"Benjamin Franklin, Orthoepist and Phonetician"

The second open-access monograph in the Publications of the Philological Society has just come out, in two volumes: Gary D. German, Benjamin Franklin: Orthoepist and Phonetician — Vol. 1: Language, Literacy and Social Mobility in Franklin’s World. Vol. 2: Colonial American Voices and London Norms: Franklin’s Quest for an Orthographic Reform. And the Philological Society Blog has an interview with the author. Here's the start of his answer to the initial interview question "about his research process and discoveries": It was sometime in 2012 or 2013, while reading George Philip Krapp’s English Language in America (1925, vol. 2), that I became intrigued by his comments on Franklin’s Reformed Mode of Spelling (1768/1779). This sparked my curiosity and led me to explore the subject in greater depth. […] Based on this initial phase of research, I wrote an article analysing Franklin’s RMS which Professor Joan Beal (University of Sheffield) kindly accepted to read. She suggested that I…