Nineteenth-Century literary languages

How does our understanding of nineteenth-century literature and culture change when we attend more closely to the four nations’ multilingual past and present? To address this question, we present a selection of the work shared as part of the AHRC-funded research network Victorian Literary Languages. In 2022 and 2023 the network brought together scholars of literature, history, and language(s) to develop new perspectives on the intersections between language and literature during a century that radically redrew the linguistic maps of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. This issue of 19 explores how literature across the long nineteenth century imagined and presented the relations between the languages of Britain and Ireland, and how literary writing questioned, reflected, and contributed to the sociolinguistic developments that marginalized (and continue to marginalize) languages other than English. It also considers literature’s role in campaigns to preserve and revive linguistic diversity. Our contributors present close analyses of texts that work to codify and disrupt linguistic hierarchies; that interrogate evolutionary narratives of linguistic development (and decline); and that shed light on the creative possibilities of authors’ engagement with linguistic plurality in its richly varied forms. The research we share here participates in ongoing efforts to redefine the parameters of nineteenth-century studies — in the context of the four nations and across the globe — and seeks to encourage further comparative research into the intertwined histories of literature and language.