accent with no geographical ties, it has little means for survival. Conversely, the evolution of the Northern-English meme has been more favourable. Though the North once enjoyed an image of “noble savages” in “sublime” natural surroundings in the eighteenth century, it then became associated with the proletariat and pollution during the Industrial Revolution at the turn of the century (Wales 2002, 46). Later in the nineteenth century, on the back of industrial progress and the subsequent rise of the bourgeoisie, the North’s wealth brought its diastratic sign into more positive light. Nonetheless, since the latter half of the twentieth century and the decline of the Northern economy, that sign has come almost full circle, and the modern-day meme for the North, metonymically held by Northern accents and dialects, is that of a salt-of-the-earth, unpretentious individual with a good sense of humour and a “covert prestige” (Trudgill 1972, 183) vis-à-vis the South. Beal (2009, 230) has aptly described the NorthSouth divide as follows: North and northerners are stereotypically portrayed as workingclass, “hard” (tough), and down-to-earth, while the South and Southerners are viewed as middleclass, “soft,” and pretentious. Northern English accents evoke these stereotypes: in matched guise experiments, northern guises are perceived as friendly and honest, but less intelligent and/or competent than Southern and/or Received Pronunciation guises (cf. Wales 2006, 166–167). The North is also associated with blue-collar masculinity and machismo: in 2008 a billboard on Sheffield railway station advertising a soft-centered chewing gum bore the legend, “softer than a shandy-drinking southerner,” and, conversely, Henderson’s Relish, an iconic brand uniquely made in Sheffield, uses the slogan, “strong and Northern.” In light of the different memetic signs attached to Northern and Southern pronunciations, accents from both parts of England have been subject to prolific exploitation in fictional texts in the aim of creating specific

172  Lydia Hayes character identities. Given the evolution of dialectal memes, from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, RP as well as SBE (Standard British English, spoken mainly in the South of England but also by upperclass Britons, especially those educated at boarding schools) accents were often used to characterise virtue, purity, and intelligence (e.g., in Dickensian novels), whereas nowadays these accents tend to lend their memetic qualities to the vilification of characters. It should be noted that both SBE accents and RP achieve this aim against the backdrop of American-English accents; however, in the context of a British text, RP has negative connotations while the SBE accent is relatively neutral, ceasing to be so when emphatically contrasted against Northern accents. On the other hand, during RP’s glory days, Northern accents were used to represent the lower class (at least culturally insofar as a new echelon of nouveau riches did emerge in Northern society in the latter days of the Industrial Revolution) and brutish qualities. Since the mid-twentieth century, however, Northern accents have enjoyed a positive portrayal on screen inasmuch as they have tended to be used to depict honest, morally upright, no-nonsense characters. Ranzato (2016, 1–2) has pointed out that the North-South “polarisation often equals to simplification,” highlighting that “the most salient and most symbolic markers of Northern English pronunciation” in textual representations are the absence of a foot-strut split, bath-broadening, and /ng/ coalescence, as well as the presence of /h/ dropping. It should also be noted that for intelligibility purposes in fictional texts, dialect is often diminished in favour of accent (case in point: audiovisual Cockney devoid of rhyming slang), which, combined with the sometimes partial and/or imprecise phonetic repertoires used, renders these fictional renditions, more aptly, Northern-coloured accents. The use of accents for character creation is a renewed moment of enregisterment, meaning that, ultimately, the use of linguistic variation in fictional texts perpetuates dialectal memes. As I have posited elsewhere (Hayes 2019, 92–94), the top-down directionality involved in perception processes means that even if only scattered usage of phonemes belonging to an accent are present in an actor’s rendition, the memetic signs the listener associates with the accent in question will likely be evoked just as if they had heard an authentic version of the accent in question. Ranzato (2016, 7) has observed that the antagonistic polarity between Northern and Southern accents in fictional dialogue is particularly salient in the case of adaptations of classic novels to period-drama films. Despite the fact that “impressionistic – linguistically speaking – b ­ rushstrokes” of eye-dialect are all that feature in the classic novel, Ranzato explains that linguistic variation is often “used as means to create a character’s idiolect” as well as to drop diatopic markers into the discourse. She ­further h ­ ighlights that dialectal variation is most prevalent in British ­adaptations to television series rather than films and added that, aside

Bastard from the North or Kingg in th’ Nohrth?  173 from adaptations, British television has a longstanding tradition of conveying dialectal realities (8). As regards the series Game of Thrones (GoT), which is an adaptation of modern novels set in a fictional past, the ample use of accent variation in television holds true, although the imprecision of pan-Northern, rather than one coherent Yorkshire accent used by actors playing “Northern” characters, might be a function of the fact that the series is American-produced, rendering specificity less important in accent renditions. It might also owe to the fact that the series in question was a blockbuster whose production was closer to that of a film, in comparison with the British television programmes alluded to by Ranzato, to such an extent that the GoT audiovisual product lies at a midway point on an audiovisual continuum on which series and films are at opposite poles.

9.3 Spanish Memes Logically, each linguistic and cultural community of speakers has its own set of dialectal memes, which come into being through processes of enregisterment similar to those described in relation to the emergence of Northern- and Southern-English dialectal memes (prescriptive treatises, fictional representations, etc.). Also similarly to the North-South divide that stands out among other linguistic variation within England, and indeed further into the UK, is what can be thought of as a CentralSouth divide in Spain: between standard Castilian Spanish (SCS) and Andalusian. Despite there being other accents, dialects and, in fact, languages within Spain, the Central-South divide has long been the most salient linguistic dichotomy in the country. Méndez-Ga De Paredes and Amorós-Negre (2016, 258) have explained that SCS and Andalusian are the oldest varieties in the Spanish language and, having undergone phonic changes in the late mediaeval period, Castilian “resulted in two highly distinct varieties of classical Spanish: Southern or Andalusian Spanish; and Northern or Castilian Spanish.” Narbona Jiménez et al. (2011, 37–38) argue that while Andalusian, or at least Western Andalusian, was apparent in the thirteenth century, a clear-cut distinction between it and SCS, which accounts for all or most of the phonetic characteristics we now associate with Andalusian, may not have come into being until the eighteenth or even nineteenth century. As for Castilian, this was the Spanish spoken in the mediaeval region of Castile (Castilla), which became widespread on the Iberian peninsula once this region merged with the kingdoms to its west and east: Leon (León or Llïón) in the early thirteenth century and Aragon (Reino de Aragón or Reino d'Aragón) in the late fifteenth century, respectively, to form the Kingdom of Castile (el Reino de Castilla) that makes up the large majority of modern-day Spain (Encyclopædia Britannica). Nowadays, Castilian Spanish with a standard Castilian accent prevails in Central

174  Lydia Hayes Spain, spreading outwards – mainly towards the North – from Madrid. It is important to make a clear distinction here between ­historic and ­modern Castilian: “Castilian” refers to the Spanish language in a historical sense whereas “Castilian Spanish” currently denotes ­peninsular Spanish (i.e., that of the whole of Spain, save, arguably, the Canary Islands, which, in any case, are extra-peninsular). Therefore, Castilian Spanish refers to the Spanish language in its entirety (grammar, lexis, ­pronunciation, etc.) and, despite its regional variation, Andalusian belongs more broadly to Castilian Spanish (Méndez-Ga De Paredes and Amorós-Negre 2016, 246), converging with this national standard to a greater extent in grammar and lexis and to a lesser extent in pronunciation (cf Méndez-Ga De Paredes and Amorós Negre 2016 for style-shifting by Andalusians). Therefore, SCS (also known as CPS: Central-peninsular standard Spanish) can be used to allude, more specifically, to a Spanish that is “standard” in accent as well as in grammar and lexis, heard mostly in Central and NorthernCentral Spain as well as in certain forms of formal discourse, such as SCS renditions by non-natural SCS-speaking news anchors on given national broadcasting stations (e.g., on Televisión Española’s thrice-daily news programme Telediario, aired on the channel 24 Horas). Although other regional varieties are also notably distinctive from SCS, Andalusian is the farthest removed from it, only next to other languages in Spain, such as Galician, Catalan, and Basque, becoming further removed in that order, to the point of no relation between Basque and any Spanishes. As noted by Méndez-Ga De Paredes and Amorós Negre with regard to Andalusian (2016, 243–44): “the characteristics of this variety compared to the other peninsular languages (and to the centralpeninsular standard) basically have to do with prosody and pronunciation.” These characteristics1 range throughout the vast region, which can be divided into Eastern and Western Andalusia at the point of Granada; nonetheless, phonetic realisations common throughout are the aspiration of the final /s/ (andaluces as andaluceh), the gemination of consonants following an elided /s/ in closed syllables (español as eppañol), the gemination of consonants following an elided postvocalic /r/ (invierno as invienno) and, occasionally, the /v/ pronunciation of /b/ (hablo as havlo). Characteristically Western Andalusian realisations include the aspiration of [x] or jota (ojos as ohoh), aspiration of g + i/e (giro as hiro), velarisation of final /n/ as [ŋ] (fiestón as fiestong), aspiration of /s/ in closed syllables verging towards assimilation (desde as dehde), /l/-/r/ neutralisations (alma as arma), non-fricative realisation of /tʃ/ as /ʃ/ (chiquillo as shiquillo), ceceo, i.e., /s/ realised as /Ɵ/ (Sevilla as Thevilla), and seseo, i.e., /Ɵ/ realised as /s/ (gracias as grasias). On the other hand, Eastern Andalusian phonetic realisations can be heard in the extra openness of vowels instead of Western aspiration (más as má, i.e., mah), final /r/ dropping causing a stressed final vowel (decir as decí, i.e., dethee), uvular fricative realisation of jota [x] as in SCS unlike the Western aspiration of this phoneme,

Bastard from the North or Kingg in th’ Nohrth?  175 and /s/-/z/ distinction also the same as in SCS unlike Western tendencies towards ceceo and/or seseo. Certain of these pronunciations have prestige within Andalusia (e.g. seseo and /s/-/z/ distinction) while others are stigmatised (e.g., ceceo and /l/-/r/ neutralisations); however, Andalusian (understood broadly as Andalusian accents and, to a lesser extent, dialect) are often subject to stigmatisation in the rest of Spain and “outside Andalusia, it is associated with popular social stereotypes” (Méndez-Ga De Paredes and Amorós-Negre 2016, 243). The Andalusian stereotype is perpetuated in fictional texts where it is used to characterise the funny guy, the ignoramus, and the poor, with its formal use in mainstream media often restricted to its utterance by folklorists, bullfighters, and comedians (Álvarez Mellado 2017, my translation). Examples are the character of El frutero in the sitcom Siete Vidas (García Velilla 1999–06), who is traditionalist, misogynistic, and racist and speaks with a (natural) Malaga accent, or the gypsy flamenco dancers in the series Velvet Colección (Campos and Neira 2017–19) who render Western Andalusian accents. Whereas these examples see Andalusian contrasted against SCS, pluriglossic and plurilinguistic, and, indeed, multicultural, realities are usually reflected in less stereotypical light, especially when a narrative is entirely set in a Spanish region where SCS does not tend to be spoken. For instance, the Eastern Andalusian accents predominant in the series Mar de plástico (Cueto et al. 2015–16), set in Almería, are used as diatopic markers, and the diastratic Andalusian sign is not always attributed to lower social class. Furthermore, the use of a somewhat-convergent-with-SCS Andalusian (Méndez-Ga De Paredes and Amorós-Negre 2016, 254) by Andalusians in non-fictional texts is evidence of their awareness of the national stereotype as well as of metalinguistic commentary by outsiders on the unintelligibility of their accents. This type of “audiovisual Andalusian” is reminiscent of the audiovisual Cockney mentioned previously. SCS, on the other hand, enjoys a largely positive or, at least, neutral depiction in Spanish originals. Nonetheless, variation is incorporated into SCS inasmuch as diction and register are concerned; it would be otherwise very cumbersome to achieve characterisations. An SCS continuum can be conceived wherein the variety ranges from Lower SCS (informal register and unclear diction, e.g., elisions) through Upper SCS (high register and exceptionally clear diction). Virtuous middle-class characters often speak at a halfway point so that the added propriety in their speech reflects the propriety of their character, mirroring SBE usages of an older era. In terms of the distinguishable pronunciations in question, estoy cansada would be pronounced in Upper SCS with an exaggerated realisation of the Spanish /d/ and a distinct openness of the final two vowels (estoy cansATHA: /es.ðɔɪ/ /kæn.sÆθ.Æ/); in mid SCS, the voiceless dental fricative (θ) veers towards a voiced dental fricative (ð), and open vowels are less emphasised (estoy cansatha: /es.ðɔɪ/ /kæn.sæð.æ/); and in Lower

176  Lydia Hayes SCS, elisions (toy cansah: /ðɔɪ/ /kæn.sæ/) and/or vowel shifts (toy consaw: /ðɔɪ/ /kɒn.sɒ/) occur. While diction affects pronunciation and, therefore, accent, it more broadly falls within the parameters of register, and registers generally transcend regional dialects. For this reason, it should be noted that the variation just described within SCS in fact exists in most regional varieties, although it only becomes key to characterisation where a single accent dominates a text. As for the use of Andalusian against the backdrop of SCS, the former’s diastratic sign is already that of lower class, irrespective of register, but it is often reinforced with lower register and diction in the form of elisions of the intervocalic /d/, which pertains to low register countrywide.

9.4 Game of Thrones: A Game of Memes Game of Thrones (GoT) is a HBO series based on the A Song of Ice and Fire novels written by American novelist George R.R. Martin. The books constitute an epic that spans a series of seven novels, of which five have been published (1996–2011). The epic unfolds in a fantasy, “specific book universe” (Zlatnar Moe and Žigon 2015, 160), which exists, or perhaps “existed,” in pseudo-mediaeval times. Unlike fantasies set in a fictional version of the real world, such as in Harry Potter (Rowling 1997–2007; Yates et al. 2001–11), the specific universe of GoT is entirely fictional. The vast majority of the story unravels on the continent of Westeros, and from the perspective of the Westerosi people, apart from certain key narratives that shift attention temporarily to Essos. Westeros is made up of seven kingdoms whose supraregent is located in the Southern, Westerosi capital of King’s Landing. The “game of thrones” is spurred on by the potential illegitimacy of the ruling house sitting on the “iron throne” in the capital city. Identity is a key element in the narrative and, although eye dialect is not used in the dialogic texts of the novels, characterisation is achieved therein through descriptive literary devices and heteroglossia. Beyond the nature of the narrative, the author evokes the mediaeval era through linguistic devices: olde-worlde orthographies (e.g., “Ser” for “Sir”); oldeworlde names (e.g., Eddard); archaic lexis (e.g., “lordling”); reference to archaic objects (e.g., “dirk” and “longsword”); and reference to archaic species (e.g., “direwolves”)2 (Martin 1996–2011)3. It is interesting that a word such as “dirk” is defined as “a type of dagger (= small pointed knife) used as a weapon in Scotland in the past” (Cambridge Dictionary) and has Scandinavian origins (Online Etymology Dictionary), as the combination points to Viking influence in mediaeval Scotland. Although the book universe is a fantasy one, it is impossible that Martin would have escaped real-world referencing without having had to coin neologisms at every corner. Similarly, the screenwriters could not have avoided the use of realworld accents without inventing entirely new sets of pronunciation.

