A Cultural History of the English Language

Gerry Knowles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317859093
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book presents a new interpretation of the history of English. Access to large corpuses of English has allowed scholars to assess the minutiae of linguistic change with much greater precision than before, often pinpointing the beginnings of linguistic innovations in place and time. The author uses the findings from this research to relate major historical events to change in the language, in particular to areas of linguistic inquiry that have been of particular importance in recent years, such as discourse analysis, stylistics and work on pidgins and creoles. The book does not attempt to chronicle changes in syntax or pronunciation and spelling, but is designed to complement a corpus-based study of formal changes. The story of English is brought up to the late 1990s to include, amongst other things, discussions of Estuary English and the implications of the information superhighway.

1

Introduction

The purpose of this introductory chapter is to raise some of the main issues that are involved in the study of the history of the English language. The first section provides a brief outline history for the reader with no previous historical background, and presents some of the basic historical material which (allowing for some necessary simplification) would be generally accepted by language historians. The remaining sections deal with some general points which are developed further in later chapters. I have used cross-references to make explicit the connections between this chapter and more particular instances in the later chapters.

1.1 An outline history

A language related to Modem English has been spoken in Britain since the early fifth century. Before the Roman legions left Britain, the east coast of England was already being subjected to raids from Saxon invaders from beyond the North Sea. In the course of the next century, the newcomers began to settle permanently. According to Bede, a monk from Jarrow writing in the late eighth century, they belonged to three tribes, Angles, Saxons and Jutes. The people are now generally referred to as Anglo-Saxons, but their language has always been called English. Eventually they conquered the whole of what is now England, and English replaced the Celtic language, which was until then spoken by the mass of the population.

The English speakers were themselves subjected to further raids from across the North Sea, this time from Danes. The first raids date from 797, and eventually the Danes conquered a large part of England north and east of a line stretching from Chester to the Thames. At the time of King Alfred, only the land south and west of this line remained in Anglo-Saxon hands. The Danish invasion and subsequent settlement had a considerable influence on the English language, and many words were borrowed into English, especially into the dialects of the north.

After the Norman conquest in 1066, French became the spoken language of the aristocracy in England, while Latin was adopted as the main written language. English was still spoken by the lower orders of society, but the old written tradition eventually collapsed, and few English written records survive for 200 years after about 1150. French remained in use for some 300 years, until it was gradually replaced by English after the middle of the fourteenth century. The kind of English that emerged, however, was strongly influenced by French, and contained a large number of French words and expressions. The French influence can be seen in the language of Chaucer, who died in 1400.

Caxton introduced printing into England in the 1470s, and written texts became much more widely available than before. Printing was the catalyst for the major upheavals of the sixteenth century which were linked in various ways to the Renaissance and the Reformation. It is from about this time that scholars began to write in English instead of Latin, and as a result many Latin words were borrowed into English. English literature flourished at the end of the sixteenth century, the time of Shakespeare (1564–1616). The Authorized Version of the English Bible was published in 1611.

Modern Standard English can be traced to about the time of Chaucer, but was for a long time variable in spelling, in the use of words, and in the details of English grammar. After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, there was considerable interest in fixing the language, and in 1712 Jonathan Swift proposed the setting up of an Academy to do this. By default, however, it was left to scholars to decide on what should be included in Standard English. Johnson’s dictionary of 1755 did much to standardize spellings and fix the meanings of words. Several grammars were produced, among the more influential being Lowth’s grammar of 1762. From the 1760s there was increasing interest in fixing a standard of English pronunciation, which resulted in a tradition of pronouncing dictionaries, of which the most influential was Walker’s dictionary of 1791. It was not until the present century that a standard pronunciation was described in detail. This is Daniel Jones’s Received pronunciation, which was adopted by the BBC in the 1920s as a standard for broadcasting.

1.2 Language and social change

Even from this broadly sketched outline it is immediately clear that the history of the language has been determined in various ways by social change. For most of the 1500 years of its history English has been subjected to a pattern of continuous small-scale change interrupted by major events which have brought about dramatic and sudden change. It is these major discontinuities that enable us to divide the history of the language into convenient ‘periods’. The first of these continued until shortly after the Norman conquest and is known as Old English. The period of French domination is the Middle English period, and finally, from about the time of the introduction of printing, when the language becomes recognizably similar to the modem language, it is possible to talk of Modem English. In order to understand the details of language change, it is important to investigate the kind of social changes that are involved and how they can bring about changes in the language.

Language contact

The English language has not existed in isolation and has always been in close contact with other European languages. The effect of contact may be to determine which of several languages is used in particular social situations. Conquest by foreign invaders is inevitably followed by the introduction of the languages of the invaders, and this can take several forms. The new language may take hold permanently, as in the case of Anglo-Saxon (see section 2.3), or the invaders may eventually give up their language, as in the case of the Danes (see section 3.4) and the Normans (see section 4.3). Where several languages are in use simultaneously, they may have different functions: for example, after the Norman conquest English and French were used as vernaculars, and Latin was used as the language of record (see section 4.2).

