Historical Sociolinguistics

Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England

Terttu Nevalainen, Helena Raumolin-Brunberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315475158
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Historical Sociolinguistics: Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England is the seminal text in the field of historical sociolinguistics. Demonstrating the real-world application of sociolinguistic research methodologies, this book examines the social factors which promoted linguistic changes in English, laying the foundation for Modern Standard English.

This revised edition of Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg's ground-breaking work:

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• discusses the grammatical developments that shaped English in the early modern period;

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• presents the sociolinguistic factors affecting linguistic change in Tudor and Stuart English, including gender, social status, and regional variation;

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• showcases the authors' research into personal letters from the people who were the driving force behind these changes; and

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• demonstrates how historical linguists can make use of social and demographic history to analyse linguistic variation over an extended period of time.

With brand new chapters on language change and the individual, and on newly developed sociolinguistic research methods, Historical Sociolinguistics is essential reading for all students and researchers in this area.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Issues in Historical Sociolinguistics

It is an everyday observation that young people do not speak like their parents, let alone their grandparents. Where we come from, what we do for a living and the company we keep may also be related to the way we speak. Northerners usually differ from southerners, TV announcers and lawyers rarely sound like dockers or farmers, nor do people use quite the same language when speaking in public and chatting to their friends. All these aspects of linguistic variability are of interest to sociolinguists as they set out to study how language can vary in patterned ways when it is used by individuals and groups of people in various social situations for different communicative purposes. In due course, this variation may lead to language change. It is the processes of language change that constitute the subject matter of this book.

Language variation and change have intrigued sociolinguists from the very beginning. Back in 1968, when sociolinguistics was a relative newcomer as an academic discipline, Uriel Weinreich, William Labov and Marvin Herzog drew up an agenda for the study of language change in its social context. The process consists, they suggested, of the actuation of a change in a language at a given time, its transition from one state or form to another, its embedding in the linguistic and social structures where it emerges, and its social evaluation by speakers. We now know a great deal about the trans­ition, embedding and evaluation of language changes, but the first issue, actuation, appears to defy empirical investigation. Although it is possible to come up with a number of constraints on the kinds of change that could take place in a language – for example, no language could lose all its consonants and survive with only vowels – it is hard to predict whether the changes that are possible will ever take place, and impossible to tell exactly when and where they might take place.

Although historical dictionaries furnish their entries with dates of first attestations, tracing back the actual origins of a linguistic innovation is not easy. A new word may indeed sometimes be attributed to a known individual, but even then there is no guarantee that it had not been coined earlier by somebody else whose innovation had simply gone unrecorded. Following the distinction made by James Milroy (1992) between speaker innovation and linguistic change, we will argue that it is only when an innovation has been adopted by more than one speaker that we can talk about change in the linguistic system. As Milroy (1992: 169) put it: ‘it is speakers, and not languages, that innovate’. By choosing the term historical sociolinguistics as the title of this book we wish to stress that issues to do with language use, and language users in particular, are also relevant to the historical linguist. Because no language evolves in a social vacuum, the speakers of earlier English should not be ignored when their language is looked at through the telescope of historical linguistics.¹

Suzanne Romaine’s Socio-historical Linguistics (1982a) was the first systematic attempt to analyse historical data using sociolinguistic models. Romaine studied relative markers in Middle Scots in a twenty-year period between 1530 and 1550. Her study included both linguistic and stylistic variation, which she based on such categories as official, nonofficial and epistolary prose and verse. In the last three decades the notion of genre has dominated historical studies of language variation. Their focus has been on the linguistic description and textual embedding of language changes, and they have demonstrated, for instance, that such speechlike genres as drama and personal letters are more likely to foster linguistic innovations than typical written genres, such as legal and other official documents.

In this book we will use the evidence provided by personal letters and focus on a range of external factors including the writers’ age, social status, gender, domicile and relationship with their correspondents. We are interested in a number of morphological and syntactic changes that have shaped the English language over the last 600 years. Our material goes back to the Late Middle and Early Modern English periods, ranging from 1410 to 1681, with the main focus on the Tudor and Stuart times. They furnish the historical sociolinguist with the earliest data that can be relied on in analysing language use in its various social contexts. However, before going into the details of our approach, a few words will be said about some alternative approaches that might be, and have been, used to assess the role of social factors in variation and change in earlier English.

