Janet Sorensen. Strange Vernaculars

Language is dynamic. Words constantly enter into and go out of use. Tracing those changes orally in the past is impossible. Instead we are limited to examining the written word. In Strange Vernaculars Janet Sorensen offers a window into some of the changes in the written English language during the eighteenth century. Sorensen believes that the languages of the common people entered the print world to help mold an English national identity. She focuses on three different categories of the vernacular: criminal cant, provincial dialects, and maritime vocabulary. The first section of the book is devoted to criminal cant, which Sorensen refers to as a specialized argot of the underworld—thieves, murderers, and prostitutes—not understood by mainstream society. Sorensen argues that this cant began as a strange and even alien form of communication between criminals, but that in the eighteenth century it became increasingly connected to the vernacular and became more familiar. Daniel Defoe and his Moll Flanders (1722) were central to this development. Moreover, somehow this cant was a means by which Moll Flanders and others asserted their Britishness, and, especially in contrast to black slaves in America, claimed a faith in freedom and English liberty. In a similar vein, Sorensen explores the use of local dialects in eighteenth-century literature in the second section of the book as a means by which authors could portray the provincial tongue as obscure. This approach allowed authors to emphasize the differentness of their characters and the idea that they represented a world that was being lost. By using these dialects in their texts and dictionaries, however, authors magically made them less regional and more English. In short, the words “spoken” by local characters provided a sense of place away from the cosmopolitan center of London, reflected an antiquarian past, and still connected those country bumpkins to the larger British nation. Sorensen devotes the third, final, and shortest section of the book to the specialized language of the sea. Like criminal cant and provincial dialects, the language of Jack Tar appeared frequently in eighteenth-century English literature in such works as Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748), William Falconer’s The Shipwreck (1762), and nautical glossaries like Falconer’s An Universal Dictionary of the Marine (1769). Sorensen sees the maritime vocabulary, unlike the other two categories discussed in the book, as so distinct, technical, and international that it was meaningless to most readers and therefore did not contribute significantly to the nationalizing mission of the other two forms of common folk vernacular.

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