Mock Welsh

Benjamin Zimmer links to a paper by Jane H Hill on Mock Spanish (with references to Jocular Yiddish, and others). I wonder how much of this is applicable to the experience of Welsh immigrants to Renaissance London, with a context that included repressive cultural legislation and the use of caricatural Welsh English (eg devoiced initial consonants, mistaken plurals) in stageplays by writers such as Shakespeare, Dekker and Jonson. Paula Blank’s Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings looks interesting, if rather outside my price range.

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