The Victorian Novel: A Sociolinguistic Study Charles Dickens’s Novel Hard Times as a Case-Study

Abstract

The present paper tries to shed light on the interface between the Victorian novel and sociolinguistics, taking as a case-study Charles Dickens’s Hard Times. It aims at showing that the influence of both the linguistic and the social structures is bi-directional: society and language may affect each other. In this respect, speech genres differ between characters separated by certain social variables such as gender, age, status, religion, ethnicity and level of education. In fact, literature and sociolinguistics are concomitants