1.1. Sociolinguistic Backprojection?

One of the methodological options open to modern sociolinguists is that they may explore their own speech communities. This was done, among others, by Peter Trudgill in his Norwich study (1974). He benefited from having native-speaker knowledge of the social factors that influenced the way his subjects spoke, and from being able to switch to the local accent himself. The situation is different when some considerable length of time separates those to be studied from those who study them. Investigating the past stages of a language, historical sociolinguists cannot safely rely on their modern intuitions about the range of linguistic variation available and acceptable to the people they investigate. Consider examples (1.1) and (1.2). In 1534, a year before his execution, Sir Thomas More wrote the following words to his daughter Margaret Roper in the Tower of London, where he was being held prisoner:

(1.1) And thus haue I mine owne good daughter disclosed vnto you, the very secrete botome of my minde, referring the order therof onely to the goodnes of God, and that so fully, that I assure you Margaret on my faith, I neuer haue prayde God to bringe me hence nor deliuer me fro death, but referring all thing whole vnto his onely pleasure, as to hym that seeth better what is best for me than my selfe dooth. Nor neuer longed I since I came hether to set my fote in mine owne howse, for any desire of or pleasure of my howse, but gladlie wolde I sometime somewhat talke with my frendes, and specially my wyfe and you that pertein to my charge. (Thomas More, 1534; MORE, 543)²

In our second example, Sabine Johnson, a London wool-merchant’s wife writes to her husband John in 1545, to inform him about the harvest and other household matters. Her letter was sent from the Johnsons’ country home Glapthorn in Northamptonshire to the port town of Calais, part of England at the time, where John often went on business.

(1.2) Whan Willyam Lawrens doyth com, I well send Haryson, hoye doyth mistrust hym to be crafty, wherefore I well not trust hym noy farther than Haryson doyth geve me counsell. All thynges shal be provyded for harvest, with the which the Parson well nout be content, for I thynke if anybodye wold by thay … he wold sell it, for he haith sold the tythe melke allredye, and hath made awaye vj or vij tythe calveis. (Sabine Johnson, 1545; JOHNSON, 289)

Looking at (1.1), a modern reader will be struck by a number of unfamiliar features in the language of this famous humanist who served as King Henry VIII’s first secretary and Lord Chancellor, and had studied at the University of Oxford and in the Inns of Court in London. However, what makes More’s English appear strange in the twenty-first century is not necessarily his vocabulary – with the possible exception of fro ‘from’ (cf. to and fro), the words in (1.1) are familiar to a modern reader. Part of the strangeness is caused by his spelling, which, despite being fairly regular, differs from the modern standard. More systematically writes, for instance, <u> instead of <v> word-medially (haue, neuer), and restricts <v> to word-initial position (vnto). It should, however, be added that the passage has been rendered easier to read by Elizabeth Rogers, the editor of More’s writings, who modernized his capitalization and punctuation for the benefit of modern readers.

The editor of the Johnson correspondence, Barbara Winchester, similarly modernized Sabine Johnson’s punctuation and use of capitals. Sabine Johnson had not received any formal schooling, and Winchester assumes that she had only learned to write as a young adult. To a modern reader her spelling looks less regular than More’s, to the extent that some familiar words might not be immediately recognizable (e.g. doyth ‘doeth’, well ‘will’, hoye ‘who’, noy ‘no’, nout ‘not’, by ‘buy’ and haith ‘hath’). Thay in if anybodye wold by thay combines the definite article the and hay, which has lost its initial /h/. Tythe melke (‘tithe milk’) and tythe calveis (‘calves’) refer to tithes on livestock to be paid to the parish.

Perhaps the main reason for the mixed feelings present-day readers may have about More’s language is his grammar. More inverts his word-order after adverbials like thus and gladly (thus haue I; gladlie wolde I). He uses mine instead of my before own (mine owne good daughter; mine owne howse). He avoids the possessive form its of the personal pronoun it and resorts to a periphrasis with thereof (the order therof). His indefinite pronoun for ‘everything’ is all thing. He systematically attaches the suffix -(e)th, and not -(e)s, to verbs to signal the third-person singular present indicative (that seeth; my selfe dooth). Finally, More surprises his modern readers by using multiple negation (nor neuer longed I) and omitting the auxiliary do in a negative clause – something a middle-aged Englishman with university education would not be expected to do today, not even in his private correspondence.

In Sabine Johnson’s passage we find some of the same features as in More’s: she, too, uses multiple negation (not trust hym noy farther) and the suffix -th in the third-person singular present indicative (doyth, haith). Where More fails to use the auxiliary do in a negative sentence, Sabine Johnson would appear to overuse it in affirmative contexts, in (1.2) as many as three times in the first sentence. Her variant for the indefinite pronoun ‘everything’ is all things, and besides the relative pronoun who she also uses the which.

One conclusion we might draw on the basis of these data is that the English language of an educated man in the early sixteenth century must have been very different from what it is today. A number of the features used by More would be considered simply ungrammatical if judged by the norms of Present-day Standard English. They include most of his word-order inversions and non-use of the auxiliary do in negative clauses with no other auxiliary. As they do not look like performance errors on More’s part, their grammatical status cannot have been the same as today. Moreover, features such as multiple negation were evidently not branded and socially stigmatized in the early sixteenth century the way they are today. On the stylistic side, More’s context of writing – a father writing to his favourite daughter – would suggest to a modern reader that the third-person suffix -(e)th could not have been regarded as archaic at the time, and that there need not be a poetic tinge in More’s systematic use of the long possessive form mine before owne.

