From Tangier to Locarno: The Experience of War in Nottingham and Language Use in Local Newspapers, 1905-1925

This article applies a historical linguistic approach to compare specific word choice before, during and after the First World War in a sample of UK newspapers and two Nottingham papers. It finds that language use in Nottingham newspapers was similar to UK papers but at the same time showed marked differences, possibly as a result of local characteristics, circumstances, events and developments, which suggests that people’s experience of war in this city did not always follow an overall UK pattern.