U214A Book 2: Chapter 2 A National Language Joan Beal Dr. Amel Salah.

U214A Book 2: Chapter 2A National Language

Joan BealDr. Amel Salah

2.1 Introduction• How was English initially rose to become a national

language?• English was not the original, indigenous (native or original)

language of England. Prior to the arrival of the Anglo-Saxon in Britain in the 400s, the inhabitants of the island spoke Celtic languages. Yet English shows few traces of Celtic, emerging instead from the mix of dialects brought by the Germanic invaders. Nor was the subsequent growth of English within England a smooth or inevitable trajectory. After the Norman Conquest of 1066, for example, English was not even the first language of the ruling classes. For several centuries, French and Latin were spoken in England as well as English which, in its many regional forms, was the language of everyday life and of the lower classes.

• Yet somehow by the fourteenth century, when official government documents were first written in English, a sense of a national, standard variety of English had begun to emerge.

• From the 1300, much of the story of English is an account of standardisation: the social and political processes by which norms of language usage are agreed and enforced.

• Today we can talk of a standard English in Britain, one that is codified in dictionaries and grammars, prescribed in schools and promoted by the media.

• However, it is important not to see the history of English as simply a move from diversity to homogeneity: as variation still exerts its pull on English even within England.

• This chapter traces the history of English in England and explore many of the issues touched on above: the hybrid (mixture) nature of English and continuing impact of language contact, the social and political nature of standardisation, the diversity that continues to characterize English in England, and the extent to which, in different historical periods, including our own, English can be considered a national language.

• The Seven Ages of English are:• 1. Pre-English period (- c. AD 450): • Local languages in Britain are Celtic, and the inhabitants

known as Celts or Britons.• 2. Early Old English (450- c. 850)• Anglo-Saxon invasion c.AD 449 after the Romans have

withdrawn (410). Settlers bring a variety of Germanic dialects from mainland Europe.

• 3. Later Old English (c.850 – 1100)• Extensive invasion and settlement from Scandinavian.• 4. Middle English (c. 1100 – 1450)• Norman conquest and Norman rule. English vocabulary

and spelling now affected by French, which becomes the official language in England.

• 5. Early Modern English (c. 145 – 1750)• Includes the Renaissance, the Elizabethan era and

Shakespeare. The role of the Church, of Latin and of French declines and English becomes a language of science and government.

• 6. Modern English (c. 1750 – 1950)• Britain experiences Industrial Revolution and consolidates

imperial power, introducing English medium education in many parts of the world. English becomes the international language of advertising and consumerism.

• 7. Late Modern English (c. 1950).• Britain retreats from empire. New standardise varieties of

English emerges in newly independent countries. English becomes the international language of communications technology.

• Activity 2.1• Today we have many sources of evidence for

the ways in which English is spoken and written for different purposes, by different types of people and in different places.

• 1. internal evidence: is linguistic evidence that comes from examples of language use, such as texts written in the language; it can also be described as direct evidence.

• 2. external or indirect evidence: comes from sources such as commentaries on the language, or archaeological finds.

• 2.2 The beginning of English • England before English• What was the linguistic situation in Britain before

English, and how did it shape what was to become English?

• The Britons living in England at the time spoke Celtic languages similar to present-day Welsh, Cornish and Breton. It had previously been thought that the Anglo-Saxons drove the Britons away from the more fertile lands in the East, but archaeological and genetic evidence has since suggested that many Britons may have lived alongside Anglo-Saxons.

• This is reinforced by the fact that the word ‘Welsh’ comes from the Old English wealth meaning ‘foreigner’ or, in some contexts, ‘servant’ or ‘slave’.

• Such evidence as we have of the Celtic language at that time comes largely from names: Avon and Ouse come from Celtic words for water or stream. The vast majority of the vocabulary of Old English for which we have written records is of Germanic origin. Latin would also have been spoken in Britain at least until the Roman withdrawal in 410.

• Most Latin words now used in English come not from the Roman occupation of Britain which ended before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxon, but were brought over by the Germanic invaders whose languages had acquired them during the Roman occupation of their own lands.

• English before England

• What do we know about the dialects of the Germanic tribes that were to come to Britain, and from which English emerged?

• Our knowledge of the Germanic tribes on the continent comes largely from the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote the Germani in AD 98. the Germani, to use Tacitus’s term, were not literate, so we have no direct evidence of their languages.

