Late Modern Devonshire Speech: Exemplar Dialectal Realisations in Gwendoline Keats’ On Trial (1899)

Abstract

Indexical links created between speakers and idiosyncrasies are explored in Agha’s (2003) groundbreaking paper on enregisterment. Historical sociolinguistics studies have employed this idea to locate indexicalised items that were recognised by native and non-native speakers in dialect writing during the Late Modern English period. Non- standard English realisations have been discussed by scholars mostly in the northern areas of England, where the usage of dialect in literature was more prominent. Other areas seem to have been underrepresented in modern historical sociolinguistic research. This paper examines the dialectal data in Gwendoline Keats’ On Trial (1899) from qualitative and quantitative standpoints to prove that literary representations of the dialect of Devonshire relied on the “enregistered voices” (Agha 2005, 39) of the county and the association with a type of persona in the popular imagination: the Devonshire speaker.