Bastard from the North or Kingg in th’ Nohrth?  177

Figure 9.1  Political map of Westeros, and a simplified Essos with key locations marked. Source: https://themusaeum.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/westerosmap.pdf

It seems they harnessed accents to compensate Martin’s literary devices, thereby facilitating intersemiotic transfer of character identities and preserving the Anglo-Saxon undertones in the books. They acted as epimemeticists by casting mainly Britons (or actors capable of rendering British accents)4 and choosing accents with real-world connotations in order to distinguish between kingdoms and continents and to forge the regional identities imagined in the novels. In the televised series, the native Westerosi characters from the fictional North and South (save Dorne) don Northern and Southern English accents, respectively, that not only colour their characters diatopically and diastratically but also diachronically –the English accents serve to take the audience back in time to an era that, at least, predates the US-English accent.

9.5 The North Northern characters are brutish but redeemed by a salt-of-the-earth quality, a good sense of humour and “an aversion to pretentiousness, which is about as Yorkshire a trait as it gets” (Taylor 2017). Their main identifying traits are loyalty and integrity. While this accent is an effective tool in conveying the memetic signs belonging to the Northern-English dialectal meme, it involves the superimposition of modern-day perceptions onto a

178  Lydia Hayes fictional past, given that these largely positive qualities associated with the Northern accent are the result of social changes in a more recent past (though it is extremely difficult to know how mediaeval accents would have sounded and, in any case, their memetic signs would likely be lost on a modern-day viewership). Almost all characters in The North speak with Yorkshire accents from Northern England. Northern characters present speech patterns such as /h/ dropping in “hard,” foot vowels /ʊ/ in “cup” and “love,” hints of a lingering velar nasal plus /ŋg/ in “singer,” /g/ dropping on final consonants by replacing [ŋ] with /n/ such as in “singing,” short vowel /æ/ phoneme in “bath,” varying pronunciations for the /ɔː/ sound in “North,” such as /ɔʊ/, /ɒː/, /ɑː/, and even a rhotic /ɔʊr/ and, most emblematically in the series, the /ɒː/ realisation of /əʊ/ as in “Snow.” Northern English phonological features vary between characters so that the overall effect is a pan-Northern – though predominantly Yorkshire – accent in the region. While Sheffieldborn, emblematically Northern Sean Bean speaks in his natural accent when portraying the quintessentially Northern character and Warden of the North, Ned Stark, his screen son Robb Stark (portrayed by Richard Madden with natural Glaswegian accent), nephew-concealed-as-bastard son Jon Snow (portrayed by Kit Harington with natural SBE accent) and ward Theon Greyjoy (portrayed by Alfie Allen with natural SBE accent) all do idiosyncratic renditions of Yorkshire accents. Older Northern characters often present elongated monophthongs such as /ɛː/ in the pronunciation of “day” (in place of the diphthong /ɛɪ/ down South and /eː/ by younger Northerners) as well as a tapped /r/, which was found to be “occasionally pronounced by males” of Sheffield in a 90s dialectal study (Stoddart et al. 1999, 76). One such male who does tend to tap his intervocalic /r/ is Sean Bean, and it seems actors such as Tim McInnerny (natural RP speaker) who portrayed Lord Glover, may have modelled their renditions on Bean’s accent and, as such, have Northern accents closer to a Sheffield one, including the tapped /r/. This similarity in accent serves to demonstrate proximity and loyalty to Winterfell, the Northern capital where the Starks rule, as well as being a diachronic sign of the older generation. Idiosyncratic Northern renditions are also used to create the identity of characters who are not necessarily Northern but who share memetic signs with Northerners. This is illustrated by Ser Davos (portrayed by Liam Cunningham with natural Dublin accent), a “reformed smuggler” (Fandom) from the South who has lived a relatively nomadic life, largely in The Narrow Sea between Westeros and Essos, yet speaks in a relatively Geordie accent. The element of “Northernness” in his accent conveys traits of defiance against the South, a good sense of humour, lowsocial class, redemption, and subsequent integrity. On the other hand, the uniqueness of the Geordie-specific accent highlights his singularity as a man from nowhere in particular and yet with Northern sympathies. Another character that avails of a Northern accent (this time closer to a

Bastard from the North or Kingg in th’ Nohrth?  179 Yorkshire rendition) is Bronn (portrayed by Jerome Flynn with natural SBE accent), who is from Flea Bottom, a slum in King's Landing, where Davos also finds his origins. Bronn’s uncouth, brutish ways are in line with Northern memetic signs. Nonetheless, Bronn resides in the South and is a rogue character with no true fealty but to the highest bidder, a trait that is out of sync with the Northern meme. Though, in general, the use of Northern accents by these characters constitutes an accentually characterised idiolect that avails of the Northern meme. In Winterfell, a “Stark contrast” manifests between the prevailing Yorkshire accents and a handful of characters belonging to the ruling house of the North, the Starks, who speak with an SBE accent, typical of the South of England and most of the South of Westeros. The Stark ladies, Sansa and Arya, and the two youngest lords, Bran and Rickon – who never become fighters, unlike their father, brothers, and other fellow Northerners – render Southern accents. Their Mother, Catelyn Stark (née Tully), is from Riverrun in the borderland Southern constituency of the Riverlands and speaks in a Southern – albeit mild – accent. SBE distinguishes the Stark children from the rest of their countrymen and, beyond simply linking them with their mother, it would seem to connote purity, serenity, and intelligence. The use of a standard to characterise virtue is an older practice that was used in Victorian novels (Chapman 1994, 221) and its use by these characters is somewhat at odds with its current dialectal meme. Nonetheless, as regards (acquired) intelligence, the SBE accent is still often associated with higher education in the UK, as non-Southern youths who receive their education at boarding schools nationwide tend to come out the other side speaking this way. From this point of view, it is logical that these characters, which have been educated (albeit within the confines of Winterfell) and not exposed to war or fighting, speak in a “sheltered” accent. The “Stark contrast” exposes by implication the traits tied to Northern and Southern accents, and, ultimately, consolidates the dialectal memes pertaining to these. It is worth noting that there is variation in the SBE renditions by these characters and these nuances reflect their identities. For example, Sansa speaks with a particularly posh Southern accent that is very similar to the speech heard in King’s Landing, and she is a prim and proper type who enjoys court life in said capital. On the other hand, Arya’s accent is not as posh or standardised as that of her sister. She has a Southern accent that veers towards the South West of England, specifically, which is a slightly earthy and somewhat less refined kind of an accent. While Arya shares the intellect of her SBE-speaking siblings, the hints of West Country in her Southern accent, which disobey the standard Southern SBE accent, are in keeping with her bold character, who time after time breaks the mould. It could be argued that these two actresses are simply performing in their natural accents, as they are from Central-South and South-West England, respectively; however, Maisie Williams who plays

180  Lydia Hayes Arya tends to /t/ glottalise in real-life interviews and not on screen (likely because her character is upper-class). Their SBE-speaking brothers Bran and Rickon are from Surrey and Northern Ireland, respectively. Art Parkinson, who portrays Rickon, has a natural Donegal accent that is a far cry from SBE, and so the fact that he renders an SBE accent serves to substantiate the idea that the use of accents was a “game of memes” played by the screenwriters. The fact that, on the other hand, Sansa, Arya and Bran may have been performed largely in the actors’ natural accents does not suggest they were unable to render alternative English varieties, as did their on-screen brothers, and might suggest they were instructed to maintain their natural accents: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In any case, the effect on viewers is that the accents with which the Northern characters speak play a decisive, if not performative, role in the creation of their identities.

9.6 The South Southerners are characterised by superiority, formality, and Machiavellian action. Whereas an older meme of the virtuous SBE speaker was used in The North, the use of this accent across the South is a modern meme, conveying untrustworthiness, pretentiousness, and cunning. In the South (everywhere south of The North in Westeros, bar Dorne), SBE accents prevail and renditions stretch from upper class London accents to RP. SBE is pronounced as it is currently, despite the fact that the foot-strut split and bath-broadening would not yet have come to pass in the pseudo-mediaeval era. Lower-class characters present /h/ dropping and glottalisation of the intervocal /t/. Exceedingly posh SBE – but not to the extent of RP – is spoken by many of the main characters in the South, including, most notably, Cersei Lannister (played by Lena Headey with natural SBE accent), and Jaime Lannister (portrayed by Nikolaj CosterWaldau with natural Danish-accented English). The Southern characters that speak with RP are Tyrion Lannister (portrayed by Peter Dinklage with natural American accent), Tywin Lannister (portrayed by Charles dance with “natural” RP accent), Ser Jorah Mormont (portrayed by Iain Glen with natural Edinburgh accent), (Lord) Varys (portrayed by Conleth Hill with natural Northern Irish accent) and Joffrey (played by Jack Gleeson with natural Dublin-Irish accent). For all of these characters save Joffrey and perhaps Tyrion, this accent depicts an older generation, whereas for Joffrey it serves primarily for vilification, and for Tyrion it matches his penchant for the old school, Southern lifestyle. RP is also well aligned with the characteristics of high intelligence and untrustworthiness, which these characters all have to a lesser or greater extent. Two of these characters are notably not from the south of Westeros, yet they are associated with the region and share qualities of the southern meme, for which reason, RP is fitting. Ser Jorah

Bastard from the North or Kingg in th’ Nohrth?  181 Mormont is from The North and Varys is from the continent of Essos. Ser Jorah carried out espionage work for Varys and ultimately follows a southern queen who seeks to take the throne. Varys, on the other hand, is deeply integrated into the court and is often referred to as a lord, given that he is a member of the Small Council that oversees decisions in King’s Landing, where he resides. He is also Master of Whisperers because of his network of spies and his influence on royals and nobles behind the scenes. The RP accent provokes a potential problematic of diachronic verisimilitude for a British audience, as the pseudo-mediaeval times of the GoT world would, in theory, predate the existence of RP. The presence of the foot-strut split, as well as RP, then, is the result of what I imagine to be a “boomerang effect” whereby the historical image spins through a prism of time to the present and recoils – but not quite rebounds – to become an anachronistic version of itself. This could also be visualised as an error of parallax from a US stance, in terms of the skewed rear view along a linear timeline that might cause RP to seem older than it in fact is; from a US perspective, RP likely sounds old enough to transport the home audience back in time sufficiently. In any case, and setting aside linguists and historians, the memes that are most accessible to a large-scale audience are modern ones, given that shared ideas change over time. It is unlikely that most viewers would be aware of the dialectal memes from bygone eras, for which reason the use of RP is successful in depicting characters of an older generation within the “text universe” (the book universe that encompasses its screen adaptation) or “macrotext” (Ranzato 2016, 1); whereas the use of SBE in the North – to characterise virtue, intelligence, and composure – might be jarring and even disconcerting to a modern audience. Indeed, the SBE cacophony in the North has received much media attention (Read 2013, which, if nothing else, confirms the importance of accent and the audience’s awareness of modern-day memes. Audiences seem to have accepted the use of Northern accents by ­characters in The North and Southern ones by those in the South (Read 2013, which begs the question of whether geographical location was a prerequisite for the use and positive reception of the chosen accents. After all, King’s Landing is positioned awfully close to London’s ­positioning in the United Kingdom. The dialectal meme would be more easily ­demonstrated if The North and the South of Westeros had been inversely positioned but the identities remained intact. Nonetheless, perhaps we are products of our environment and the asperous Northern consonants and full-bodied vowels, for example, could only emerge from a harsh climate and landscape, which are to be found most often in northerly locations. Therefore, let me caveat the acceptance of the GoT Northern and Southern accents in virtue of their emanation from those respective locations in Westeros by saying that while George R.R. Martin may have recreated the world we live in, he did not recreate the solar system it inhabits. Then again, while accents and geography do align in The North,

182  Lydia Hayes the Southern accents of the South of Westeros fall against a Southern European landscape. Nevertheless, besides being lingua franca in the GoT world, English, known therein as “the Common Tongue,” is native to all inhabitants of the fictional continent of Westeros (including the Dornish in the extreme South, who speak it with a foreign accent due to their pseudo-historical past), which justifies Southern accents in the regions around the capital.

