Nineteenth-Century English

Jane Austen’s English is far different from Virginia Woolf’s, but historians of the English language have given scant attention to the ways in which English changed over the course of the nineteenth century. In Nineteenth-Century English, Richard W. Bailey treads new ground by showing the extent to which the language changed as cultural and economic transformations brought us into the modern world. Six aspects of nineteenth-century English are treated in separate chapters: writing, sounds, words, slang, grammar, and voices. In each domain, innovation and obsolescence are discussed as they were observed by contemporary writers. Thus Bailey shows how linguistic details gained powerful social meaning in the emergent stratification by class, region, race, and gender of the anglophone community.