Multilingual Subjects: On Standard English, Its Speakers, and Others in the Long Eighteenth Century

Daniel DeWispelare, assistant professor of English, documents how different varieties of English became sidelined as “dialects” as the 18th century British Empire spread a notion of “Standard English” across the globe. He maintains that nonstandard speakers and writers—from slaves and indentured servants to translators and rural dialect speakers—were valuable to the development of Anglophone literary aesthetics even as Standard English became dominant throughout the English-speaking world.