9.7 Translation: Juego de tronos The dubbed version of the series into Castilian Spanish, Juego de tronos (JdT), has undergone standardisation processes as per conventions in the Spanish dubbing industry. This means that the two most prevalent accents (those discussed in this chapter), as well as some other linguistic variation in the original version, are conveyed in Upper SCS. The exceedingly clear enunciations of Upper SCS renditions are a trait of Castilian Spanish dubbese, perpetuated by dubbing talents being instructed to “talk proper” with “perfect diction” (Alonso Naranjo Jr 2020, my translation). Some dubbing directors hold that the standardised Spanish used in dubs is not necessarily SCS but instead “neutral Castilian Spanish” (Villar 2020, my translation). What does differentiate SCS from a neutral standard is the intonation characteristic of dubbing, or dubbese (see Sánchez-Mompeán 2020) and its “prefabricated orality” (Baños-Piñero and Chaume 2009). In any case, the dubbing accent (insofar as phonetic realisations are concerned) is certainly closest to SCS and, as such, triggers the SCS meme, to a certain extent; diastratic signs of the meme tend to undergo a levelling effect, or else are all elevated to an upper-class sign, due to the perfect diction previously mentioned. And whereas the Upper SCS meme is fitting for characters of the Southern region of Westeros, the fact that it is also used for Northern and all other characters5 seems to have a cancelling effect on its signs in the South. It should be acknowledged, however, that the dubbing director of JdT, Antonio Villar (2020), has explained that while accents were not used in the dubbed version, efforts were made to vary register and for characters to lean towards either an uncouth or refined type of diction and utterance (i.e., Mid/Lower and Upper SCS). Furthermore, he contended that characterisations and character transformations were achieved by virtue of the voice talents’ acting (ibid.). For example, the character of Lord Baelish aka Littlefinger (Meñique), tends to sibilate and trail off at the end of sentences in the original, which reflects the scheming, untrustworthy, and mysterious nature of his character, and this feature of his speech is emulated in the dub (Villar confirmed this intention and he himself dubbed this character) but his idiolect, consisting of a shifting accent, is not portrayed in the dub. We can draw from insight provided by Villar that register aimed at contributing to

Bastard from the North or Kingg in th’ Nohrth?  183 diastratic signs and, on the other hand, timbre, tone, and modulation played pivotal roles in creating idiosyncratic signs. As for diatopic signs, regionalisms are not used in the dub; however, given that Upper SCS is slightly more accentuated in the South and/or among upper-class characters, while something veering away from Upper SCS and towards Mid SCS is somewhat more prevalent in The North and/or among less refined characters, diastratic signs can sometimes imply diatopic signs as well. Nonetheless, the subtlety with which these variations manifest in the dubbed version, coupled with the fact that the diastratic marker does not always coincide with a diatopic one, means that, ultimately, linguistic variation is not easily discernible and visual cues fill in the gaps. Mannerisms, dress, and landscape are paramount for conveying characters’ origins to dubbed-version viewers, although these too can become inconspicuous when less prominent characters appear out of context. These visual cues, of course, contribute to characterisations in the original version as well, which highlights the collective agency of audio and visual elements. In that vein, Beal (2020, 9) has posited that non-linguistic behaviour can also index social value and perform – or performatively create – identities: The concepts of indexicality and enregisterment relate to the ways in which features of language (or, indeed other aspects of social behaviour such as dress) come to be associated with aspects of social identity such as class, gender, region, etc., and how clusters of such features (registers) are used by speakers to perform identity. Whereas accentual standardisation has, to varying extents, obscured diastratic and idiosyncratic signs, and almost eradicated diatopic ones, grammatical variation, which can be thought of as both dialectal and pertaining to register, has achieved the creation of a diachronic sign in JdT: the formal form of address for the second-person singular, vos, which is obsolete in Castilian Spanish,6 and its plural inflections function as a temporal marker in the dubbed version. In the original version, such archaic realities are not used, which may owe their absence to the fantasy element of the series or to an attempt at diachronic integrity. As regards the former, the use of thy, thou, or thee, could evoke a real historical moment and take away from the mystery of the mythical era of GoT. On the other hand, these pronouns are so often associated with Shakespeare that, although they preceded him, the conceptual tie could provoke a problematic of diachronic verisimilitude. Nonetheless, it seems the dubbing director, Villar, considered the benefits of using el voseo outweighed the risks: similar to the Shakespearian conundrum, vos is often associated with Cervantes, although this pronoun too preceded the Spanish author (albeit used slightly differently before his time). Bringing to mind the anachronistic usage of RP in the original version, el voseo likely

Game of Thrones Diatopic signs

Diastratic signs

Idiosyncratic signs

Yorkshire/ Northern accents

• The North of England/Westeros • Yorkshire accent shows proximity and loyalty to Winterfell

Mid-to-low social class; informality; brutish; uncouth; defiance; patriotic; aversion to pretentiousness; sense of humour; loyalty; integrity.

SBE

The South of England/ Westeros until the border with the Kingdom of Dorne

• Non-Yorkshire Northern • Absence of footrenditions serve to suggest a strut split and bathdistance from Winterfell e.g. broadening is a modern Geordie. trait of Northern English • Northern accent used to but also of mediaeval characterise Bronn whose English. origins are in King’s • Stronger accents are Landing. used by an older generation e.g. Lord Glover. Idiosyncratic SBE renditions Presence of foot-strut split correlate to class hierarchy and bath-broadening is whereby royals present the anachronistic. This accent most ‘posh’ SBE with more does not have diachronic elongated vowels and clearer signs. diction.

RP

High social class; refinement; formality; deceit; cunning; pretentiousness; seriousness; intelligence; untrustworthiness. The South of England/ nonThe highest echelon geographically marked/King’s of social classes; Landing/ southern affiliations high intelligence; connivance; superiority.

Jorah Mormont from The North and Varys from Essos speak with RP

Diachronic signs

Older generation within text universe.

184  Lydia Hayes

Table 9.1  Accents and their diatopic, diastratic, idiosyncratic, and diachronic signs in Game of Thrones and its Castilian-Spanish dubbed version.

Diatopic signs

Diastratic signs

Idiosyncratic signs

Diachronic signs

Upper SCS

• Central and NorthernCentral Spain and nonspecific (formal discourse) • Tied often to the south of Westeros • Central and NorthernCentral Spain and nonspecific (formal discourse) • Tied often to the North of Westeros

Upper class and refined characters

-

Voseo: this obsolete pronoun in Castilian Spanish evokes an older era.

Middle class and uncouth characters

-

Voseo: this obsolete pronoun in Castilian Spanish evokes an older era.

-

e.g. sibilating and trailing off by Littlefinger conveying mysteriousness, cunning and deceit.

-

Mid SCS

Tone, timbre and modulation

Bastard from the North or Kingg in th’ Nohrth?  185

Juego de Tronos

186  Lydia Hayes seems so far removed from current Spanish audiences that it is perceived as sufficiently archaic to take them back in time. Paco Vara (2020), the translator of the JdT scripts (which were later altered in studio by Villar to meet dubbing requirements), has explained that he started using the pronoun spontaneously to distinguish between characters’ relationships, such as scenes wherein two noble characters Ned Stark and the king, Robert Baratheon, speak to each other in public using vos and in private using the tú form, to show their trust and fondness for one another. It should be noted, however, that the precedent to use a mixture of voseo and tuteo had been set in the JdT books, although these were not necessarily employed in an identical fashion in both texts. In any case, the screenplay inherently differs from the books and linguistic decisions were overseen by the same proofreader, Natalia Cervera from the publishing company Gigamesh, for the translation of both the books and the series (Nieto 2020). It can be concluded that the two predominant accents used in the original version of the series, namely Northern and Southern English accents, lead to complex character creations given that they bring all four memetic signs into full bloom, whereas standardisation in the Castilian Spanish dubbed version leads to character simplification and, ultimately, opaque identities with many memetic signs obscured. Nonetheless, identities in the dub are not completely devoid of memetic markers. Most significantly, temporal demarcation is achieved by dint of el voseo and, to a lesser extent, diastratic signs are created through register and diction (i.e., Mid through Upper SCS), diatopic signs are tied to those diastratic ones, and idiosyncratic signs are realised via the voice talents’ voice qualities and their acting. Despite the fact that diastratic signs are sometimes coupled with regional origins, there is no clear divide between accent specificities in the dubbed version and, therefore, the North-South Westeros divide is instead revealed through elements such as plot, character development, and dress. The memetic signs attached to accents in the original and dubbed versions are outlined in the tables 9.1, where comparisons can be made.

9.8 Memetic Translation Whereas Spanish dubbing practises standardisation, which, in the case of Game of Thrones, lead to many blurred memetic signs in the dubbed version, some other dubbing industries employ linguistic variation, which enables more memetic signs to be transmitted to the target-text audience. A pertinent example is that of the new British-English dubs on Netflix of Spanish series, such as Alta Mar/High Seas (Campos and Neira 2019– 2020) and Hache (Fernández 2019–), that avail of SBE, Estuary English (EE), RP, and Cockney-coloured accents for characterisation (Hayes 2021). It is worth noting that, in many cases, SBE and RP have been used

Bastard from the North or Kingg in th’ Nohrth?  187 to convey Upper SCS, while EE and Cockney have been used to convey Lower SCS. The use of British linguistic variation involves a change in the identity of the characters in question, whose accents then link them to British places, yet many of the memetic signs are comparable in the cultures of the source and target texts. Let us recall that change is a necessary condition for memetic propagation. In this sense, language and accentual markings were transformed in the English dubs High Seas and Hache, in order for the memetic signs in the dub to reflect, but not mirror, those in the original. Bearing in mind this English-dubbing strategy for Spanish originals, a translation strategy could be conceived for Spanish dubbing, wherein diastratic signs present in English accents are conveyed by dubbing talents in Lower through Upper SCS. While the JdT dub did aim to incorporate variation in register and diction, which characterises the Lower-Upper SCS distinction, these were not reserved for particular fictional regions nor so starkly contrasted – in reality, the distinction was, at most, MidUpper – that diastratic markers were entirely obvious. More pronounced differences in Lower through Upper SCS could more effectively give rise to characterisations and create polarities; for example, the Upper SCS that was used throughout JdT could have characterised Southerners well, had it been brought into relief against Lower or marked Mid SCS consistently in The North. However, the more pronounced the accent, the closer to real-world SCS and, as previously mentioned, the language in Spanish dubs strives to be a neutral variety particular to dubbed texts. It might seem more acceptable to carry out more accentuated SCS renditions if a parallel is drawn between neutral Castilian Spanish and SCS. The reluctance to be frank about the bases on which neutrality is established has been pointed out by Fuentes-Luque (2019, 826) in relation to Latin American dubbing: “so-called ‘neutral Spanish’ - often easily recognized as actually Mexican Spanish.” Although this option of varying marked SCS could serve to replenish diastratic signs, it is in using diatopically marked accents that a full-spectrum dialectal meme is evoked, as seen in Table 9.1. That said, unlike the English dubbing industry (and indeed the Italian one, which has a much longer tradition, generally, and of using linguistic variation, specifically), the Spanish have an aversion to using dialects in dubbing and view the practice as passé and polemical. The negativity towards dialects in dubbing may be due to colonialist stigma and political incorrectness, which Chaume (2012, 141) has illustrated with the example of Cuban Spanish used to dub a maid’s African-American English in the Castilian Spanish dub of Gone with the Wind (Fleming 1939). Indeed JdT dubbing director Antonio Villar (2020), has shared his opinion that the use of Castilian accents could cause confusion for the audience. This can be explained by a cognitive dissonance that could arise when hearing domestic accents associated with a domestic meme, requiring this mental image to be

188  Lydia Hayes reconciled with foreign visuals. Cognitive dissonance due to accent is especially likely to be the effect in countries with consolidated dubbing industries with standardisation norms, which then practise this strategy for the first time. Nonetheless, audiovisual-product consumers tend to prefer the AVT practices to which they are accustomed and so problematics such as cognitive dissonance are, in fact, surmountable and could be an extension of the “suspension of linguistic disbelief” (Romero-Fresco 2009, 49) by dubbed-version audiences. There is in fact a third option (after varied register/SCS and Spanish dialects and accents), of using foreign accents in Spanish. This way, the dubbed text does not purport to be a Spanish original but, instead, highlights the foreign nature of the text, using memes triggered by foreign accents so that the audience is, almost paradoxically, brought closer to the foreign context through foreignisation. This has been carried out already in, among others, the English dub of Fariña/Cocaine Coast (Sedes et al. 2018) in which voice actors speak with generic Hispanic, Latin American, and Spanish accents in English to reflect the Spanish reality (Hayes 2021). While it is logical that a dubbed product will not be as sophisticated as an original version in identity creation due to the facility with which linguistic variation can be used in the latter, the significant reduction of memetic dimensions renders the standard language of dubbed versions a feature of dubbese that is worth renegotiating in the domesticationforeignisation continuum, and the language of Spanish originals, as well as strategies used in other dubbing industries, can inform alternative dubbing strategies. The current aversion to accents in Spanish dubs does complicate but does not preclude their incorporation. After all, they are already used in certain instances in comedies dubbed into Spanish to reproduce humoristic effect (see Arampatzis 2013), and foreign accents are often conveyed when significant to the plot (Voellmer 2012, 58). Empirical studies have shown that Spanish translators do tend to provide notes (in 70.6% of cases) on accents (foreign and native), as well as on other linguistic variation, which are relevant to a character, in order to bring these to the dubbing director’s attention (Martínez Sierra 2016, 110–11). These notes could give impetus to more linguistic variation used in dubs, if video-on-demand services such as HBO España, dubbing directors, voice talents, and audiences were open to experimentation.

9.9 Bastard from the North or Kingg in th’ Nohrth? Jon Snow, one of the protagonists of GoT, renders a soft Yorkshire accent. He is the alleged bastard of Ned Stark, Warden of the North, and he himself becomes the King in the North at the turn of season six into seven of the series. Given the Northerners’ loyalty to Jon Snow, King in the North is usually – at least when said in earnest and not by the younger Starks – uttered by Northerners themselves and, as such, in a

Bastard from the North or Kingg in th’ Nohrth?  189 Northern accent. On the other hand, Southerners more frequently refer to him as Bastard from the North (and sometimes Bastard of the North) and, therefore, this epithet is heard in Southern accents (mainly SBE and RP). Jon Snow’s elevation to the status of King in the North is an act of Northern patriotism and political rupture from King’s Landing in the South. As the series draws near its climax, “King in the North” becomes a sort of war cry, and the Northern accents in which it is exclaimed add memetic signs to the utterance, to the extent that if it is said in a Southern accent, we understand there is an unconventional loyalty in question. The Northern accent is, in a way, a (supra)segmental shibboleth of The North. I have tried my hand at impressionistic eye dialect to represent the accent in question (duplicating the /g/ to suggest the characteristically Northern phonological feature of a velar nasal plus and inserting a /h/ suggesting that the vowel sound /ɔː/ has been modified), although the spelling is, of course, symbolic. In actual fact, there are few Northern characters in GoT who present a velar nasal plus in their speech – likely because this phoneme is more characteristic of a Brummie accent than a Yorkshire one, although older generations in Yorkshire and Lancashire have it too. Nonetheless, this phoneme triggers a Northern association. In any case, the idiosyncratic rendition of Northern accents in the series means that the “North” in “King of the North” is subject to varying pronunciations, such as, but not limited to, /nɔʊθ/ /nɔʊrθ/ /nɒːθ/ and /nɑːθ/. This iconic quasi shibboleth of the Game of Thrones series puts the agency versus benignity of accent into stark relief when considering that in the Castilian Spanish dubbed version, neither el rey en el Norte (King in the North) nor (el) bastardo del Norte (Bastard from the North) is (supra)segmentally layered with memetic meaning, rendering these epithets less iconic in the world of the Spanish dub, which exists within the text or GoT universe.

9.10 Concluding Remarks The concept of a “dialectal meme” can be used for analysing the cultural nuances and, therefore, character identity, conveyed through ­linguistic variation in fictional texts. Accents have been the form of linguistic ­variation under scrutiny in this chapter, but memes can be triggered by other linguistic variation too, such as by dialect or register (the latter of which has also been discussed in this chapter) and indeed by other forms of social behaviour, such as dress. When it comes to translation, a memetic analysis on the diatopic, diastratic, idiosyncratic, and diachronic signs evoked by linguistic variation can shed light on whether character identity is comparable in original and dubbed versions. Specificities of memes vary from person to person although, broadly speaking, each community of speakers shares in its own set of dialectal memes, which has been illustrated in the specific cases of Northern and Southern English accents and Central and Andalusian Spanish accents. The GoT case study

190  Lydia Hayes has shed light on the deep dimensions of meaning conveyed through accents and their memetic signs in original versions, and the somewhat superficiality of memetic signs in dubbed versions, due to the absence of accentual variation. Nonetheless, efforts to nuance identities within the constraints of standardisation are made in dubs and have been described in the case study, through observation and with special thanks to insights provided by the JdT dubbing director. Finally, memetic dubbing strategies have been discussed, taking into account ideological and industry-related obstacles and opportunities.

