The history, linguistic status and potential of the term dramway

Abstract

This is a comprehensive investigation of the term dramway, local to south-west Britain and best recorded in Gloucestershire. It does not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary or in well-known national and regional dialect dictionaries. It is of historical, theoretical and sociological interest. The aim here is to answer two linguistic questions, one historical and the other both theoretical and socio-onomastic. Firstly, how can its origin be explained? and secondly, is it an ordinary word (a common noun), a proper name or something else (and to what purpose)? The paper draws on local industrial and railway history sources, archival, printed and online, and on writings in linguistics and onomastics to illuminate, through extensive discussion of the example-word, some complex strands of the process of its becoming-a-name and becoming-a-meme in a bilingual setting and in a context of post-industrial decline and consequent heritage and tourism management.

Keywords

• proper name
• common noun
• socio-onomastics
• historical linguistics
• morphosyntax