Developing a standard in lower-class Scottish writing: pauper petitions as a source for nineteenth-century lower-class Scottish language

Abstract

Abstract The anglicisation of Scottish writing, a development in which the features of the previously high-status Scots language variety became marginalised and proscribed in favour of prestige Standard English variants, is typically dated by scholars to the sixteenth through eighteenth century. The effect of anglicisation on upper- and middle-class Scottish authors’ written language has been attested in numerous studies; however, how the metalinguistic ideologies of the time affected the language of the Scottish lower classes has long remained underinvestigated. This study makes use of the recent publication of a corpus of lower-class Scottish writing from the nineteenth century – the Corpus of Scottish Pauper Petitions – to investigate the effect of prescriptivism on lower-class Scottish writing as documented in nineteenth-century pauper petitions. The materials are placed side-by-side with the writings of upper- and middle-class Scottish people during this period, taken from the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing. This study, which investigates both overt and covert Scotticisms by drawing respectively on usage guides by contemporaneous prescriptivists and works by modern linguists, takes a ‘from below’ approach to Scotland’s linguistic history and represents a new step in our understanding of the development of historical Scottish writing.