From provincialism to accentism: From language discrimination to language creativity

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the keywords or la-bels related to the standard language debate (i.e. ‘Vulgar Pronunciation/Accent’, ‘Provincial Pronunciation/Accent’ and so on) did not only ac-quire new connotative meanings, but they also contributed to reinforce a ‘social divide’. Moreover, newspapers constituted an important plat-form for the debate around language. My data will be drawn from a corpus of articles dealing with issues of pronunciation and the focus of my paper, then, will be, among other -isms, on provincialism, vulgarismand accentism as examples of language creativity in newspapers