Don Santiago ‘a Catholic from conviction and an Old Bachelor from necessity’: A Historical Sociolinguistic Analysis of James J. Wright’s Letters.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35903/teanga.v13i.11913Keywords:
James J. Wright's Letters, Cuba, Irish English, diasporic identity, LIWC-22Abstract
Historical sociolinguistic studies of the Irish abroad have examined both anglophone (Amador-Moreno, 2019; Amador-Moreno & Ávila-Ledesma, 2020) and non-anglophone contexts, including the Caribbean region (Brehony & Finnegan, 2019; González García, 2020). In the latter, however, most research has been conducted within the field of migration history, with little attention to language use. This paper builds on this scholarship by analysing the correspondence of Dublin-born enslaver and slave-trader, James Jenkinson Wright (1788-1845), who emigrated with his family from Ireland to the United States but spent most of his adult life in Santiago de Cuba. In the Caribbean country, James Wright became a leading coffee planter and merchant. His 37 surviving letters, written between 1833 and 1845, offer a rare insight into the discourse style, stance taking and identity work of this Irish English speaker. This study applies the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC-22) tool, specifically the Cognition category, to uncover patterns of linguistic involvement and assess how these contribute to the construction of Wright’s Irish diasporic identity. The findings show that Wright’s use of personal pronouns, mental verbs and memory-related lexis functions as a key resource for negotiating belonging and diasporic identity formation in his letters. By focusing on a non-anglophone setting, the chapter extends the scope of historical sociolinguistic research on Irish English and provides new perspectives on how identity is negotiated in Irish emigrants’ letters.
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