18th Century Careers: Interview with Anni Sairio, a historical sociolinguist
Tell us a little about you and your research.
I’m a historical sociolinguist and something of a philologist at the Department of Modern Languages in the University of Helsinki. I study the interrelatedness of language and society in historical texts, and my research has largely focused on the language and letters of the Bluestocking circle in eighteenth-century England. I’ve edited some 200 letters of Elizabeth Montagu (1718-1800) and some of her correspondents from manuscripts at the Henry E. Huntington Library, British Library, and Houghton Library, and compiled these letters into an electronic database that’s designed for linguistic research; I’ve had the good fortune to be able to visit wonderful libraries for this purpose. Editing is time-consuming work, but very rewarding – you make constant progress, and get to know your research material thoroughly.
I’m interested in issues such as eighteenth-century spelling variation in private writing and how that variation is patterned in terms of e.g. gender and social rank, intertextuality in letters, social and linguistic prestige, and the relationship between 18th-century linguistic prescriptivism and actual usage. I’m currently working on a linguistic biography of Elizabeth Montagu, and some shorter projects dealing with social dimensions of page layout and orthography, verbal irony in letters, identity, and intertextuality.
Have you learned anything unusual/fascinating about Elizabeth Montagu?
I find it interesting (though perhaps not all that surprising) that Elizabeth Montagu reacted strongly to the increasing stigmatisation of preposition stranding between the 1730s and 1770s. Here’s an example of this severely criticized construction:
My Brother Morris & his family are going to Sandleford, which I am very glad of, for I think it is a Good air for ye sweet little man. [Elizabeth Montagu to Sarah Scott,1760, MO 5779]
This feature all but disappears from Montagu’s letters as the years go by, and I think it happens because of her increasing awareness of her literary reputation and what was considered proper style and good language use. Montagu published the Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear in 1769, albeit anonymously, and towards the end of the 1770s she had established herself as an influential social hostess and a patron of arts. Interestingly the initial decline of preposition stranding in Montagu’s letters precedes the influx of grammar writing which took off in the 1760s, so she must have been influenced by the earlier 16th-century comments (particularly of John Dryden) which were more elite-oriented and less accessible to the common audience than grammars. This decline of preposition stranding could be considered as language change from above, initiated by the upper strata of society. Nuria Yáñez-Bouza has done interesting research on the history of preposition stranding.
I’ve also been impressed by Montagu’s early letters to Lady Margaret Bentinck, the Duchess of Portland, written when they were in their twenties. Elizabeth is amazingly cheeky and satirical in these letters and openly makes fun of third parties. She was a sophisticated and skilled letter-writer from an early age, and elegantly weaved quotes from Shakespeare and other literary references in her texts.