When a language is given up, its users may transfer some of its patterns into the new language. In this way foreign influence has peaked when Danes adopted Anglo-Saxon (see section 3.4), when bureaucrats began to use English rather than French (see section 4.4), and when scholars began to write in English rather than Latin (see section 5.3). The process of adopting features of another language is known as borrowing, and the most readily borrowed items are words. English has thousands of words borrowed from Danish, French and Latin. In more recent centuries words have been borrowed from all over the globe as a result of mercantile contact and imperial expansion.

Contact must be taken into account when we consider the origin of the English language. It is self-evident that it is not a single object with a single origin. English vocabulary, expressions and idioms come from a wide range of sources, mainly Latin, French and Germanic, but also Hindi, Hungarian and native American and Australian languages. English pronunciation is largely Anglo-Saxon, but also in part Danish and French. English grammar is basically Germanic, but it has been modified by French and Latin.

Language and power

Language is an important factor in the maintenance of power, and an understanding of power relations is important in tracing the history of a language. In the medieval period, the relevant power was possessed by the church. The important language was Latin, and written English was moulded according to the language practices of the church. Most of our modem literacy practices were closely modelled on those originally developed for Latin. When the power of the church was challenged by the growing power of the state, the prestige of Latin was recreated in English, and the new language of power was a Latinate form of English.

For much of the modem period, English was the language of the English national state, as it grew from a small kingdom to a major empire. The growth of the nation state, the cult of nationalism at the court of Elizabeth, the seventeenth-century revolutions, and worldwide expansion are all reflected in the history of the language. When English was an unimportant vernacular, it was associated with the common people, but after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 it was the language of the ‘politest part of the nation’. Soon there was a widespread belief that the common people did not speak proper English at all. Since the middle of the present century power has shifted away from Britain to the United States, and new technologies are creating new relationships which will affect the language in the next millennium in ways we cannot even guess.

A shift of power does not of itself bring about language change, and is mediated by intellectual change, in that shifts of power can affect the basic assumptions people make about their language. Some of the major changes in English in the sixteenth century resulted from the belief of scholars that it was desirable to use English in place of Latin, and from their deliberate efforts to bring change about. The shift of power from the aristocracy to the middle class is reflected in the eighteenth-century concept of politeness (chapter 9), which in turn led to the ‘fixing’ of standard written English (see section 9.5). The increasing economic power of the working class led to the concept of the Queen’s English (see section 10.5) and a narrowed definition of acceptable pronunciation (see section 10.4). In the late twentieth century the assertion and recognition of the rights of women have led to a marked change in the use of the pronouns he, she and they, and of nouns referring to human beings, such as poetess and chairman.

Language and fashion

In addition to changes which have an identifiable social origin, there is a large mass of changes which have been the result of prestige and fashion. Although we can never find out how or why some particular innovations occur in the first place, we can nevertheless trace their spread over several generations. For example, much of the current variation in English pronunciation follows the loss of the [r]¹ sound after a vowel in words such as sure, square or cart. This can be traced back in some detail to the fourteenth century (Wyld, 1920). The nature of the evidence is such that we can infer that a new form has emerged, but we are given no idea who started the new fashion or why. For example, when the captain in Thackeray’s Vanity fair says I’m shaw, we can infer that he uses the new form of sure rhyming with law rather than the old form rhyming with bl

er, but we do not know how this new form arose in the first place.

Innovations spread along lines of prestige. The capital imitates the fashions of the court, and the provincial towns imitate the capital. The farmer going to market comes into contact with the more prestigious speech of the town. Of course not all innovations begin at court, and the farmer will come across more local and regional changes. But these are unlikely to spread against the tide of prestige, and will remain local dialect forms (see section 9.2 under Provincial English). Innovations eventually spread to the limits of the sphere of influence of the place in which they arise, and bring about within that area a greater degree of linguistic conformity.

In addition to these geographical changes, we have to take into account age differences and the effects of education. Young people adopt new styles of speech for the same reasons as they adopt new styles of dress and other social habits. Traditionally young people adopted the new forms as they came into fashion in their locality, but this pattern began to change with the introduction of mass education. Teachers have sought to teach children what they regarded as the ‘correct’ forms of English, with the result that most people are aware of a clash between the English that comes naturally and the English they have been taught formally. The pattern is now changing again as the ‘younger generation’ is constructed by ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The origins of the English language
• 3. English and Danish
• 4. English and French
• 5. English and Latin
• 6. The language of England
• 7. The language of revolution
• 8. The language of learned and polite persons
• 9. The language of Great Britain
• 10. The language of empire
• 11. Conclusion
• Appendix: Further suggestions
• Bibliography
• Index