Notes 1 All of the pronunciations cited in this paragraph are mentioned in Narbona Jiménez et al. (2011), Méndez-Gª de Paredes and Amorós-Negre (2016, 2019), and perceived by personal observation, with the exception of the /b/ as /v/ realisation, which is founded on my first-order indexing alone, and I have not yet found overt comment on it in academic writing. 2 Direwolves date back to the geological epoch of the Pleistocene, which means they predate the Middle Ages by a long margin; however, it is noted in the novels that they are rare creatures from times gone by that are thought to be extinct and, as such, their presence in the “book universe” constitutes a rarity. 3 Individual page numbers have not been provided as these terms appear recurrently throughout the whole novel. 4 There are also, to a lesser degree, foreign accents in English as well as invented languages used in the series; however, my focus in this chapter is on the British accents used to forge images of the fictional North and South, which are the most widely spoken varieties in the series and those which the audience predominantly hears. 5 This refers to all characters speaking English (L1) in the source text and Spanish (L2) in the target text but not invented languages. There are also isolated instances of foreign accents (L3) conveyed in both versions, which do not include pseudo-Hispanic accents in Dorne as these coincide with the main language of the dub (L2: Spanish). 6 The voseo, or vos form of address, has been obsolete in Spain since the ­nineteenth century, which renders it archaic in peninsular Spanish today; however, it is still used in many Latin American countries and, most notably, it remains part of formal and informal discourse in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay.

References Agha, Asif. 2003. “The Social Life of Cultural Value.” Language & Communication 23(3–4): 231–273. Alonso Naranjo, Rafael Jr. 2020. Dubbing class (03/01/2020). Escuela de Doblaje y Sonido Soundub Formación. Madrid. Álvarez Mellado, Elena. 2017. “No hablarás con acento andaluz en el telediario de las 9.” El diario, February 27, 2017. https://www.eldiario.es/zonacritica/ hablaras-acento-andaluz-telediario_6_617048315.html. Arampatzis, Christos. 2013. “Las variedades no estándar en la comedia de situación estadounidense y su doblaje al español: un estudio descriptivo.” Trans: Revista de Traductología 17: 85–102.

Bastard from the North or Kingg in th’ Nohrth?  191 Baños-Piñero, Rocío, and Frederic Chaume. 2009. “Prefabricated Orality: A Challenge in Audiovisual Translation.” In inTRAlinea 47, Special Issue: The Translation of dialects in multimedia. Edited by Giorgio Marrano, Giovanni Nadiani, and Christopher Rundle. Beal, Joan C. 2009. “‘You’re Not from New York City, You’re from Rotherham’: Dialect and Identity in British Indie Music.” Journal of English Linguistics 37: 223–240. Beal, Joan C. 2019. “Dialect in Literature as Evidence for Historical Enregisterment.” Conference Presentation at Them and [uz]: accents and dialects in fictional dialogue (28/02/2019). Università Sapienza di Roma: Rome. Beal, Joan C. 2020. “Enregisterment and Historical Sociolinguistics.” In Processes of Change: Studies in Late Modern and Present-Day English. Edited by Sandra Jansen and Lucia Sierbes, 7–24. John Benjamins: Amsterdam. Cambridge Dictionary. “Dirk.” https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/ english/dirk. Chapman, Raymond. 1994. Forms of Speech in Victorian Fiction. Longman: London and New York. Chaume, Frederic. 2012. Audiovisual Translation: Dubbing. Routledge: London. Chesterman, Andrew. 1997. Memes of Translation. John Benjamins: Amsterdam. Dawkins, Richard. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press: Oxford. Encyclopædia Britannica. “Castilian dialect.” https://www.britannica.com/topic/ Castilian-dialect. Fandom. “Davos Seaworth.” https://gameofthrones.fandom.com/wiki/Davos_ Seaworth. Fuentes-Luque, Adrián. 2019. “An Approach to Audio-Visual Translation and the Film Industry in Spain and Latin America.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 96(5): 815–834. Hayes, Lydia. 2019. “An Interdisciplinary Approach to Studying Linguistic Variation in Audiovisual Texts: Extrapolating a Synergy of Neuropsychology, Semiotics, Performativity, and Memetics to Translation Studies.” Syn-Thèses 9–10: 90–107. Hayes, Lydia. 2021a, forthcoming. “Netflix Disrupting Dubbing: English Dubs and British Accents.” JAT: Journal of Audiovisual Translation 4(1). Hayes, Lydia. 2021b, forthcoming. “Linguistic Variation in Netflix’ English Dubs: Memetic Translation of Fariña aka Cocaine Coast.” In New Perspectives in audiovisual translation: towards future research trends. Edited by Laura Mejías-Climent and José Fernando Carrero. PUV: Publicacions Universitat València: València. Jiménez, Narbona, Rafael Cano Aguilar Antonio, and Ramón Morillo VelardePérez. 2011. El español hablado en Andalucía. Editorial Universidad de Sevilla: Seville. Labov, William. [1966] 2006. The Social Stratification of English in New York City. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge. Martin, George R.R. 1996–2011. A Song of Ice and Fire. Voyager Books: London. Mayoral Asensio, Roberto. 1999. La traducción de la variación lingüística. Uertere: Soria. Méndez-Gª de Paredes, Elena, and Carla Amorós-Negre. 2016. “Second Level Pluricentrism in European Spanish: Convergence-divergence in Andalusian Spanish.” In Pluricentric Languages and Non-Dominant Varieties Worldwide:

192  Lydia Hayes Part II: The Pluricentricity of Portuguese and Spanish. Edited by Rudolf Muhr, 242–258. Peter Lang: Bern. Méndez-Gª de Paredes, Elena, and Carla Amorós-Negre. 2019. “The Status of Andalusian in the Spanish-speaking World: Is it Currently Possible for Andalusia to Have its own Linguistic Standardization Process?” Current Issues in Language Planning 20(2):179–198. Nieto, Marla. 2020. “La fantasía y la ciencia ficción son mis temas favoritos para traducir.” El Comercio, January 8, 2020. https://www.elcomercio.es/gijon/ fantasia-ciencia-ficcion-20200108001909-ntvo.html. Online Etymology Dictionary. “Dirk.” https://www.etymonline.com/word/dirk. Ranzato, Irene. 2016. “Reading Dialect Varieties in the Literary Macrotext.” Status Quaestionis 11: 1–16. Read, Max. 2013. “What Is Going on With the Accents in Game of Thrones?” Gawker. https://gawker.com/what-is-going-on-with-the-accentsin-game-of-thrones-485816507. Romero-Fresco, Pablo. 2009. “Naturalness in the Spanish Dubbing Language: A Case of Not-so-Close Friends.” Meta 54(1): 49–72. Rowling, J.K. 1997–2007. Harry Potter. Bloomsbury: London. Sánchez-Mompeán, Sofía. 2020. “Prefabricated Orality at Tone Level: Bringing Dubbing Intonation into the Spotlight.” Perspectives 28(2): 284–299. Sierra, Martínez, Juan José. 2016. “Problemas específicos de la traducción para el doblaje.” In La traducción para el doblaje en España: mapa de convenciones. Edited by Beatriz Cerezo Merchán et al. Publicacions de la Universitat Jaume I: Castelló de la Plana. Silverstein, Michael. 2003. “Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life.” Language & Communication 23: 193–229. Stoddart, Jana, Clive Upton, and John David Allison Widdowson. 1999. “Sheffield Dialect in the 1990s: Revisiting the Concept of NORMs.” In Urban Voices. Accent Studies in the British Isles. Edited by Paul Foulkes and Gerard J. Docherty, 72–89. Routledge: London. Taylor, Chris. 2017. “The 7 Accents of ‘Game of Thrones’ Explained for nonBrits.” Mashable UK, November 29, 2017. https://mashable.com/2017/11/29/ game-of-thrones-accents-guide-british/?europe=true. Trudgill, Peter. 1972. “Sex, Covert Prestige and Linguistic Change in the Urban British English of Norwich.” Language in Society 1(2): 179–195. Vara, Paco. 2020. Email correspondence, April 29, 2020. Villar, Antonio. 2020. Email and audio-file correspondence, April 29, 2020. Voellmer, Elena. 2012. “The Complexity of Establishing L3 in Inglourious Basterds. Applying a Model of Translation Analysis to Dubbing.” MA diss., Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Wales, Katie. 2000. “North and South: An English Linguistic Divide?” English Today 16(1): 4–15. Wales, Katie. 2002. “‘North of Watford Gap’ – A Cultural History of Northern English (from 1700).” In Alternative Histories of English. Edited by Richard J. Watts and Peter Trudgill, 45–66. Routledge: London and New York. Wales, Katie. 2006. Northern English: A Social and Cultural History. Cambridge University Press. Wells, John C. 1982. Accents of English 1: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.

Bastard from the North or Kingg in th’ Nohrth?  193 Wells, John C. 1997. Our Changing Pronunciation. Transactions of the Yorkshire Dialect Society XIX: 42–48. https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/yorksdial. htm. Zlatnar Moe, Marija, and Tanja Žigon 2015. “Comparing National Images in Translations of Popular Fiction.” In Interconnecting Translation Studies and Imagology. Edited by Luc Van Doorslaer, Joep Leerssen, and Peter Flynn, 145– 161. John Benjamins: Amsterdam.

Filmography Alta Mar/High Seas. 2019–20. Ramón Campos and Gema R. Neira. Bambú Producciones: Spain. [Television series]. Fariña/Cocaine Coast. 2018. Carlos Sedes. Atresmedia Televisión, Bambú Producciones: Spain. Beta Film: Germany. [Television series]. Game of Thrones. 2011–19. David Benioff and Daniel Brett Weiss. Home Box Office (HBO), Television 360, Grok! Studio, Bighead Littlehead: United States. Generator Entertainment: United Kingdom. [Television series]. Gone with the Wind. 1939. Victor Fleming. Selznick International Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM): United States. [Motion picture]. Hache. 2019–present. Verónica Fernández. Weekend Studio: Spain. [Television series]. Harry Potter. 2001–11. David Yates. Heyday Films: United Kingdom. Warner Bros.: United States. [Motion pictures]. Juego de Tronos. David Benioff and Daniel Brett Weiss. Home Box Office (HBO), Television 360, Grok! Studio, Bighead Littlehead: United States. Generator Entertainment: UK. [Television series]; Villar, Antonio. Soundub: Spain. [Castilian Spanish dubbed version]. Mar de plástico. 2015–16. Juan Carlos Cueto. Boomerang TV: Spain. [Television series]. Siete Vidas. 1999–06. Nacho (Ignacio) García Velilla. Telecinco: Spain. [Television series]. Velvet Colección. 2017–19. Ramón Campos and Gema R. Neira. Bambú Producciones, Movistar+: Spain. [Television series].

10 “Why is he making a funny noise?” The RP Speaker as an Outcast Luca Valleriani

10.1 Introduction Received Pronunciation (RP) has long been considered as the standard English accent, a prestige form that ought to be taken as a model and accepted as a norm, even though its privileged status is not due to any intrinsic qualities but was acquired for historical reasons (Wells 1998, 34–35). Traditionally, RP was treated in sociolinguistic studies as something given (“received,” as its name says), as if its definition was shared throughout all English-speaking areas in the world. While this view is nowadays old-fashioned and the experts agree on the existence of different standard forms of English outside Europe, it is still rather common to regard RP as the standard accent everywhere in the British Isles, and it is rarely stressed that the traditional features linked to RP as being an upper-class and “regionless” accent can be considered as fully accepted only in England and, to some extent, in Wales, but certainly not in Scotland or Ireland where “RP is generally seen as a foreign (English) accent; these countries have their own higher-class accents which differ in many important respects from RP” (15). Nevertheless, it is true that in Scotland and Ireland people have always been exposed to RP more than in other English-speaking countries, at least through radio and television broadcasting (if not directly in face-to-face situations), since this accent was the only one a television announcer could adopt until the 1970s (Wells 1992, 279). With the aim of expanding on the concept that nowadays RP plays the role of a reference accent only in England and not necessarily in the other countries in the UK, this chapter will also explore the “fall” of BBC English in the last few decades in favour of a progressive greater openness to non-standard and regional accents in British television. Such purpose will be fulfilled through the sociolinguistic analysis of the dialogues of a recent successful British show, Derry Girls (McGee 2018–present), which was chosen in this case because the story takes place in Northern Ireland, where people do not regard RP as their reference accent despite being part of the United Kingdom. Derry Girls perfectly reflects this concept

“Why is he making a funny noise?”  195 not only because almost all the characters speak with a marked Northern Irish accent,1 but also because the only character speaking an English (arguably, a Near-RP – see section 10.5) accent is often marginalised in the show because of his way of speaking. After mentioning the main phonological features that distinguish Northern Irish accent from RP, this study will show the function of the contrast between the two accents through the analysis of the modalities in which the RP speaker is regarded as an outcast in the TV series Derry Girls, contrary to its traditional status.

