Non-Standardization: On the historical enregisterment of ain't in 19th century American newspapers

The emergence of a "non-standard" register is quite obviously the flipside of standardization: if there is no standard, there can be no non-standard. If standardization is the suppression of optional variation (Milroy and Milroy 1999:22), then a non-standard can be thought to emerge when optional variation is "relegated" to a register of non-standard, vernacular forms, or is reassigned non-standard status (i.e. stigmatized). Examples abound from the history of English that formerly optional variants persist (multiple negation, lack of adverb-marking <–ly>, non-standard verb forms, non-standard pronouns, different concord patterns, …), but at the price of heavy stigmatization. Perhaps the most stigmatized widely-used form today is ain't, a historically well-established negative contraction for all forms of present tense be and have (and, more recently, do).

In this talk, I will try to show that "relegation to non-standard" is not an automatic by-product of codification or prescription, but a deliberate construction by interested parties, a process I will call "non-standardization". Taking ain't as my example, I trace the historical enregisterment of this negated verb in historical newspaper data (taken from the AHN database). The 19th century provides rich evidence of the increasing stigmatization of ain't in American English, through various text types that were common in newspapers at the time (local reports, anecdotes, political satire, letters, short fiction, even poetry). In these texts, characterological figures (in the sense of Agha 2007) are constructed and disseminated, often for the purpose of humour, that are characterized linguistically by their use of features like ain't (and, often, a host of other features). Laughing at these figures and the language they use consolidates them as stereotypes, and increasingly strongly links their language to their social characteristics, and their stigmatization.

The reconstruction of these stereotyped figures involves much qualitative, historical background work, and my talk thus also calls for a re-evaluation of qualitative, instead of solely quantitative, corpus work.

References

Agha, Asif. 2007. Language and Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

AHN: America's Historical Newspapers: https://www.readex.com/products/americas-historical-newspapers

Milroy, James, and Lesley Milroy. 1999. Authority in Language: Investigating Standard English. 3rd edition. London & New York: Routledge. [First published 1985].