Sorensen brings together sociolinguistics and literary history in an innovative and subtle exploration of the social cachet that heteroglossia had for writers in the 18th century. . . . This sensitive work is both a contribution to 18th- century studies and a model of how heteroglossia in literature might be investigated in other eras.
Choice I learned much from ... Read moreStrange Vernaculars, a dense, demanding, and thoroughly rewarding book.
-Jack Lynch, Oxford Journal For readers interested in the evolution of English, this is a fascinating look at the role strangeness and otherness played in the development of a national language and identity.
-James Holloway, Fortean Times Sorensen shows how a wide range of authors represented and classified the real or imagined speech of lower status groups, refashioning it as 'strange vernaculars'. . . . She is especially strong on the hidden role of race. . . . Her final section on sailors' talk includes some fine points on Jane Austen, and on the allure of naval speech as both foreign and familiar, an allure that lies at the heart of the book.
-Elspeth Jajdelska, Times Higher Education Show[s] how discourses on the English language both reflected and galvanized the forces of cultural and political hegemony in Britain, and those of expansion, empire and slavery on a global scale.
-John Gallagher, Times Literary Supplement This brilliant book is a wise analysis of a range of vernacular words
slang, thieves' jargon, sailors' dialect
found in an admirably broad survey of reference works and canonical and noncanonical eighteenth-century literature. I enjoyed the detailed literary and cultural contexts and was incredibly impressed by the breadth of primary linguistic sources and secondary scholarship. Providing rich, interconnected perspectives on language, literature, and cultural history, Sorensen's argument is persuasively sophisticated.
Carol Percy, University of Toronto Any student of eighteenth-century English literature and culture is aware to some extent of the important presence, or significant absence, of the regional or provincial speech in the literature of that period. But no one as far as I know has produced an authoritative, comprehensive, and fine-grained study of these vocabularies and what they signify and imply. This is a major, pathbreaking book.
John Richetti, University of Pennsylvania In this marvelous book, Sorensen recovers overlooked complexities in the stories of national unification and linguistic standardization often recounted by scholars of Enlightenment Britain. Her discussion of the charisma that eighteenth-century writers and readers attached to heteroglot, canting, and riddling Englishes also represents an innovative work of literary history. Strange Vernaculars is remarkable for its erudition and its author's keen ear for verbal fun.
Deidre Lynch, author of Loving Literature Sorensen integrates perspectives from historical sociolinguistics, dialectology, lexicography, literary criticism, folklore, and social history to give us a fresh and fascinating account of the growth of vernacular English in the early modern period. In her breadth of reading and depth of illustrative detail, she provides a hugely insightful contribution to our knowledge of the history of English studies that will quickly make Strange Vernaculars a standard work of reference.
David Crystal, author of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language Show Less