10.2 Received Pronunciation: Is it Actually “Received”? As stated by Wells, the name Received Pronunciation is “less than happy, relying as it does on an outmoded meaning of received (‘generally accepted’)” (1998, 117) and even phonetician Daniel Jones, who was the first one to codify its description, was not happy with the label ([1909] 1960, 12); however, consciously or not, he established the term, whose first use was traditionally linked to Alexander Ellis but has more recently been ascribed to the eighteenth-century lexicographer John Walker (Mugglestone 1997, 258; Sturiale 2002, 91; Cruttenden 2014, 75). In fact, while merely describing RP as the standard spoken British English and, at the same time, declaring that the term did not imply that other accents were not equally “good,” Jones wrote his works at the beginning of the twentieth century, a period in which national broadcasting was developing and thus demanding the spreading of a standard pronunciation (Cruttenden 2014, 77). Jones was aware of the prestigious status of RP, but never referred to its supposed superiority in his studies, although he considered the accent as a non-regional variety, which he codified mainly because he thought it was useful, if not even necessary, for intelligibility and language teaching purposes (Sturiale 2002, 94). After Jones, the most influential phonetician who contributed to establishing the term RP was A.C. Gimson (1962), who tried to carry forward his predecessor’s tradition by stating that, despite retaining the term, it was inappropriate to define RP in strict social terms for two reasons: firstly, the evolution of British society was making it possible for a wider number of people to acquire the standard accent, and secondly, as a result, the structure of the accent itself was subject to some modifications. As a consequence, the label Received Pronunciation began to be not only questioned but even rejected by the major linguists and dialectoligists in the 1990s and the 2000s, like Trudgill, Honey, the Milroys, and Leith, as listed by Sturiale (2002, 95–96). Peter Trudgill, in particular, proposed a different point of view, arguing that RP should not be considered as the standard English accent but rather as a standardised one (ibid.). Among other labels, Queen’s English and BBC English have been the two most “popular” terms used by experts and journalists to refer to the

196  Luca Valleriani standard pronunciation of English, but linguists now agree that such definitions cannot be considered as appropriate, since it is now acknowledged that the Queen’s language is an upper and more conservative form of RP (Cruttenden 2014, 79) and national broadcasting opened to regional varieties several decades ago (Macauley 1988, 121; Sturiale 2002, 98, but see next section for a concise history of BBC English). The reason why the name RP is still widely used is perhaps due to the neutrality of the initials, as suggested by Abercrombie (1963, 48), but thanks to some renowned studies we now know that it is not be taken as “something given” or “a homogeneous invariant monolith” (Wells 1992, 279). As Wells adds, it is a fact that a certain degree of variability can be found in every accent and RP is no exception: It is convenient to recognize first of all a central tendency which I shall call mainstream RP. We can define it negatively, by recognizing two other tendencies or types of RP, which are part of RP as a whole but distinct from mainstream RP. One is U-RP (…), the other adoptive RP (…). It is also convenient to recognize a rather vaguer entity, Near-RP, comprising accents which are not exactly RP though not very different from it. (ibid.) Wells’s model is to be considered an expansion of Gimson’s (1984) first attempt to identify variants of RP, which distinguished between General RP and its upper-class forms. Gimson also predicted that the term General British (GB), used by Windor Lewis in 1972, might supersede RP, and it is on this statement that Cruttenden has more recently remarked that GB is to be preferred for several reasons: not only is it a more neutral definition, but it also parallels General American (2014, 80). Furthermore, he has also introduced new terms for GB variants, which are Conspicuous General British (CGB), the “posh” form associated with the upper classes, and Regional General British (RGB), defined as “GB with a small admixture of local characteristics” (81).

10.3 Regional Accents in British Television The medium of television has made a huge contribution to the ­establishment of RP as a reference accent, since people actually “received” it through it, as the traditional label suggests, in spite of the numerous argumentations on the inappropriateness of the acronym. This was possible because the language of television arose from that of the pre-existing medium of the radio, on one hand, and the language of drama on the other. Radio national broadcasting influenced the language of television news and adverts, being initially produced by the BBC, which was established as a company in 1922 and had a great impact on the linguistic landscape in Britain. In fact, the Advisory Committee of British Broadcasting, which

“Why is he making a funny noise?”  197 included the head John Reith, but also influential experts on linguistic topics such as Daniel Jones and George Bernard Shaw, agreed on promoting the “right” accent described by Jones and implemented a language policy based on a strict prescriptivism (Sturiale 2002, 97). Mugglestone also suggests that language variation was “by no means value-free in the early twentieth century. Instead, popular language attitudes were pervaded by wide-raging assumptions about class, correctness, ‘educateness’, and ‘culture’” (2008, 200). In such way, radio (and, later, television) made it possible for RP to be spread in every county in the UK, so that the entire population gradually became familiar with the accent and, to some extent, even influenced by it in their language; yet, while broadcasting was definitely a f­ undamental tool to establish the model of Standard English, the same cannot be said about RP, which remained the accent of a minority (213). However, this did not mean that there was no attempt in using broadcasting to start a linguistic change that would implement a unique accent for e­ veryone and eliminate any geographical marker of identity, this being the explicit o ­ rientation of Arthur Lloyd James, one of the members of the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English, who used to define ­broadcasting as the “speaking press,” because it could potentially shape and fix ­pronunciation, playing the same role that the printing press ­introduced by William Caxton in 1476 had played in the “visual language” standardisation (211–12). Lloyd James’s parallelism between press and broadcasting was undoubtedly working in its theoretical premises, but reality did not meet his expectations, because if BBC policy worked in making RP a “regionless” accent that everyone in Britain became familiar with, the same cannot be said from the social point of view. The strict prescriptivism of its policy contributed to presenting it as a class accent, as the “proper” accent that only wealthy and educated people could speak. This view was being established in an era in which “public schools were under attack and the social structure was changing” (Macauley 1988, 121). It is for this reason that the passive reception of RP through the audiovisual medium by the British population turned into a gradual modification of BBC policies after the Second World War, when the domination of RP was weakened in favour of an increasing consideration towards “the reaction of all listeners” (ibid.). As far as film dialogue is concerned, it inherited its linguistic norms from dramatic dialogue. Not only was RP the only accent that could be heard in British films at the first stages of the audiovisual medium, but even the structure and lexis of the language itself was artificial and old-­fashioned, sounding even more unnatural than the speech of TV announcers (Pavesi 2009, 32). Fictional dialogues were exploited as another ­fundamental tool to standardise language in Britain through a fierce censorship aimed at eliminating any kind of “verbal ­ transgression” (regional accents, ­colloquial and vulgar language) from the model of the white upper class

198  Luca Valleriani (Kozloff 2000, 22). There were of course a few ­exceptions in those films where marking a social distance between characters was fundamental for the story itself, but only a slight effort was made to characterise workingclass voices (Jaeckle 2013, 94). Policies for film and TV dialogues started to change from the 1950s, when they gradually became more open to the use of language varieties, but there was a real turning point between the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, when the accurate representation of society in all of its aspects became the ultimate aim for many filmmakers. Therefore, language became a fundamental tool to convey a realistic effect, and this meant that both diatopic and diastratic variants started to play a pivotal role in that sense (Kozloff 2000, 23–24; Hodson 2014, 206–15). Although at a first stage, the use of British accents was not authentic and, at times, stereotypical, it certainly paved the path for the works of directors of the British realistic cinema, such as Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, whose dialogues are a substantial source of regional varieties (Ranzato 2010, 55). The same can be said for the dramatic television dialogue in the UK with popular soap-operas such as Coronation Street (Warren 1960–present), EastEnders (Smith and Holland 1985–present) and Hollyoaks (Redmond 1995–present), where actors are usually free to use their own accents in order to make audiences identify with them. The 1990s marked another crucial point in the history of British television, which can be defined, in Ranzato’s words, as “the big turn in television adaptations of the classics” (2016, 6). In fact, regional and social dialects have been widely used since then to portray characters adapted from the classics, even when the same characters speak Standard English in the novel, with the aim of both localising the story in a specific geographical area and providing a social differentiation between characters through language. British audiovisual dialogues started to adhere rather closely to face-to-face spontaneous conversation (Taylor 1999). As a consequent evolution, an even greater use of dialects and sociolects in the television fictional dialogue in the 2000s and 2010s can be noticed, with the proliferation of new genres of TV shows in which resorting to language variation is a fundamental tool, not only to demarcate a spatial and social setting, but also to create humour and characterise through idiolects (Ranzato et al., 2017). Among the others, two television genres can be considered as very prolific in the use of accents: first of all, detective dramas, where language is often a quick way to portray personalities of characters who only last for one or a few episodes, like in Broadchurch (Chibnall 2013–17) and Father Brown (Flowerday and Guner 2013–present), just to mention some examples; secondly, teen dramas, where we frequently find dialects and also the so-called teenage slang, a set of features which are common to the main urban areas in the UK, and the most famous instances in this case are Skins (Brittain and Elsley 2007–13) and Misfits (Overman 2009–13). Several other sitcoms and comedy-drama

“Why is he making a funny noise?”  199 TV series can be mentioned as great examples of the use of language variation aimed at providing the audiovisual product with a sufficiently good level of linguistic realism, such as those shows whose main purpose is that of depicting the British lower classes (Shameless UK, Abbott 2004–13) or underlining differences between social classes (Downton Abbey, Fellows 2010–15). Finally, not to be forgotten as a big innovation, especially in the last few years, is the use of other standard accents different from RP, which have recently gained social prestige, like Irish and Scottish English, even when the story is not set in their original areas – see, for instance, TV show Catastrophe (Horgan and Delaney 2015–19), where all the main characters either speak with Irish, Scottish, or American accents despite the fact that the story is set in London.2 As regards London or South-eastern English in general, it is worth mentioning that characters who are conceived as speaking with a “neutral” language usually talk with a new kind of accent, the so-called Estuary English (EE), considered to be in a middle position in the language continuum between Cockney and RP. In fact, even when not in its “U” form (to use Wells’s terminology) RP is now used in films and television mostly to mark one character’s social difference from others (a usually posh and upper-class figure) or to create a specific effect (RP speakers are sometimes evil characters) while it is general tendency to use EE for characters who are not meant to show explicitly their geographical provenance and social background. Rosewarne, who first coined the term, has pointed out that it is undeniable that even BBC general language has recently changed and that EE has been the strongest influence: “Just as the spread of RP this century has depended largely on radio and television, so Estuary English is gaining ground through the same channels” (1994, 5). It is not surprising, then, that most of the characters in TV shows set in London speak this accent, like the protagonists in recent sitcoms like GameFace (Conaty 2017–present) and Fleabag (Waller-Bridge 2016–19). This new “democratic” evolution of the standard, adds Rosewarne, received a rather low score in international ratings (1994, 8), even though new studies on the perception of EE would be probably needed, while several regional accents are now perceived as being “warm” and “friendly” and are generally accepted with a positive attitude by the British population (e.g., the Yorkshire accent and the Scottish accent of Edinburgh are apparently the most appreciated), resulting in an ever-growing employment of language variation in entertainment audiovisual products (Ranzato 2017, 18–19).

10.4 Standard English in Northern Ireland The previous sections outlined a concise history of the rise and fall of RP in the audiovisual media as a reflection of a general decline of the prestige of the accent as perceived generally by people in UK. The ultimate aim of

200  Luca Valleriani this study, however, is that of underlining how the overt prestige of RP has not been a reality everywhere in the British Isles. The quotation from Wells reported in the introduction clearly conveys how, regardless of the attempt of imposition of a reference accent by authoritative dictionaries and the media, RP has actually had a privileged status only in England and partially in Wales, while it has always been considered as a foreign accent in the other nations of the archipelago (Wells 1998, 15). Wells further adds that in Scotland “a Scottish accent can be prestigious in a way that a local English accent is not” (1992, 393) and that “neither RP nor popular accents of England exert much perceptible influence on Irish English. (…) In Ireland RP is in no way taken as an unquestioned norm of good pronunciation” (418). Consequently, it can be safely stated that the accents of Edinburgh and Dublin have acquired respectively in Scotland and in the Republic of Ireland the same status of RP/EE in England, which are considered as foreign (English) accents in those areas. While issues on reference accent in Scotland and Ireland have been discussed or at least mentioned by previous studies, not much has been written about English pronunciation in Wales and Northern Ireland. However, following Wells (1992, 1998), we may affirm that a Southern English pronunciation is apparently still perceived as the prestigious accent in Wales, where feelings for a national identity focus more on claiming Welsh as an official language than considering Welsh English as a reference accent (although a more accurate study on this would be needed). As regards Northern Ireland, the situation is more complicated. English language was introduced in that area during the seventeenth century with the British colonisation, known as the Plantation of Ulster, which brought settlers from Scotland and the English Midlands. The contact between Scots, English and the Irish-Gaelic language resulted in what can now be called Northern Irish English (NIE), a label which includes three different dialects: Mid Ulster English, South Ulster English and Ulster Scots. The first is the most widespread variety; it is specially spoken in the capital, Belfast, and it is the linguistic model (Milroy 1981; Wells 1992; McCafferty 2001 and 2007). Ulster English shares some similarities with all the varieties that contributed to its merge, but nowadays it “represents an amalgam which can no longer be unscrambled” (Wells 1992, 438), whose main phonological features are here briefly summarised from both Wells (436–47) and McCafferty (2007, 124–27): • a substantial loss of phonemic vowel-length distinctions (more or less as it happens in Scotland), so that we find shorter vowels in fleece words [flis] and loss of diphthong in face [fes] and mouth [maθ] words; • a general centred realisation of back vowel sounds, which are sometimes rounded too, like in both foot and goose, where we find [ʉ];3

“Why is he making a funny noise?”  201 • •

T voicing in intervocalic position, thus party [ˈpɑːɹde]; /p/ and /t/ glottalisation in intervocalic position, as in pepper [ˈpɛʡəɹ] and butter [ˈbʌʡəɹ]; • /r/ is pronounced in any position, usually as a retroflex approximant (fur [fɜɻ]), but it is sometimes tapped in intervocalic position (three [tɾi:]); • the rising tone is the unmarked intonation even in statements and commands. Furthermore, McCafferty (2007, 127–30) reports that some syntactic structures that are considered non-standard in other parts of Britain are equally perceived as unmarked, like the use of present and past simple tenses to express meanings that are usually conveyed by present perfect in other Englishes (e.g., “I know him all my life”), the “habitual be(s)” (e.g., “I be/He bes up three times a night”) and the modal “be to” as a counterpart of “must” (e.g., “He be to go”). Finally, from the sociolinguistic point of view, it can be noted that progressive variants are generally adopted more by the Protestant population, while Catholics “tend to preserve older – ‘rural’ – forms longer” (McCafferty 2001, 212). The cultural difference between Catholics and Protestants is subtly explored only through jokes in the comedy series Derry Girls, while there is no overt reference to a linguistic distance between the two social groups, although it would be interesting to conduct a contrastive analysis of the language of the two groups in episode 2x01, where the Catholic protagonists are forced to interact with a group of Protestant boys. On the contrary, an explicit reference to the English as “others” is often found in the dialogues, and it will be the main focus of the next section.

