Cultural Studies on "Otherness" Represented in the Non-Standard English Usage in the 18th-Century Drama

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In this research project, I dealt with the eighteenth-century English drama, especially characters speaking non-standard English, in order to investigate how the dramatic language usage in the plays written for the London audience foregrounded "otherness". The standardisation of English, by setting up a binary opposition of the central/the marginal, inevitably went hand in hand with the alienation of non-standard English speakers including the Scottish, the Irish and the West indians, and theatre functioned as a centre stage for that process.Moreover, this research took one step further to explore this discriminating system and revealed that the actual conditions were far more complicated than that. For example, not a few Irish playwrights self-humiliatingly pandered to the trend. On the other hand, from the viewpoint of comparative studies, I suggest that Hiberno-English as the counter culture can be a model to cope with the Japanese language discrimination.