Louis-Lucien Bonaparte, nineteenth-century English dialects, and nineteenth-century dialectology

Louis-Lucien Bonaparte is a key figure in Euskara studies and in documenting the dialectal interrelationships among Romance languages, but he was also engaged in describing and distinguishing English dialects. As with other languages, he outlined differences among English dialects by having native speakers of those dialects translate books of the Bible into them. This article examines the practice of translation as a means of recording language variation and Bonaparte’s commitment to it and describes the English dialect program he developed. Dialect translation exposed the need for a phonetic alphabet, which Bonaparte lacked, although several attempts at such an alphabet were in progress at the time. As a result, he was necessarily concerned about the dialectal accuracy of the translations he commissioned. Bonaparte gifted one of his translators, Henry Baird, with a specially bound and illustrated collection of his English dialect pamphlets, now held in the Madeline Kripke Collection of Historical Lexicography at the Lilly Library, Indiana University. Into that collection, Baird tipped in letters from Bonaparte about the problems of phonetic representation in the Biblical translations — transcribed in the article — which provide us with concrete evidence of Bonaparte’s method, as well as his concerns about it.