• By comparing related languages for which there is written evidence historical linguists have reconstructed a Germanic family of languages and its hypothetical ancestor, Proto-Germanic. This family is divided into three groups:

• The West Germanic, including the ancestors of present-day German, Dutch and English

• The North Germanic or ‘Norse’, including Norwegian, Danish, Swedish and Icelandic

• The East Germanic of which the only surviving records come from Gothic.

• All the languages of the Anglo-Saxon invaders belonged to the West Germanic group. Tacitus described the Germani as comprising separate tribes, some of which will have been the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxon invaders. The immediate linguistic heritage of the Anglo-Saxon invasions of the fifth century was not therefore a unified language called ‘English’, but a variety of West Germanic languages or dialects spoken by settlers from across present-day Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands.

• English in England• According to the Oxford English Dictionary

(OED), the first instance of a name referring to the whole of the Anglo-Saxon peoples was by Pope Gregory I, writing in 595 and using the Latin word Anglus. Although when the historian Bede used the term gentis Anglorum (English people) he was referring to all the Anglo-Saxon, it is often unclear whether other writers used this just with reference to the Angles who, according to Bede, settled in the north and east of the country.

• Throughout the Old English period, several kingdoms existed; these are usually described as the Heptarchy, consisting of Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex and Wessex. Much of the period was turbulent, and borders shifted as one kingdom conquered until the time of King Alfred(849 – 899), and even he did not rule over all of what we now call England.

• Even though Alfred was never king of all England, his reign (rule) as king of Wessex saw a revival of learning in which texts were composed in West Saxon English (the dialect of Old English used in Wessex) or translated into it from Latin.

• Although it could be argued that these texts exemplify an evolving and incipient (initial) form of standard, written English, West Saxon was never a national standard.

• However, a kind of standardization occurred in major religious centers, and the dominance of Wessex towards the end of the period of Old English could have resulted in West Saxon being selected as the standard language of England. This process was interrupted by the Norman conquest of 1066, after which English would not fulfill the functions of a standard language for several centuries.

• Even in the Old English period, English was not the only language spoken and written in what is now England: Latin was the language of the Church, Cornish survived in the South-West, and the North Germanic (or Norse) languages of the Vikings were to have a major influence on the North and East.

2.3 Foreign influenceDanes and the Danelaw (the Later Old English period)

• According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (record), the Vikings first came to England from Scandinavia in 783, although the date most often cited as that of the first Viking raid is 793, when a group landed on Lindisfarne off the coast of Northumbria.

• In the second half of the century, Danish invaders brought armies over with a view to conquest and permanent settlement. In 878, a treaty was signed acknowledging the rule of the Danish king Guthrum in an area north and east on a line drawn from London to Chester. This area was known as the Danelaw.

• Place names provide a great deal of evidence for the kinds of settlement that developed in these periods, as well as clues about the nature of interaction between people speaking different languages. Within the Danelaw, it appears that Danes and Angles lived together, they probably understood each others languages . The English that developed in this area was strongly influenced by the Norse language, e.g. within this area we find place names with Norse elements such as -by meaning ‘village’ as in Gimsby and Whitby.

• We do not have written records of this Anglo-Norse variety but, when written records from this area emerge in the Middle English period, the density of Norse loanwords is striking. Many of these words were to find their way into standard English where they remain widely used e.g. ‘eggs’, ‘husband’, ‘skin’, ‘sky’. They are mostly words relating to everyday life, bearing witness to the intimate relationship between those of Danish and Anglian descent in the Danelaw. Orton and Wright (1974, p. 17) state that “several thousands of Scandinavian loans are found in the present-day dialects of the North and East Midlands”. These include words such as lake (to play), slape (slippery) and lop (flea).

• Between 1950 and 1961, the Survey of English Dialects (SED) collected examples of British dialects before, as the researchers believed, these died out through increased social mobility and media influence.

• The influence of Norse affected grammar as well as vocabulary. For example, the northern dialects of Middle English adopted the Scandinavian pronouns they, them and their for third person plural pronouns. These were much more functional than the Old English forms hi, hira and him, which were likely to be confused with the singular forms corresponding to modern English he, her and him.

• The Norman Conquest and French in England• By the middle of the eleventh century, the written

English of Wessex (West Saxon) was beginning to be used as a literary language, but Latin was still used in the Church and an Anglo-Norse dialect was used in the Danelaw.

• The Norman Conquest of 1066 was to introduce elite language which would take over from English in higher-status functions: Norman French. The Norman French of the conquerors and the more prestigious Central (Parisian) French of their descendants were to have a deep and lasting effect on English.