Had we not looked at More first, we might perhaps have put Sabine Johnson’s use of multiple negation down to her lack of education. This modern interpretation would have been supported by the evidence of [h]-loss in thay (‘the hay’). However, there would have been counterevidence as well. If Sabine Johnson was uneducated, how to interpret her use of the third-person -(e)th? It could hardly have been read as a sign of literary or archaic usage, unless we thought of it as a dialectal feature. Similarly, the literary-sounding compound relative pronoun the which would have been incongruous with our initial line of reasoning and assumptions as to what to expect of the language of an uneducated person. Present-day social evaluations clearly do not make much sense with historical data.

We may now begin to bridge the temporal gap between the present day and the early sixteenth century by presenting some general questions. They include the following:

1. When and where did such forms as -(e)th, shared by Sir Thomas More and Sabine Johnson, get replaced by those used today?

2. How did these new usages gain popularity and spread in the language community?

3. Who were the people who promoted them, and what was their social status?

4. How did the evaluation of these usages, old and new, change over time? For example, how did a feature so widely spread in English around the world today as multiple negation become stigmatized?

These questions largely correspond to those raised by Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968). The first two are concerned with the transition and diffusion of changes in the community, the third with their embedding in society, and the fourth with their social evaluation. While in agreement in theory, historical and present-day studies usually approach the time factor differently at the empirical level. A historical sociolinguist will normally begin by charting the time course of the process studied, and then proceed to describe its social embedding in the course of time. This is rarely what happens in present-day studies. They typically analyse linguistic variation as it is displayed by different gener­ations at one point in time, the present. Any differences in their distributions of linguistic features may, but need not, be interpreted as changes in progress, frequently with the younger generations leading the process.

As these present-day patterns are synchronic, or ‘apparent-time’, phenomena – and not diachronic and ‘real-time’ – their social evaluation in the speech community is expected to be constant. Speech communities may even frequently be defined by referring to shared speaker evaluations of linguistic features (see Labov 1972; Romaine 1982b). When it comes to standard languages, these shared views extend to the entire community of speakers of a given language. So multiple negation is one of the most heavily stigmatized features throughout the English-speaking world. But as we have seen, social evaluations cannot be expected to remain constant across time, and modern consensus views are not useful in explaining the social evaluation of past forms of a language. Historical answers to our embedding and evaluation questions need to be looked for elsewhere.

1.2. Contemporary Perceptions of Usage

It is obvious that present-day intuitions will not serve as secure guidelines for interpreting historical data in social terms. Historical sociolinguists may therefore look for contemporary comments on earlier usage to place their inter­pretations on a firmer footing. These accounts are invaluable in that they provide first-hand information on how linguistic variation was perceived by contemporaries. Comments on Tudor English come from a mixed variety of sources ranging from prefaces to early printed books by William Caxton, and handbooks on classical rhetoric by Thomas Wilson (1553) and George Puttenham (1589), to treatises by sixteenth-century spelling reformers led by John Hart (1569). In the seventeenth century, comments on language variation and use begin to appear in monolingual dictionaries and grammars, and in works of eminent literary figures like John Dryden and Jonathan Swift. The market is finally flooded with normative grammars in the eighteenth century.³

First-hand though they may be, contemporary comments also have their problems as sources of sociolinguistic evidence. The information they provide is patchy at best: the earlier the period, the thinner the coverage. The well-known passage in Puttenham (1586) on ‘the best English’ and regional variation hardly fills one whole page, and Gil’s (1619: 15–18) equally famous description of regional variation no more than four. As many areas of variation are merely mentioned in passing or anecdotally, no far-reaching generalizations can be based on them. One such issue is gender variation in language use. In The Gouernour (1531), Sir Thomas Elyot has this general comment to make on women’s speech forms as an influence on the pronunciation of noblemen and gentlemen’s children:

(1.3) the nourises and other women aboute hym … that they speke none englisshe but that which is cleane, polite, perfectly and articulately pronounced, omittinge no lettre or sillable, as folisshe women often times do of a wantonnesse, wherby diuers noble men and gentilme...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface to the second edition
• Preface to the first edition
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• 1. Introduction: Issues in Historical Sociolinguistics
• 2. Sociolinguistic Paradigms and Language Change
• 3. Primary Data: Background and Informants
• 4. Real Time
• 5. Apparent Time
• 6. Gender
• 7. Social Stratification
• 8. Regional Variation
• 9. Historical Patterning of Sociolinguistic Variation
• 10. Language Change and the Individual
• 11. Language Change: Transmission and Diffusion
• 12. Conclusion
• Appendix I: Methodology: How to Count Occurrences?
• Appendix II: Numerical Information
• Appendix III: The Letter Collections
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index