Professor Laura Wright is Professor of the History of the English Language at the University of Cambridge and a historical sociolinguist. Her research focuses on the history of Standard English and the London dialect, including mixed-language texts written in Anglo-Norman, Medieval Latin and Middle English, as well as 17th, 18th and 19th century London English.
What is the main aim of your research (in this context), and what key questions or issues does it address?
The main aim of my research was originally to try to understand what medieval people in Britain wrote, based on accounts-rolls and books that have survived – I find accounts interesting, as they are records of things that people bought and where their goods came from. The names for commodities crossed language boundaries as it’s the nature of trade to depend on mobilities: people moved goods by getting on horseback or ship; or their words moved from speaker to speaker across vast spaces even if speakers themselves didn’t move. In Britain the medieval recording system mixed Medieval Latin/Anglo-Norman French/Middle English.
What does your research involve you actually doing on a daily basis, and where do you typically carry out your work?
Typically I read old writing of all sorts. In archives, that consists of parchment and paper (I would need several lifetimes to exhaust the medieval archive of London Bridge alone), and online it’s old maps and newspapers; but it can be on gateposts, on perfume bottle labels, on fireworks, in blues lyrics … I’ve just written a short paper on nineteenth-century anchovy paste lids. (There was a point: I was trying to figure out why Charles Dickens put “a pot of anchovy paste from Burgess’s in the Strand” on his shopping list. Turns out the social connotations were superior to those of Burgess’s in King William Street, as father litigated against son. And there was a personal relationship: one of the lawyers in the Burgess v. Burgess court case cited a precedent, Day and Martin v. Warren. Dickens had worked in Warren’s boot-polish firm as a child. He put both Day and Martin’s and Warren’s in his novels – and Sir Walter Scott put Burgess’s twice in his.)
What outcomes or contributions do you hope your research will lead to in the future?
In academic terms, a focusing on the practicalities of how languages transition into others, and all the language mixing that that entails and what it connotes or connoted socially at the time. For societies undergoing language loss (which I work on together with my colleague Prof Ioanna Sitaridou), an understanding of how devastating it can be for last speakers and first descendants who can’t speak the ancestral language. Both carry a burden of guilt of betrayal.
What aspect of your work is most exciting to you right now?
Lexical sociolinguistics, because the advent of big data means that words can now be investigated for their social connotations in the past.
How does this year's symposium theme, "Language and communication across boundaries?" relate to your research?
Most of my research involves more than one language, as I follow where speakers went and they tended not to stay still. They crossed national boundaries, land/sea boundaries, social boundaries – to go back to the perfume labels above, London perfumers Septimus Piesse and Eugene Rimmel crossed a social boundary. Hitherto perfume names had reflected social-class aspiration (e.g. The Royal Essence, Allcraft, 1704), but these two saw the working classes as an untapped market and aimed their product at Our Gents and Misses (Rimmel, 1870s), e.g. Kiss Me Quick (Piesse & Lubin, 1858), named after the music-hall song Kiss Me Quick and Go (Steel and Buckley, 1856); Stolen Kisses (Piesse & Lubin, 1858), named after Buckley’s music-hall song Stolen Kisses of the same date; Jolly Dogs (Piesse & Lubin, 1876), named after the music-hall song Jolly Dogs of 1865 by Harry Copeland (“They always seem so jolly oh, wherever they may be / They laugh ha ha, they dance, they sing, what jolly dogs are we”). Flirtation was part of the attraction of music halls and perfume-marketing took on the social connotations of flirting (Piesse & Lubin’s Follow Me, Lads!, Box His Ears, Tom-Boy, Leap Year Bouquet, St. Valentine’s, 1850s-1890s), which continues to this day in the anglophone world though not elsewhere.