Forthcoming: Tracing the history of pronunciation in Nineteenth-Century English

One issue of studying the historical phonology of any language is how to reconstruct the pronunciation of periods before proper recording technology had been invented or widely used. Most studies that are concerned with the pronunciation before the twentieth century therefore make use of written sources that provide commentary on how people spoke or allow to derive pronunciation from spelling variation. The major goal of this book is to investigate the phonology of nineteenth-century English based on written evidence. It assess how suitable grammar books are for this purpose and features quantitative and qualitative analyses of comments on phonological features in a collection of 258 English grammars published in Britain, Ireland and North America (Collection of Nineteenth Century Grammars or CNG). Furthermore, it contains a detailed evaluation of the extent to which grammars were prescriptive in their approach to phonological variation and change. The phonological features considered are Long Mid Diphthonging (in GOAT and FACE words), the TRAP-BATH split, postvocalic /r/ absence and /r/ realisations, /h/-dropping and /h/-insertion, the WHICH-WITCH merger, /v/-/w/-interchange, and realisations of -ing. The research presented in this book can be located in the areas of historical sociolinguistics, historical phonology, grammaticography, and prescriptivism.