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Emigrant letters are a valuable source of evidence for vernacular varieties over the past few centuries. In this volume several collections of such letters are analysed with a view to gaining linguistically significant insights into earlier stages of colloquial English varieties across the world. There are chapters dealing with letters from the USA, including those by African Americans, from Canada, Australia and New Zealand as well as several chapters examining letters written by Irish emigrants from various overseas locations. The contributions deal with the sociolinguistics of letter writing, specifically issues surrounding authorship and content. The contributors assess the insights they reach in the context of language change from below and determine the value of emigrant letters as a hitherto under-exploited source of primary linguistic data which help to fill gaps in our knowledge of key developments in many varieties of English.

Contents

1. Mining vernacular correspondence for linguistic insights Raymond Hickey

2. Homesickness, recollections and reunions: Topics and emotions in a corpus of female Irish migrant correspondence Emma Moreton and Chris Culy

3. ‘I have not time to say more at present’ Negating lexical have in Irish English Kevin McCafferty

4. ‘Matt & Mrs Connor is with me now. They are only beginning to learn the work of the camp’: Irish emigrants writing from Argentina Carolina P. Amador Moreno

5. Singular, plural, or collective? Grammatical flexibility and the definition of identity in the correspondence of nineteenth-century Scottish emigrants Marina Dossena

6. Wisconsin immigrant letters: German imposition on Wisconsin English Samantha Litty

7. ‘[T]his is all [,] answer soom’ African American vernacular letters from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Lucia Siebers

8. Morphosyntactic features in Earlier African American English: A qualitative assessment of semi-literate letters Alexander Kautzsch

9. ‘I hope you will excuse my bad writing’: shall vs. will in the 1830s Petworth Emigration to Canada Corpus (PECC) Stefan Dollinger

10. Memoirs from Central America: A linguistic analysis of personal recollections of West Indian laborers in the construction of the Panama Canal Stephanie Hackert

11. The path to homogeneity. Grammatical variation in nineteenth century Australian letters Raymond Hickey and Kate Burridge

12. ‘[S]eas may divide and oceans roll between but Friends is Friends whatever intervene’. Familiar letters in New Zealand Dania Jovanna Bonness