10.5 Derry Girls: The “Otherness” of the RP Speaker Derry Girls is a Northern Irish comedy series created by Lisa McGee and directed by Michael Lennox. The first season was broadcast at the beginning of 2018 on Channel 4 and later, following the great critical acclaim received in the UK, also on Netflix. The same happened with the second season, aired in 2019, and a third one has recently been commissioned. The show has become the most watched series in Northern Ireland since 2004 and it has become very popular across the UK too, with an average of 2.5 million viewers (Belfast Telegraph 2018). The story is set in Derry,4 the second-largest city in Northern Ireland, during the end of The Troubles5 in the 1990s. The central character in the series is Erin, a teenage girl who attends a Catholic girls’ secondary school. In each episode, she drags her friends and family (or she is dragged by them) into hilarious situations. As previously mentioned, the accent of most of the characters is heavily marked, so much so that even McGee declared she “didn’t make many

202  Luca Valleriani concessions in the way she wrote Derry Girls but she tried to use expressions and words6 that wouldn’t be totally beyond the comprehension of outsiders,” which is a similar decision to the one made with London Irish (2013), another comedy series written by the same author and starring Northern Irish characters (Belfast Telegraph 2017). In this case, we do not find a standard form of Northern Irish, but a specific kind of accent that McCafferty calls (London)Derry English (LDE) and that he investigated through a sociological and ethnical approach (2001). Even though the present article will not deeply deal with phonological ethnic variation in Derry, McCafferty’s results (131–201) will be relevant for the analysis of the dialogues in Derry Girls. The analysis will be conducted in reference to some dialogues that were transcribed with the aid of the Netflix interlingual subtitles and, in some cases, little attempts at eye dialect (e.g., omission of phonemes is generally indicated with an apostrophe, used to point out the presence of T-glottalisation or NG-coalescence) were included to emphasise what is strikingly audible in the scene but which cannot be noticed in the written text. In the scene in Table 10.1 (taken from episode 1x01),7 Erin, her cousin Orla and their friend Clare meet another friend, Michelle, who introduces her cousin James to the group. While the four girls speak with a marked Northern Irish dialect (Saoirse-Monica Jackson and Jamie-Lee O’Donnel, who play respectively Erin and Michelle, were actually born and raised in Derry, while Nicola Coughlan and Louisa Harland – Clare and Orla – are from the Republic of Ireland and affected a Northern dialect for the series), James, who is played by Dylan Llewellyn, has a Southern English accent. As previously mentioned, the vowel system in Northern Irish accent is quite different from that of RP. More specifically, in the dialogue transcribed in Table 10.1 there is no phonemic vowel-length distinction, and several back and front vowels are uttered as central (e.g., “thing” [θɜŋ], “man” [man], “move” [mʉv]). Diphthongs are generally absent too, so that for instance the verb “make” is pronounced as [mek] and “own” as [on]. As regards consonants, suffix -ing is pronounced [ɪn] and dental stops are glottalised in final position (“what” [wɒʡ]), but flapped when a word starting with a vowel follows, like in the sentence “what did he say” (causing an H-dropping in “he”). T/D-flapping is not mentioned in Wells (1992), but it is in McCafferty (2001), so it can be inferred it is one of the few phenomena that differentiates (London)Derry English from the standard Northern Irish. Apart from phonological evidence, the prosody of the dialogue would probably be the most striking aspect to any hearer who is not familiar with English in Ulster; according to McCafferty, in Derry “high-rising intonation occurs in declarative utterances. It is specifically noticeable

“Why is he making a funny noise?”  203 Table 10.1  Derry Girls, 1x01, 6:40 MICHELLE:  Motherfuckers! “Motherfucker” is my new thing. Watched this

film last night. Me dad got it off Pyro Pauline, and it’s about these two lads, they wear these cracking suits and they rock about shooting people and eating cheeseburgers and they’re all “motherfucker this,” “motherfucker that.” It’s got your man in it, what do you call him? The disco dancer from Look Who’s Talking.

ERIN: Who owns the fella? MICHELLE:  Me. Well, come on, ball-ache, are you introducing yourself or wha’? JAMES:  Hi. I’m Michelle’s cousin, James. ORLA:  Why’s he makin’ that funny noise? MICHELLE:  He’s English, Orla. That’s the way they talk. He’s my Auntie

Cathy’s wain. I told you about my Auntie Cathy. She went to England years ago to have an abortion, never came back. Never got the abortion, either! Lucky for you, James, uh? Ha!

JAMES:  I-I didn’t actually know tha’… ERIN:  What did he say? MICHELLE:  Nothing interestin’. ERIN:  What’s he doin’ here? MICHELLE:  Cathy’s just got divorced, so she’s moved back. The husband caught

her doing the dirt on him. She’s a bit of a goer, is our Cathy, riding rings around him, so she was. Isn’t that right, James?

in the speech of the younger age-group” (2001, 135–36). According to Moritz (2016, 121), who conducted an acoustic analysis on the prosodic variation in the three main Northern Irish varieties, this type of intonation – also known as “upspeak” or “uptalk” – is in fact more frequent in the area of Mid Ulster English, which includes Derry. Contrarily to uptalk in Australia, New Zealand and some parts of the US, this prosodic phenomenon bears no semantic relevance in Northern Ireland, where its use is rather systematic (119). Nevertheless, uptalk in Derry Girls is emphasised especially in young women’s utterances, which is probably due to the fact that the creator might have taken into consideration the evidence that in the last few decades the British viewers have been familiarising with Australian and Californian female characters talking as if they were permanently asking questions (BBC News Magazine 2014). Thus, the reason behind the choice of not limiting the high-rising intonation of a group of teenage girls may be the attempt at eliciting humour through the subtle reference to other TV tropes, even if this sometimes undermines comprehensibility. In the case of the scene in Table 10.1, however, the possible lack of a thorough comprehension creates a further humorous

204  Luca Valleriani effect, since the audience is shown the opposite situation, namely the girls not understanding James’s RP-like intonation. The girls’ language is also regionally marked in vocabulary (“lads,” “fella” and “wain” are typical lexical instances of the area) and in morphology and syntax (e.g., “me” instead of “my” and the reinforcing structure verb + subject or “so” + subject + verb – see also Table 10.3). Moreover, their speech presents influences from the urban teenage slang, such as expressions like “cracking,” “ball-ache,” “do the dirt on” and “riding rings around.” On the other hand, James’s idiolect is totally different from that of the rest of the group, and this is made explicitly clear by defining his talk as a “funny noise” and by their difficulty understanding him (“What did he say?”). James, who is presented as a complete outcast, not only linguistically but also culturally, had lived all his life in London before he was sent by his mother to live temporarily with his aunt. As previously mentioned, James speaks a Southern English accent that might be defined as Near-RP, which is, according to Wells, a term that “refers to any accent which, while not falling within the definition of RP, nevertheless includes very little in the way of regionalisms” (1992, 297). It may also be argued that James’s idiolect is a form of Estuary English, but it does not present many non-RP characteristics, except for T-glottalisation, which, in the way he pronounces the word “that” in Table 10.1, sounds more like a total omission. His idiolect is non-rhotic, it presents a full vowel-length distinction and its tone is high-rising only in questions, which is why James is succinctly identified in this paper as an RP speaker, following the consolidated tendency of defining an unmarked voice with this acronym. The excerpt in Table 10.1 is just the first of a series of mocking references to James’s identity and language, and he is very often referred to as “the wee English fella” throughout the first season. Such a humorous mocking is found in the second season too, when a character who finally expresses a good attitude towards his accent is introduced. In episode 2x02, a new English teacher, Ms de Brún, arrives at Our Lady Immaculate College and asks students to yell at something they hate as an exercise aimed at letting them express their feelings. As shown in Table 10.2, this is an occasion to create a new humorous situation drawing on James’s linguistic difference from the rest of the characters. James (and, probably, numerous viewers too) considers the other characters’ use of the adjective “wee,” a regional word meaning “small,” as rather confusing. In the scene in Table 10.2, he declares his frustration about the general abuse of this word and, as a consequence, underlines his being different from the rest of the people in Derry, where the polyfunctional use of the word “wee” is not perceived as ambiguous. What is worth pointing out here, but also in the example in Table 10.1, is that

“Why is he making a funny noise?”  205 Table 10.2  Derry Girls, 2x02, 11:30 MS DE BRÚN: Dig deep. Something you hate. Something you despise. No

holding back. Come on! Get it out! (…)

JAMES: The fact that people here use the world “wee” to describe things that

aren’t actually that small!

MS DE BRÚN: God but I love that accent, James!

James is the person “with an accent,” while in most other occasions he would be presented and/or perceived as someone speaking standard. Ms de Brún, whose lines in this scene contain several Northern Irish phonological features (e.g., the use of a centred vowel in “dig” [dɜg] and of a short vowel in “deep” [dip], but also the monophtongisation in “hate” [het] and “out” [at] and the flapping of /t/ in “get it out” and “that accent”), makes a positive comment on James’s accent, but, by saying that she loves it, she also implicitly remarks that he is the one with a non-standard accent. Through this meaningful comic scene the author of the series is stressing on the notion that the English accent is not be stigmatised as a rejected imposed standard, but that it is an accent like the others. RP, whether it is considered pleasant or not, is perceived in the series as a marked foreign accent, thus metaphorically subverting the idea of the coloniser’s superiority over the colonized. In the last episode of the second season, there is another character that can be perceived by the audience as speaking differently from the rest of the characters, Cathy, James’s mother. Despite being born and raised in Derry, Cathy built a new life in England and is keen to stress that she does not belong there anymore, and this can also be heard in her idiolect, which is why it is interesting to include in this study a scene featuring this character (see Table 10.3). During the episode there is no reference to the way Cathy speaks, but it is not hard to hear that she tries to affect an English accent as a way to remark her social distance from her Northern Irish interlocutors. It may be suggested that, following Wells again, she attempts a form of Adoptive-RP, “that variety of RP spoken by adults who did not speak RP as children. The usual reason for adopting RP – or at least attempting to do so – is a change in the individual’s social circumstances” (1992, 283– 84). Adoptive-RP is hard to define linguistically since it is subject to variability depending on the original accent of the speaker and their control degree. In this case, Cathy manages to control her consonants better than her vowel sounds, in fact her idiolect is non-rhotic and she clearly pronounces /t/ in each position (it is never tapped nor voiced), but a general shorter and centred realisation of vowels can be heard (“out” [at], “man”

206  Luca Valleriani Table 10.3  Derry Girls, 2x06, 12:50 SARAH: And fair play to you, Cathy. You’ve kept them eyebrows shipshaped, so

you have. Credit what credit’s due. (…) We heard about your wee divorce. Nightmare.

CATHY: Yeah, it was a difficult decision, but Paul, my ex, well, he just became so

controlling. (…) He was unbearable towards the end. It was always “Oh, Cathy, why did you stay out all night?” or “Who was that man you were having dinner with, Cathy?” He was very insecure.

[man]), except for the phrase “so controlling” where the diphthong /əʊ/ is emphasised and sounds very much like RP. Nevertheless, what makes her speech noticeably different from the rest of the characters is her prosody. Cathy’s pace is considerably slower than that of Sarah, Erin’s aunt, and her tone is only almost imperceptibly rising. On the contrary, Sarah’s tone is high-rising all the time and she makes use of evident non-standard morpho-syntactic features, such as “them” as a demonstrative and the reinforcing “so”-clause, which is widely used throughout the whole series, although it is not mentioned in the manuals describing Northern Irish English. Also, she provides an example of the use of “wee” out of its usual semantic context. Several sociocultural arguments can be proposed to explain why, despite being quite noticeable, Cathy’s attempt at affecting RP is not overtly stigmatised by the other characters, such as the general tendency of adult people to avoid referring too explicitly to the way their peers talk; yet, this social rule is sometimes disobeyed in the fictional world, where dialogues are at times impolite in ways that natural dialogue is not, especially for humorous purposes. Therefore, the lack of space is likely the main reason why the scene in Table 10.3 contains no reference to Cathy’s adoptive accent. This character, in fact, appears only in this episode, and her peers make critical references to her aspect, her job, her motherhood and her relationships with other men. The linguistic issue is not mentioned by the characters who listen to her speaking, but it is certainly a valuable device to reflect her new lifestyle. Needless to say, James’s accent is much more authentically English than that of his mother, but throughout the two seasons he manages to overcome his “other” identity and become an integral and irreplaceable part of his group, even though his accent is considered as a negative aspect (defined as “stupid” – see Table 10.4) until the very end of the two seasons. Accents can say much about a person, but do not define one’s

“Why is he making a funny noise?”  207 Table 10.4  Derry Girls, 2x06, 18:28 MICHELLE: You’re a Derry Girl now, James. (…) It doesn’t matter that you’ve

got that stupid accent or that your bits are different to my bits. Well, because, being a Derry Girl, well, it’s a fucking state of mind! You’re one of us.

personality, thus James is a boy and is English, but nonetheless he can be considered a Derry girl.

10.6 Concluding Remarks Although the label Received Pronunciation is still commonly adopted, several scholars in the last few decades have widely argued about how inappropriate it is, since the accent it defines is no longer considered as a given model, but rather as an accent that has acquired a prestigious status historically. By providing an outline of the debate on the name of the accent and a brief excursus on the language of British broadcasting, the present chapter has tried to show that, despite being widespread all over the UK, RP has really not been “received” everywhere in the British Isles. It is undeniable that radio and television broadcasting have contributed to standardising the language – and, consequently, pronunciation – but while this caused English dialects to be perceived as “inferior” (at least until the 1960s–1970s), this was never the case in Scotland and Northern Ireland, where RP has never been perceived as a “regionless” reference accent. Such evidence was shown in this study through the analysis of some dialogues from Derry Girls, one of the most successful TV comedy shows in 2018. Derry Girls was chosen, first of all, because it is a great example of an audiovisual product which gained positive critical and audience acclaim despite presenting a non-English accent, and secondly because it clearly shows how RP – any form of it – is considered in Northern Ireland as a foreign accent, typical of a specific geographical area (Southern England). The character of James, in fact, is said to “make a funny noise” when speaking and to have a “stupid” or “lovely” accent, which subverts the traditional representation of the RP speaker as a person without an accent. To a more conceptual extent, it also subverts the traditional view of the colonised to be laughed at by the coloniser. The linguistic analysis of the scenes selected from the TV show point out that all the features that are generally considered as standard or, at least, prestigious (a full vowel-length distinction, a clear realisation of RP diphthongs, non-rhoticity and a non-rising tone in statements, among others) might be perceived, on the contrary, as non-standard and even

208  Luca Valleriani unpleasant. It is necessary to clarify, however, that these are results from the analysis of represented accents and their represented perception, and that outcomes may differ in reality. For this reason, seeing how the English accent was exploited for humorous purposes in Derry Girls, a perception study on RP in the Northern Irish context would be of much interest. Moreover, another further step in this research could be the analysis of the same TV series from a sociolinguistic and ethnic point of view (such as the representation of the Northern Irish teenage slang or the contraposition between the accents of the Protestant and the Catholic populations).

