37.2279, Books: Tracing the history of pronunciation in nineteenth-century English: Marco Wiemann (2026)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-2279. Tue Jul 07 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.2279, Books: Tracing the history of pronunciation in nineteenth-century English: Marco Wiemann (2026)

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Date: 07-Jul-2026
From: Sebastian Nordhoff [support at langsci-press.org]
Subject: Tracing the history of pronunciation in nineteenth-century English: Marco Wiemann (2026)


Title: Tracing the history of pronunciation in nineteenth-century
English
Series Title: Advances in Historical Linguistics
Publication Year: 2026

Publisher: Language Science Press
           http://langsci-press.org
Book URL: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/553

Author(s): Marco Wiemann

eBook

Abstract:

A key challenge of studying the historical phonology of any language
is how to reconstruct the pronunciation of periods before the
availability of sound recording. Many studies of pre-twentieth-century
pronunciation rely on sources that comment on how people spoke, or
infer pronunciation from spelling variation or rhymes. This book is
the first to investigate the phonology of nineteenth-century English
based on a new kind of written source material: it examines
pronunciation evidence provided by contemporary grammar books, and
offers quantitative and qualitative analyses of the phonological
commentary found in a collection of 258 English grammars published in
Britain, Ireland, and North America during the nineteenth century.
The nineteenth century has been described as the century of
prescriptivism, and this book examines the tensions between
prescriptive and descriptive approaches in the grammars. Individual
case studies detail several linguistic features which were undergoing
change and which were reportedly stigmatised at the time. Consonantal
features include non-rhoticity, /h/-dropping and /h/-insertion, the
WHICH-WITCH merger, /v/-/w/ interchange, and the pronunciation of
-ing. Further studies chart variation in the vowel of BATH words, and
in the diphthongs of words such as FACE and GOAT, which are
characteristic of both RP and American English pronunciation. In
exploring the potential of this understudied source material as
evidence of historical pronunciation, this book contributes to the
fields of historical phonology, grammaticography, the study of
prescriptivism, and historical sociolinguistics.

Linguistic Field(s): Historical Linguistics

Subject Language(s): English (eng, stan1293)

Written In: English (eng, stan1293)



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