• From this time until the thirteenth century, the ruling and governing classes of England would have French (or Anglo-Norman, the variety of French which developed in England) as their first language. As the Noblemen spoke French.

• Although there must have been a certain amount of French-English bilingualism for the sake of communication, English in this period was a vernacular (dialect) rather than a language of status. Actually, men of low status stick to English. The words borrowed from French into English at this time bear witness to this difference in status, see examples on p. 64.

• English and ideas about diversity in the fourteenth century• During the 14th century, the use of French in England began

to decline, although it was not until Henry IV came to the throne in 1399 that England had its first king since the conquest who spoke English as his first language. The gradual shift in balance between the two languages is illustrated in a passage written by John of Trevisa in 1385.

• In this passage Trevisa bears witness here to an important turning point in the history of the standardisation of English: although the grammar school curriculum was to be dominated by Latin for several centuries after this, once English became a medium of education there was a need for some kind of standard for instruction.

• At this time there was little concept of a standard version of English and diversity was the norm.

• Dialects of Middle English can be divided into five main groups, with much variation within each group (Crystal, 2003, p. 50):

• Southern, a continuation of Old English West Saxon • Kentish (or South-Eastern), a continuation of Old

English Kentish• East Midland, the east part of the Old English Mercian

area • West Midland, the west part of the Old English

Mercian area • Northern, a continuation of Old English Northumbrian.

• With respect to the dialect of Middle English, it is worth making three observations. First, some of the distinctive features of Middle English dialects have left traces in the corresponding varieties today, p. 66. the second point which is the dialectal diversity was still the norm in the 1300s even in written or formal domains (such as literature or official documents) where today we would expect adherence (devotion) to a national standard. The third point is that there are hints in 14th century literature that the dialect of London and the South was gaining prestige, no doubt because of its association with the capital and the Court. Accompanying the prestige awarded to the London dialect was a derogatory attitude towards other varieties.

• 2.4 Standardisation• The beginning of standardisation: selecting a standard

variety• In discussing the development of standard English, there

was a model of standardisation first proposed by Einar Haugen (1966) and later modified by James and Lesley Milroy (1985). The stages of standardisation as outlined by Haugen are:

• Selection of a variety to be standard• Codification, by which norms are elucidated and captured

in dictionaries or grammars• Elaboration, which involve the extension of the standard

to a wider variety of functions• Implementation, whereby norms are imposed and

variability suppressed. (blocked).

• Milroy and Milroy expand the model to include prescriptivism, by which judgements about the correctness and desirability of certain linguistic features serve to maintain the standard. They also stress that the stages of standardisation need not be successive and may overlap.

• Elaboration of function• By the 16th century, there is evidence of a

agreement of opinion as to what constituted the best English, at least for writing.

• The process of standardisatin is defined by Einar Haugen (1966, p. 935) as involving both the maximal variation of function (i.e. the range of different purposes the language can be used for), and minimal variation in form brought about by the reduction of variability. The implementation of reduction in variability involves codification , which had barely begun in the early 17th century.

• Conclusion• Despite the prescriptive beliefs that there

have in some ways shaped the English spoken in England today, its history shows us that the language has always been underpinned by hybridity, diversity and change. English is a result of a mix of different influences on the varied Germanic dialects from which it emerged – Scandinavian, Latin, Norman, French – and it continues to be shaped by its speakers’ encounters with other languages, even within the British Isles.

• Reading A: Shakespeare and the English language

• When Shakespeare’s plays were first printed together, Ben Jonson provided a poem describing Shakespeare as ‘not of an age, but for all time’. Subsequent criticism built on this, constructing what has been called the ‘myth’ of Shakespeare as a cultural phenomenon: a ‘universal’ genius whose qualities transcend history, and by who can ‘speak’ to us across time (e.g. Dobson, 1995). One of the commonest claims about Shakespeare’s language is that he invented hundreds of words.

• Many have felt that Shakespeare’s language must hold the key to his genius – but analysis of his linguistic practice has lagged behind almost every other part of Shakespeare scholarship. Perhaps this is because Shakespeare’s language can only be seriously studied in relation to what others were doing at the time.

• Reading B: Johnson among the Early Modern grammarians

• Johnson saw himself as protector of the English language, despite its variable instability. No grammarian or lexicogrammarian or lexicographer had ever approached language in such a complete and documented way. Johnson had a different aim from fellow grammarians and lexicographers; he wanted to entertain as well as inform his readers. Johnson’s approach set a new standard for the authority of dictionaries: an educational tradition in which dictionaries would supply editorial comments and provide illustrative quotations that would increase knowledge.