Notes 1 Apart from James, the protagonist’s father, Jerry, does not speak with a Northern Irish accent either. He is from the south of Ireland, but, contrarily to the “English fella,” he is never treated as an outcast due to his accent. 2 Most of these examples can be viewed on the Dialects in Audiovisuals website, a project coordinated by Irene Ranzato (https://dialectsinav.wixsite.com/ home/. Accessed January 22, 2020). 3 For an audible complete overview of vowel quantity and quality in Northern Irish English, visit http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/research/gsound/Eng/Database/ Phonetics/Englishes/Home/HomeMainFrameHolder.htm (Heggarty et al. 2013, accessed March 21, 2020). 4 The official controversial name of the city is Londonderry, but part of the population prefers Derry. In this study, it was chosen to use the unofficial name so as not to create ambiguity with the title of the TV series. 5 The Troubles is the name by which the conflict between nationalists and unionists (1969–98) is known in Northern Ireland. 6 Channel 4 has published a Derry Girls glossary with common words used in the show, which can be visited at https://www.channel4.com/press/news/ derry-girls-glossary-learn-local-lingo-you-eejit (Accessed January 22, 2020). 7 The scene can be viewed in the dedicated section of the website Dialects in Audiovisuals (https://dialectsinav.wixsite.com/home/derry-girls. Accessed May 3, 2020).

References Abercrombie, David. 1963. Problems and Principles in Language Study. London: Longmans. Cruttenden, Alan. 2014. Gimson’s Pronunciation of English. London/New York: Routledge. “Derry Girls Could Become TV Hit – If Viewers Can Understand Them”. Belfast Telegraph, December 20, 2017. Accessed January 10, 2020. https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/entertainment/news/derry-girls-could-become-tv-hit-ifviewers-can-understand-them-36423218.html. Gimson, Alfred C. 1962. An Introduction to the Pronunciation of English. London: Arnold. Gimson, Alfred C. 1984. “The RP Accent.” In Language in the British Isles. Edited by Peter Trudgill, 45–54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

“Why is he making a funny noise?”  209 Heggarty, Paul, Warren Maguire, and April McMahon. 2013. “Belfast.” Accents of English Around the World. University of Edinburgh. http://www. lel.ed.ac.uk/research/gsound/Eng/Database/Phonetics/Englishes/Home/ HomeMainFrameHolder.htm. Hodson, Jane. 2014. Dialect in Film & Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Jaeckle, Jeff. 2013. Film Dialogue. London/New York: Wallflower Press Jones, Daniel. [1909] 1960. The Pronunciation of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kozloff, Sarah. 2000. Overhearing Film Dialogue. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press. Macauley, Ronald. 1988. “RP R.I.P.” Applied Linguistics 9(2): 115–124. McCafferty, Kevin. 2001. Ethnicity and Language Change: English in (London) Derry, Northern Ireland. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. McCafferty, Kevin. 2007. “Northern Irish English.” In Language in the British Isles. Edited by David Britain, 122–134. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Milroy, James. 1981. Regional Accents of English: Belfast. Belfast: Blackstaff Press. Moritz, Nuzha. 2016. “Uptalk Variation in Three Varieties of Northern Irish English.” Speech Prosody: 199–222. doi:10.21437/SpeechProsody.2016-25 Mugglestone, Lynda. 1997. “John Walker and Alexander Ellis: Antedating RP.” Notes and Queries 44(1): 103–107. Mugglestone, Lynda. 2007. Talking Proper. The Rise and Fall of the English Accent as a Social Symbol. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mugglestone, Lynda. 2008. “Spoken English and the BBC: In the Beginning.” AAA – Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 33(2): 197–215. Pavesi, Maria. 2009. La Traduzione Filmica. Aspetti del parlato doppiato dall’inglese all’italiano. Roma: Carocci. Ranzato, Irene. 2010. La Traduzione Audiovisiva. Analisi degli elementi culturospecifici. Roma: Bulzoni. Ranzato, Irene. 2016. “Introduction: Reading Dialect Varieties in the Literary Macrotext.” Status Quaestionis 11: 1–16. doi:10.13133/2239-1983/13830. Ranzato, Irene. 2017. ‘Queen’s English?’ Gli accenti dell’Inghilterra. Roma: Bulzoni Editore. Ranzato, Irene et al. 2017. “Derry Girls.” Dialects in Audiovisuals. Accessed January 22, 2020. https://dialectsinav.wixsite.com/home/derry-girls. Rosewarne, David. 1994. “Estuary English: Tomorrow’s RP?” English Today 37(10): 3–8. ‘Stall the ball!’ – Derry Girls has Become Northern Ireland’s Biggest Series Ever. Belfast Telegraph, February 21, 2018. Accessed March 20, 2020. https://www. belfasttelegraph.co.uk/entertainment/film-tv/news/stall-the-ball-derry-girlshas-become-northern-irelands-biggest-series-ever-36628085.html. Sturiale, Massimo. 2002. “RP: Received or Reference Pronunciation?” Linguistica e Filologia 15: 89–112. The Unstoppable March of the Upward Inflection? BBC News Magazine, August 11, 2014. Accessed March 20, 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/ magazine-28708526 Taylor, Christopher. 1999. “Look Who’s Talking. An Analysis of Film Dialogue as a Variety of Spoken Discourse.” In Massed Medias. Linguistic Tools for

210  Luca Valleriani Interpreting Media Discourse. Edited by Linda Lombardo, Louann Haarman, and John Morley. Milano: LED. Wells, John C. 1992. Accents of English 2. The British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wells, John C. 1998. Accents of English 1. An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Filmography Broadchurch. 2013–17. Chris Chibnall. UK. Catastrophe. 2015–19. Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney. UK. Coronation Street. 1960–present. Tony Warren. UK. Derry Girls. 2018–present. Lisa McGee. UK. Downton Abbey. 2010–15. Julian Fellows. UK EastEnders. 1985–present. Julia Smith and Tony Holland. UK. Father Brown. 2013–present. Rachel Flowerday and Tahsin Guner. UK. Fleabag. 2016–19. Phoebe Waller-Bridge. UK. GameFace. 2017–present. Roisin Conaty. UK. Hollyoaks. 1995–present. Phil Redmond. UK. London Irish. 2013. Lisa McGee. UK. Misfits. 2009–13. Howard Overman. UK. Shameless. 2004–13. Paul Abbott. UK. Skins. 2007–13. Jamie Brittain and Bryan Elsley. UK.

Index

Abbott, Paul 199 Abercrombie, David 196 Aebischer, Pascale 161 African-­American English 147, 161, 187 Agha, Asif 2, 5, 37, 43, 71, 109–110, 112, 124, 170 Aladdin 137, 142–143, 147 Alèn Garabato, Carmen 33 Allen, Alfie 178 Alonso Naranjo, Rafael Jr. 182 Alta Mar 186 Álvarez Mellado, Elena 175 Amador Moreno, Carolina 55 American Hustle 144, 147–148 American (US) English 53–55, 63, 133–146, 156–160, 172, 180, 196, 199 Amorós-­Negre, Carla 173–175, 190 Anderson, Lindsay 154 Anglo-­Cornish 4, 30–44, 96, 102; see also Cornu-­English Arabic accent 143, 156 Arampatzis, Christos 188 Atkinson, James A. 116–117 Auden, W.H. 155–156 Auer, Anita 112 Axon, William E.A. 122 Bakhtin, Mikhail 71 Bamford, Samuel 122 Baños Piñero, Rocío 135, 182 Barber, Charles 75 Barry, Sebastian 4, 47–63 Bartley, J.O. 103 Bassi, Shaul 162 Baugh, Albert C. 74 Beal, Joan 4, 102, 113, 119, 125, 168, 170–171, 183

Bean, Sean 178 Beck, Jay 154 Beetham, Margaret 113 Bell, Allan 109–111, 124 Bellot, Jacques 80–81 Billington, Michael 102 Bishop, Hywel 34 Blake, Norman Francis 102 Blank, Paula 7, 81, 91–92, 99, 102–103, 150, 164 Bleichenbacher, Lukas 137 Bonsignori, Veronica 142 Boose, Lynda E. 151–152 Bosseaux, Charlotte 6 Boucicault, Dion 117, 125 Bourdieu, Pierre 74 Boyer, Henri 33 Bradshaw, Peter 159 Braga, Jorge 50 Branagh, Kenneth 151–152, 156, 159, 165 Breton 32–33, 40, 102 Brewster, Scott 27 Brierley, Benjamin 113, 116, 118 Briguglia, Caterina 49–50 Britain, David 34–35, 123 Brittain, Jamie 198 Broadchurch 198 Brome, Richard 5, 92, 97–104; The City Wit 92, 98–99; The Court Beggar 92, 98–99, 102–104; The Demoiselle 92, 100, 102; The Northern Lass 92, 97–102; The Sparagus Garden 99 Bruti, Silvia 153 Bucholtz, Mary 111–112 Burke, Peter 75 Burns, Robert 4, 11, 14–16, 20, 26

212 Index Burt, Richard 151–152, 161 Buzelin, Hélène 49 Cable, Thomas 74 Calbi, Maurizio 153, 162 Campbell, Bruce 92 Campos, Ramón 175, 186 Carbonell i Cortés, Ovidi 49 Carew, Richard 92–94 Carlson, Marvin 102 Catastrophe 199 Catford, John C. 49–50 Catriona 15, 24 Cavalli, Fabrizio 162 Caxton, William 81, 197 Cellan Jones, James 156 Celtic 4, 24, 31–32, 39, 43, 92, 95 Cesare deve morire 162–163 Challis, Don 155 Chapman, Raymond 179 Chaudhri, Talat 100, 103–104 Chaume, Frederic 135, 182, 187 Chesterman, Andrew 168–169 Chibnall, Chris 198 Clark, Alex 53, 56 Clark, Urszula 123 Cockburn, Henry 26 Cockney 49–50, 140, 155–156, 172, 175, 186–187, 199 code-­mixing 12–14 Coldiron, Anne E.B. 85–86 Colet, John 76, 86 Collier, John 113 Colloquia familiaria 80 The Comedy of Errors (Jones) 156 Community 146–148 Conaty, Roisin 199 Conde-­Silvestre, J. Camilo 112 Cooper, Paul 102, 113 Coriolanus (Fiennes) 160 Cornish 3–5, 30–44, 91–104 Cornu-­English 4, 30–44; see also Anglo-­Cornish Coronation Street 198 Correll, Barbara 86 Corrius, Montse 3, 133, 137, 147 Coster-­Waldau, Nikolaj 180 Coughlan, Nicola 202 Coupland, Nikolas 5, 34, 70–72, 74, 79, 109–111 Craik, T.W. 86 Cramsie, John 94 Crunelle-­Vanrigh, Anny 80–81, 86–87 Cruttenden, Alan 195–196

Crystal, Ben 85 Crystal, David 70, 85, 159 Cueto, Juan Carlos 175 Cukor, George 152 Culpeper, Jonathan 70, 72, 80 Cunningham, Liam 178 Dalby, Stephen 155 Daltrey, Roger 156 Dance, Charles 180 Dance, George 125 Dann, Holly 31, 36–37, 42–43 Davies, Andrew 161 Davison, Carol Margaret 12, 26 Dawkins, Richard 7, 168 Days Without End 4, 47–63 Death and Dr Hornbook 16–18, 20 Dekker, Thomas 69 Delabastita, Dirk 3, 5, 69, 73–74, 76, 81, 83–86, 93, 147, 150, 164 Delaney, Rob 199 del Toro, Benicio 140 Deeme, Jonathan 136 Dench, Judy 87 Derry Girls 7, 194–208 Dexter’s Laboratory 144 diachronic signs 169, 171, 177–178, 181, 183–185 dialect literature 13, 37–38, 125, 150 diastratic varieties/sociolects 1–2, 4–5, 47, 69, 134, 142, 164, 169, 171–175, 177, 182–189, 198 diatopic varieties 142, 151, 169, 172, 175, 177, 183–187, 189, 198 Dickens, Charles 2, 172 Die Hard with a Vengeance 137 Di Giovanni, Elena 137 Dinklage, Peter 180 Dollimore, Jonathan 81 Downton Abbey 199 Duncan, Ian 14, 26 Dungeons and Dragons 137 Dunmore, Stuart 93–94 Dutch 73, 80, 99 Dutton, Richard 96 early modern English 5, 70, 74, 158 early modern English drama 7, 69–70, 91–104 EastEnders 198 Eccleston, Christopher 161–162 Eckert, Penelope 35, 110, 112 Edel, Uli 159 Elam, Keir 73

Index  213 Electric Pastyland 38, 40–41 Ellis, Alexander John 121–122, 195 Elsley, Bryan 198 Elster, Annika 160 enregisterment 2, 5, 30–44, 70–71, 84, 108–125, 170–173, 183 Erasmus, Desiderius 74–75, 80 Esslin, Martin 155 Estuary English 186, 199, 204 Evans, Simon 93 eye dialect 6, 41, 169, 172, 176, 189, 202 A Fair Quarrel 5, 92, 96, 101 Family Guy 143, 147 Fariña 188 Farina, Dennis 140 Father Brown 198 Fellowes, Julian 199 Ferdinand, Siarl 32, 33, 102–103 Fergusson, Robert 4, 11, 14–16 Fernández, Verónica 186 Fiedler, Leslie A. 156 Filppula, Markku 54–55, 102 Finnellan Doyle, Thomas 125 Firste Fruites 73 Firth, Colin 138 Fishburne, Lawrence 156 A Fish Called Wanda 141 Fleabag 199 Fleming, Victor 187 Fletcher, Patricia 135 Florio, John 73 Flowerday, Rachel 198 Flynn, Jerome 179 Ford, John 5, 92, 96 Forsyth, J.J.B. 114–115, 125 Four Weddings and a Funeral 138–139, 141, 147 Franco Batista, Camila 51 French 5, 40, 49, 70–71, 73–76, 79–87, 95, 138–139, 146, 148 The Fresh Prince of Bel Air 138 Friedman, Susan Stanford 163 Frye, Northrop 86 Fuentes-­Luque, Adrián 187 Gaelic 12, 14, 16, 55, 200 Gallagher, John 75, 80 GameFace 199 Game of Thrones 7, 168–190 García Velilla, Nacho 175 García-­Vidal, Tamara 112 Gaskell, Elizabeth 125

Gaskell, William 122 Geordie 31, 43, 178, 184 George, Ken 93, 103 German 48, 51, 133, 147, 148 Germanà, Monica 12, 26 Germanic 73, 85 The Ghaists 15–16 Gibson, Andy 109, 111, 124 Gielgud, John 155, 158 Giles, Howard 74 Gill, Alexander 7 Gimson, Alfred C. 195–196 Giner, García-­Bermejo 12, 26, 125 Gleeson, Jack 180 Glen, Iain 180 Gone with the Wind 187 Görlach, Manfred 95, 102 Grant, Hugh 137–138 Greek 73, 85 Grutman, Rainier 3 Guner, Tahsin 198 Hache 186–187 Halliday, Frank E. 103 Hall, Kira 111 Halloween 16 Hamlet (Almereyda) 153, 159 Hamlet (Doran) 164 Hamlet (Richardson) 153 Handbook of Cornish Language 102 Handford, Peter 155 Hardy, Thomas 1 Hargreaves, Alexander 121 Harington, Kit 178 Harland, Louisa 202 Harry of Cornwall 95 Harry Potter 176 Hatim, Basil 49 Haughton, William 69 Hayden, Joanne 52 Haywood, Louise M. 49 Headey, Lena 180 Hernández-­Campoy, Juan Manuel 110, 112, 124 Hervey, Sándor 49 Heywood, Thomas 7, 98, 121–122 Hibbard, G.R. 86 Hickey, Raymond 119 Higgins, Ian 49 Highley, Christopher 100 high performance 109–118 de la Higuera Glynne-­Jones, Susana 47, 57

