Getting Cinderella to the ball: towards a corpus of 19th-century Australian English letters

We are fortunate that the Late Modern English period is no longer, as once described by Jones (1989: 279), a ‘Cinderella’ of historical linguistics. Emerging methodologies in historical sociolinguistics have enabled increasing attention to be focused on this era, with corpus-based work giving new insights into diverging features of Englishes across the world. Personal correspondence is now understood to be a valuable genre of data for historical analysis, with substantial letters-based research revealing findings in British (e.g. Auer, 2015; Fairman, 2014), Irish (e.g. Amador-Moreno & McCafferty, 2012), Canadian (e.g. Dollinger, 2015), and New Zealand English (e.g. Hundt, 2015).

Australia, meanwhile, is a post-colonial setting that is ripe for the picking in exploring 19th-century variation and change in English. While some analysis in this period has been carried out based on published texts (e.g., Burridge, 2010, Collins, 2015, Collins & Yao, 2014), 19th-century personal correspondence presents an under-explored resource. This is due in part to a relative scarcity of data. For example, of the 534 personal letters included in the COOEE Corpus (Fritz, 2007), only 37 are from Australian-born writers.

This work-in-progress report showcases a potential data source sitting in the archives of the Royal Botanic Gardens of Victoria (RBG). Between his appointment as Victorian Government Botanist in 1853 and his death in 1896, German-born scientist Ferdinand von Mueller recruited hundreds of amateur botanical collectors across Australia and maintained an extraordinary connection with them through correspondence (for example, see Figure 1 below). At least a thousand letters written to Mueller survive in manuscript form at the RBG library in Melbourne. I summarise findings from a preliminary sociolinguistic survey of this collection undertaken in 2022 with permission and assistance from the Correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller Project (Home et al., 1987-2022). A total of 265 letters were photographed and described, noting correspondents’ gender, location of residence in Australia, age and birthplace (where known) and apparent social situation, as well as linguistic features that may be of interest for further analysis, such as variability of shall/will future constructions, formality registers and epistolary norms. The survey represents a small sample of a much larger collection. I consider the potential for further data-gathering to create a corpus of 19th-century ‘botanical’ correspondence in Australia covering 30-40 years, thereby adding to the growing field of exploration of letter-writing and language change in Englishes world-wide.

References
Amador Moreno, Carolina P. & McCafferty, Kevin (2012). Linguistic Identity and the Study of Emigrant Letters: Irish English in the Making. Lengua y migración 4(2): 25.
Auer, Anita (2015). Stylistic variation. In Auer, A., Schreier, D. & Watts, R. J. (Eds.), Letter Writing and Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 133-155.
Burridge, Kate (2010). “A peculiar language”: linguistic evidence of early Australian English. In Hickey, R. (Ed.), Varieties of English in Writing: The Written Word as Linguistic Evidence. Amsterdam, NLD: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 295-347.
Collins, Peter (2015). Diachronic variation in the grammar of Australian English. In Collins, P. (Ed.), Grammatical change in English world-wide. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 15-42.
Collins, Peter & Yao, Xinyue (2014). Grammatical Change in the Verb Phrase in Australian English: A Corpus-based Study. Australian journal of linguistics 34(4): 506-523.
Dollinger, Stefan (2015). Emerging standards in the colonies: variation and the Canadian letter writer. In Auer, A., Schreier, D. & Watts, R. J. (Eds.), Letter Writing and Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 101-113.
Fairman, Tony (2007). Writing and ‘the Standard’: England, 1795-1834. Multilingua 26.
Fritz, Clemens (2007). From English in Australia to Australian English 1788-1900. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Home, R.W., Lucas, A.M., Maroske, S., Sinkora, D.M., Voight, J.H., & Wells, M. (1987-2022). The Correspondence of Ferdinand von Mueller. Website https://www.rbg.vic.gov.au/science/library/correspondence-of-ferdinand-von-mueller-project/
Hundt, Marianne (2015). Heterogeneity vs. homogeneity. In Auer, A., Schreier, D. & Watts, R. J. (Eds.), Letter Writing and Language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 72-100.
Jones, Charles (1989). A History of English Phonology. Harlow: Longman Group UK Limited.