Middle English dialect features in Medieval Coventry. By the late Middle Ages, Coventry had become the most important centre of trade in the West Midlands ...
Middle English dialect features in Medieval Coventry By the late Middle Ages, Coventry had become the most important centre of trade in the West Midlands and is nowadays considered to have been the fourth largest city in England after London, York and Bristol (Lancaster 1975: 1). Due to both its size and its prominent role during events such as the Wars of the Roses, the city attracted many different people from all over England, notably also from different social standings, including members of the royal family, merchants, soldiers, farmers and various religious orders. It can consequently be stated that the city was a melting pot of people of different social standing from different corners of England, and possibly elsewhere. This means that dialect, and possibly also language contact, between these various people must have taken place on an almost daily basis, which would have had an influence on the local urban vernacular and its development. Until today, one of the most important sources for the investigation of Middle English dialects is McIntosh, Samuels and Benskin’s Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LALME), published in 1986. This seminal work provides historical linguists with linguistic profiles of many different places in England between the years 1350 and 1450. One may want to argue that these profiles only present snapshots of the different vernaculars in late Medieval England since they are based only on a few documents written at some point between 1350 and 1450. The linguistic profiles might therefore not be representative for that entire period. Moreover, the profiles do not provide any historical context and take no variation into account. As a result, one can hardly investigate the diachronic development of the different vernaculars in any way based on these profiles. In my research project, I intend to create a more detailed linguistic profile of Coventry between 1400 and 1700, which will be based on a wide range of different texts and will be viewed against the dynamic local socio-‐historical background. It is the aim of this paper to shed some light on the linguistic variation in Coventry during the later Middle Ages within the socio-‐historical framework that helped shape the local urban vernacular, in particular how both Northern and Southern Middle English dialect features would have ended up in Coventry’s written sources. References: -‐ Lancaster, J. C. 1975. ‘Coventry’, in M. D. Lobel (ed.), The Atlas of Historic Towns. Volume 2. London: The Scolar Press in conjunction with the Historic Towns Trust, 1 – 13. -‐ McIntosh, A., M. L. Samuels & M. Benskin. 1986. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.