214 Index Hill, Conleth 180 historical dialogue analysis 70–73, 80, 84 Hodgdon, Barbara 161 Hodgson, Leslie 155 Hodson, Jane 73–74, 109, 198 Hoenselaars, Ton 5, 69, 74, 84–85, 93, 153 Hogg, James 4, 11, 14, 19–21, 24, 27 Holland, Tony 198 Hollyoaks 198 Holyband, Claudius 80–81 Hope, Jonathan 70 Hopkins, Anthony 136, 142, 155 Horgan, Sharon 199 Hoskins, Bob 155–156 House M.D. 136, 146 The House that Jack Built 115, 118 Howard, Jean 81 Howard, Tony 152 Howatt, A.P.R. 75, 80, 86 The Hudsucker Proxy 144 Humphries, Gerry 155 Hurtado Albir, Amparo 63 indexicality 2, 35, 40, 42–43, 71, 78, 109, 112–113, 121, 123–124, 170–171, 183, 190 Interim Nation 38 Irish 3–4, 7, 53, 55–56, 63, 85, 92–93, 95, 103, 140, 158–59, 169, 180, 194–208 Irons, Jeremy 137, 143 Italian 4, 5, 7, 47–63, 73, 80, 85, 134, 142, 162–163, 187 Jack and the Beanstalk 114–115 Jackson, Saoirse-­Monica 202 Jaeckle, Jeff 198 Jaffe, Alexandra 6 Jago, Frederick William P. 95 Jenner, Henry 94, 100, 102 Jerrold, Douglas 125 John of Trevisa 86 Johnson, Samuel 76 Johnstone, Barbara 33, 35, 110, 112, 123 Jones, Daniel 195, 197 Jones, Rebecca 162 Jonson, Ben 5, 92, 95, 97–98; Bartholomew Fair 103; Every Man in His Humour 95; The Magnetic Lady 92, 97–98, 103; The New Inn 103; The Staple of News 92, 97, 103

Joseph, Paterson 153 Joyce, Patrick 113, 117 Jucker, Andreas 70, 72–73 Julià Ballbè, Josep 49 Kent, Alan M. 4, 30–44, 94, 103 Keyishian, Harry 151 King Lear (Edel) 159 King of Texas 159–160 King’s English 5, 70–71, 73–74, 76, 84–85, 150 Kirwan, Peter 91, 102 Klemola, Juhani 102 Kozloff, Sarah 153–155, 198 Kytö, Merya 70, 80 L2 language 3, 134, 190 L3 language 3, 134, 137–138, 140, 147–148, 190 Labov, William 35, 85, 110, 170 Lancashire dialect 5, 93, 98, 108–125, 189 Latin 5, 70–71, 73–79, 81, 83–86 Latin American 187–188, 190 Laurie, Hugh 136 Lavault-­Olléon, Élisabeth 49 Layne, Pyngle 108, 115, 125 The Layrock of Langleyside 118 Leigh, Mike 198 Lennix, Harry 161 Lennox, Michael 201 Leonhardt, Jurgen 85 Lily, William 76 The Lion King 137, 142–143, 147 literary dialect 13, 37, 125 Little Boy Blue 108, 114–115, 118, 125 Little Red Riding Hood 114 Llewellyn, Dylan 202 Lloyd James, Arthur 197 Lloyd, Megan S. 103 Loach, Ken 198 Locher, Miriam 70 Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels 140 Lombardo, Agostino 153 Loncraine, Richard 156–157 London Irish 202 The Long Strike 117–118, 125 Lopez, Qiuana 112 Love, Actually 138 Luhrmann, Baz 153 Macauley, Robert 196–197 Macbeth (Kurzel) 164

Index  215 Macbeth (Polanski) 164 Maccabe, Frederick 108, 114 Macdonald, Kirsty 14 Machan, Tim William 84 MacKenzie, Alexander 12 Mack, Peter 74, 86 Madden, Richard 178 Magnusson, Lynne 76, 78, 85 Maguire, Warren 122 Mair, Christian 48, 52, 56 Mar de plástico 175 The Marry Men 20, 26 Marston, John 69 Martina, Enna 164 Martínez Sierra, Juan José 188 Martin, George R.R. 176–177, 181 Mary Barton 118, 125 Mason, Ian 49 Massai, Sonia 76, 78, 153 The Matrix Reloaded 139, 146 Mayer, Jean-­Christophe 89 Mayoral Asensio, Roberto 170 Mazzon, Gabriella 73 McCafferty, David 200–202 McClain, Lisa 94 McDavid, Raven 53–55 McDowell, Andie 140 McGee, Lisa 194, 201 McInnerny, Tim 178 McKellen, Ian 157, 159 McNamee, Eoin 52, 56 Melchiori, Giorgio 75–76, 86 meme 7, 168–190 Méndez-­Gª De Paredes, Elena 173–175, 190 Mennella, Cristiana 47, 57, 61 Merry Andrew o’Manchester 116, 118 Messina, Cedric 155 Mickey Blue Eyes 137 Mid-­Atlantic accent 135–136 Middleton, John 5, 92, 96, 101 Midsummer Night’s Dream (Reinhardt) 152 Miller, Jonathan 155, 162 Mills, Jon 100 Milner, George 121 Milroy, James 195, 200 Minutella, Vincenza 153 Misfits 198 Montgomery, Chris 34 Moore, Emma 34 Morgan, Oliver 73 Moritz, Nuzha 203 Morris, James P. 121

Mother Goose 108, 114–115, 118 Mugglestone, Lynda 195, 197 multilingualism 1, 3–6, 14, 69–87, 146, 151 Muñoz Martín, Ricardo 49 Munro, Lucy 101 Murdoch, Brian O. 91, 103 Narbona Jiménez, Rafael 173, 190 Neill, Michael 155–156 Neira, Gema R. 175, 186 Nevalainen, Terttu 73, 85 Nevala, Minna 12 Newcastle dialect 12–13, 113 Nicholls, David 161, 164 Nieto, Marla 186 Nixon 136 Norden, John 32, 93 north-­south divide 170–173 O’Donnell, Jamie-­Lee 201 Oliver, H.J. 86 Olivier, Laurence 151, 158 Ortiz, Antonio 100 Orton, Harold 34 Osborne, John 155 Ostovich, Helen 103 Othello (Miller) 155–156 Othello (Parker) 156 Othello (Sax) 161–162 Overman, Howard 198 Paese, Howard 12, 13 Palliwoda, Nicole 48 Palsgrave, John 81 pantomime 5, 108–118 Parker, Oliver 156 Parker, Patricia 76, 86 Parkinson, Art 180 Parr, Anthony 97 Parr, Ralph 116–117 Paulasto, Heli 102 Pavesi, Maria 197 Pennacchia Punzi, Maddalena 151 Perkin Warbeck 5, 92, 96 Perteghella, Manuela 50 Phillips, Watts 125 Picton, James A. 122 Pitt, Brad 140–141 Planchenault, Gaelle 71, 78 Plescia, Iolanda 70 prefabricated orality 135, 182 Preston, Dennis R. 6 Price, Glanville 100

216 Index Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 20–22 Proper Job, Charlie Curnow! 38 Pugliatti, Paola 95 Pulp Fiction 142, 147 Puss in Boots 116 Queen, Robin 135 Rabadán, Rosa 49 Rackin, Phyllis 81 Ranzato, Irene 1–7, 48, 135, 172–173, 181, 198–199, 208 Ravassat, Mireille 70 Read, Max 181 Received Pronunciation (RP) 3, 7, 36, 42–43, 135, 138, 143, 156–160, 162–164, 170–172, 178, 180–181, 183–184, 186, 189, 194–208 Redmond, Phil 198 Reed, Carroll E. 53 Redgauntlet 15, 24 Reisz, Karel 154 Reith, John 197 Reversal of Fortune 137 Reynolds, Erin 84 Rice, Anne 91 Richard III (Loncraine) 156–157 Richardson, Catherine 95 Richardson, Kay 164 Richardson, Tony 154 Robertson, Fiona 27 Robinson, Justyna 35–37, 43 Romeo + Juliet (Luhrmann) 153 Romeo and Juliet (Cukor) 152 Romero Fresco, Pablo 188 Rosewarne, David 199 Roth Pierpont, Claudia 158 Rothwell, Kenneth S. 152–153, 155–156 Rowley, William 5, 92, 96, 101 Rowling, J.K. 176 Ruano-­García, Javier 102 Rudanko, Juhani 73 Russell, Dave 113 Saenger, Michael 69, 80 Sáenz, Miguel 4, 47 de Sainsliens, Claude 81 The Salamanca Corpus 12, 118, 125 Sánchez Mompeán, Sofía 6, 182 Sanders, Julie 100, 103–104 Sandow, Rhys 35–37, 43 Sandys, William 103

Sax, Geoffrey 161 Scawen, William 103 Schafer, Elizabeth 99 Schilling, Natalie 110–111 Schreiber, Liev 159 Schröder, Saskia 48 Scots 3, 7, 11–27, 85, 95, 200 Scott, Walter 14–15, 19, 22–24, 27 Scottish English 19–20, 23, 92, 138, 199–200 Sebba, Mark 6 Shakespeare, William 2, 5–7, 69–87, 91–95, 98, 150–164, 183; All Well’s That Ends Well 103; As You Like It 152; The Comedy of Errors 156; Coriolanus 160–162, 164; Cymbeline 91, 158; Hamlet 103, 153–154, 159, 164; Henry IV 85–86; Henry V 5, 71, 80–87, 92, 95–96, 164; Julius Caesar 162–163; King Lear 5, 69, 92, 103, 159; Love’s Labour’s Lost 85; Macbeth 103; Merry Wives of Windsor 71, 75–86; Midsummer Night’s Dream 103, 152; Othello 155–156, 161–162; Pericles 155; Richard III 156–157; Romeo & Juliet 152; The Taming of the Shrew 85; The Tempest 103; Titus 160–161; The Winter’s Tale 103 ShakespeaRe-­Told 161, 164 Shameless 199 Shaughnessy, Robert 155 Shaw, Catherine M. 98 Shaw, George Bernard 197 Sheffield dialect/accent 113, 178 Shepley, Jas 114–115 Shorrocks, Graham37 A Shorte Introduction of Grammar 76 Shrek 135 Siemon, James 69 Sierz, Alex 91 Siete Vidas 175 The Silence of the Lambs 136, 147 Silveira Cyrino, Monica 160 Silverstein, Michael 35, 112, 170 Sinfield, Alan 81 Skins 198 Slobodník, Dusan 49–50 Smith, Julia 198 Smith, Katy Simpson 52 Snatch 139, 140, 148 A Song of Ice and Fire 176

Index  217 Spanish 4, 7, 47–63, 85, 99–100, 133–134, 138–148, 173–176, 182–190 Specimens of Cornish Provincial Dialect 94 Spenser, Edmund 79, 93 Spriggs, Matthew 103 Standard English 4, 35–40, 42–43, 47, 54, 84–85, 99, 102, 194–195, 197–201 Steggle, Matthew 103 Stereotype 6, 39, 42, 71, 74, 91, 133–150, 156, 158, 160, 163, 171, 175 Sternberg, Meir 138, 147 Stevenson, Robert Louis 4, 11, 13–15, 19–20, 22, 24–26 Stoddart, Jana175 Stoyle, Mark 91–92, 96, 103 Sturiale, Massimo 195–197 style-­shifting 35–36, 170, 174 stylisation 5, 69–87, 109–124 Sullivan, Jill 114–116 Survey of Cornwall 92 Survey of English Dialects 34, 36, 119 Taavitsainen, Irma 70, 72 Tam O’Shanter 16–20 Taviani Paolo 162–163 Taviani Vittorio 162–163 Taylor, Christopher 177, 198 Taylor, Francis 121 Taymor, Julie 160, 164 Tello Fons, Isabel 50–51 Tempera, Mariangela 162 The Tempest (Taymor) 164 Thornborrow, Joanna 111 Thrawn Janet 15, 19, 24–26 Titus (Taymor) 160–161 Toury, Gideon 51 Townsend, William Thompson 125 Treenoodle, Jan 94 Trudgill, Peter 35, 42, 171, 195 Tudeau-­Clayton, Margaret 74, 76, 85–86 Turning Serpentine 38–41 Underwoods 13 upper class accent 102, 137, 143, 154, 160, 172, 180, 182–187, 194, 196–197, 199 Upton, Clive 119, 123 Vara, Paco 186 Velvet Colección 175

vernacular 5, 14, 27, 47–63, 73–86, 110, 115–117, 121, 123 Vicinus, Martha 113 Vignozzi, Gianmarco 153 Villar, Antonio 182–183, 186–187 Vives, Erasmus 75 Vives, Juan 75 Voellmer, Elena 133, 188 Voodoo Pilchard 38 Voog’s Ocean 40 Wade, William 125 Wagner, Suzanne 42 Wakelin, Martyn 41, 44, 102–103 Wales, Katie 2, 102, 121, 163, 170–71 Walker, John 125 Walker, John 195 Waller-­Bridge, Phoebe 199 Walter, J.H. 87 Walton, Shana 6 Wanted a Wife 116, 118 Warren, Tony 198 Watson, Roderick 26 Watt, Dominic 43 Waugh, Edwin 113, 116 Welles, Orson 151 Wells, John C. 44, 121, 125, 169–170, 194–196, 199–200, 202, 204–205 Welsh 7, 32, 76–79, 85, 92–93, 95, 102–103, 136, 200 West Country accent 34, 41, 44, 179 Widdowson, H.G. 75, 80, 86 Widdowson, John D.A. 119 Wiggins, Martin 95 Wigston, Nancy 52 Williams, Derek R. 102 Williams, Masie 179 Williamson, Nicol 154–155, 162 Wilson, Thomas 85 Wilton-­Jones, John 125 The Wire 136 working class dialect/accent 49, 124, 169, 198 Woźniak, Monika 160 Wright, Joseph 119, 123 Wyke, Maria 160 Yates, David 176 Yorkshire dialect/accent 98, 113, 119, 173, 177–179, 184, 188–189, 199 Zeffirelli, Franco 151 Zettl, Herbert 152 Žigon, Tanja 176 Zlatnar Moe, Marija 176