On 17 April 1807, after a 25-day journey, a ship arrived in New York carrying among its passengers a Scottish emigrant family consisting of Mary Ann Archbald, her husband and their four young children. Archbald had already chronicled her life on a small island off Scotland’s west coast for more than twenty years when she first set foot on American soil. Once settled on their newly purchased farm in New York, she continued to keep an account of how she spent her days surrounded by her immediate family. It is through those journals, letter books and original letters that a window opens through which it becomes possible to analyse Archbald’s language use from her early twenties, throughout middle age and into her late seventies.
Dörnbrack’s dissertation shows how Archbald’s written language use changes over time, both prior to and following her migration. For the most part, changes in Archbald’s language use result in greater alignment with the norm of written English which was codified at the time. However, individual examples can be found which place greater distance to the established norms, and in one case, Archbald created a variant form which was neither in agreement with the norm nor in outright opposition to it. Overall, this dissertation shows that Archbald was not a passive receiver of norms from above, but that she engaged actively and creatively with the prescribed norms of her time to express different sides of her identity.
Nora Dörnbrack successfully defended her dissertation on 19 January 2024.
Trial lecture
Designated topic: "What are the three waves of sociolinguistics and how do they apply to historical sociolinguistics?"
Evaluation committee
- Senior lecturer Anna Havinga, University of Bristol (first opponent)
- Professor emerita Joan C. Beal, University of Sheffield (second opponent)
- Senior lecturer Nicholas Elwyn Allott, University of Oslo (committee administrator)
Chair of the defence
- Professor Anne Birgitte Rønning
Supervisors
- Professor Anita Auer, University of Lousanne
- Associate Professor Jacob Thaisen, University of Oslo
- Professor Robert McColl Millar, University of Aberdeen