North and South: British dialects in fictional dialogue

Status Quaestionis, an online, peer-reviewed journal of the Department of European, American and Intercultural Studies of Sapienza University of Rome, launches a call for papers to inaugurate a series of yearly issues entirely dedicated to linguistic and translational themes. The first collection of essays of this linguistic series will focus on British dialect varieties in all forms of fictional dialogue which contributors are asked to analyse both in its deviations from expected sociolinguistic patterns and similarities with face-to face conversation. This collection will ideally concentrate on the function of dialect varieties in literary and dramatic texts and their linguistic construction as fictional artefacts, as well as their translation in any given language. Dialect has been used to sketch character stereotypes in both diatopic and diastratic ways in literature, theatre, cinema and television. For what concerns the British linguistic landscape in particular, ‘mythical’ geographical coordinates have contributed to the construction of almost archetypical stereotypes: the ‘North-South divide’ and the web of associations linked to the image of the barbaric Northerner as opposed to the more civilised Southerner (Wales 2002) are, for example, ingrained in popular perception of British dialects and have influenced literary, stage and film authors in their portrayals of individual characters and speech communities. Stereotyping, however, is arguably more evident and widespread in film and television (Lippi-Green 1997, Hodson 2014) – part of what Kozloff (2000), writing about American films, calls exploitation of the language resources - while the use of dialect in literature is often more nuanced and justified as means to give a distinctive stylistic mark to the text as a whole (i.e. Irvine Welsh’s and James Kelman’s Scots in novels). As far as sociolects are concerned, contributions on the underresearched ‘upper classes’ and their linguistic features in fictional texts are particularly encouraged, as the subject has notoriously received little attention even by researchers in natural conversation.