Spelling Focusing and Proto-Standardisation in a Fifteenth-century English Community of Practice

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe analytical construct known as community of practice – a group of people linked by the pursuit of a joint enterprise and sharing a repertoire of resources to this end – is used extensively in sociolinguistic research into the diffusion of variation in connection with the construction of both identity and social meaning and as part of a common, locally-constructed style. Communities of practice are also crucial in the diffusion of standard as well as non-standard practices and I believe that this tenet – which certainly holds for the present – could also be extended to the past, adding a new dimension to the historical study of standardisation. In this paper I intend to reconstruct a fifteenth-century community of practice on the evidence afforded by the late Middle English collection of correspondence known as the Stonor Letters. I will analyse the linguistic resources that members of this community of practice shared, paying particular attention to spelling focusing as demonstrated by the reduced frequency of spelling variants in their letters when compared to the orthography of letters by non-members. This perspective can thus help view historical proto-standardisation in a new light, one which associates it with processes of identity construction.