“Language identity and language ideology in 18th-century British encyclopaedias” -International Conference of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest “Online Workshop Dictionaries and Prescriptions”, 25-26 novembre 2022.

At the start of the Eighteenth century, a new emerging genre helped change the representation, the conceptualisation, and the vernacularisation of the world: this turning point was marked by the publication of universal dictionaries of arts and sciences, also known as encyclopædias (Yeo 1991, 1996, 2001, 2003). Language and metalinguistic issues – terminology and ideas – represent one of the major fields of interest, due to the contemporary debate on variation and variants, regularisation and standardisation, cultural prestige and identity. The general aim of this paper is a close examination of and a discussion on the most relevant linguistic and cultural assumptions as they emerge from the paratextual apparatus (introductory sections and prefaces, if included), and from the long and complex entries Language, English, and Grammar. The following works are the most relevant over the century, and the main focus of the study: Chambers’s Cyclopædia (1728 [1727], 2 in-folio voll., hereafter Cy), Encyclopædia Britannica (1768-1771, 3 in-quarto voll., hereafter EB), and Rees’s Cyclopædia (1778-1788, 5 in-folio voll., hereafter ReCy). The reference is usually to the first edition of the preceding works, where different, a left superscript number is added (e.g. 5thCy).