A Social History of English

Mr Dick Leith, Dick Leith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134711444
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

A Social History of English is the first history of the English language to utilize the techniques, insights and concerns of sociolinguistics. Written in a non-technical way, it takes into account standardization, pidginization, bi- and multilingualism, the issues of language maintenance and language loyalty, and linguistic variation.
This new edition has been fully revised. Additions include: * new material about 'New Englishes' across the world
* a new chapter entitled 'A Critical Linguistic History of English Texts'
* a discussion of problems involved in writing a history of English
All terms and concepts are explained as they are introduced, and linguistic examples are chosen for their accessibility and intelligibility to the general reader.
It will be of interest to students of Sociolinguistics, English Language, History and Cultural Studies.

Part I: Emergence and consolidation

1 Languages in contact

In the Introduction we saw some of the ways in which we need to modify our conception of English as we observe its use in different kinds of communities throughout the world. The same type of adjustment must be made when we look at English across its fifteen centuries of history. In this chapter we shall outline the issues involved in the historical description of a language like English as it has been adapted to changing social functions in different periods, and as it has co-existed with other languages. The period covered is from the earliest records to the end of the Middle Ages. We shall trace the origins of English as the vernacular of certain Germanic tribes on the continent of Europe, at a time when much of that area was dominated by the institutions and language of the Roman Empire. We can use the Latin of that period, with its patterns of contact with other languages, as a model for discussing a major kind of bilingual situation, and also that particular form of standardisation known as diglossia. In describing the Anglo-Saxon settlement of what is now England, we shall see how English came into contact with the Celtic language of the Britons, and how it developed a literature under the influence of Latin. As the various kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxons created institutions and extended literacy, they came to be threatened by the Vikings, who spoke a different though closely related language. There followed two other cases of language-contact, involving different varieties of the same language: Norman French after the Norman Conquest, followed by the Central French of the Paris area after 1204. Finally, we shall see how an early form of what we can call language-loyalty surfaced in the fourteenth century, linking the English language with a patriotism based on antipathy towards France.

At no point during the period under discussion was there a standard variety of English accepted as such wherever the language was spoken. Rather we see a growing trend towards dialectal variation, as different centres of power exert their influence over local speech. We are not therefore describing English as a taught language; nor is it the case that the bilingual situations we shall discuss were primarily products of the schoolroom. We are dealing with language-learning, and language-contact, in contexts that are more informal, more haphazard, and unplanned: as peoples migrate, as armies occupy new territory, as settlers intermarry. What may strike the modern monoglot speaker of English is the relative ease with which new languages seem to have been acquired or old ones discarded.

Just as there was no norm of language during the first thousand years of England’s history, so there was no enduring political centre. Until the late Middle Ages the concept of England itself was a fragile one. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were often at war with each other, and for over two centuries they suffered militarily and politically at the hands of the Vikings. The periods of centralisation under Alfred and Athelstan were short-lived; one kingdom, Northumbria, was for centuries virtually isolated. Although unity of a kind came with the Normans, it was a unity imposed by a foreign power, through a foreign language. Long after the early period of Norman settlement was over, many of the institutions of England remained saturated with French manners, ideals, and language.

Some of the changes which took place during this period in the structure of English – its sounds, its words, its grammar – will be mentioned in the following pages, and later in the book. But we shall predominantly be concerned here with changes of a different kind. The English of the Germanic tribespeople who first encountered the Celts of Britain was not the English of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms at the time of the Viking invasions. By that time English had a written form, and was beginning to serve the functions of the developing institution of monarchy. The language had changed, that is to say, because it had been made to function in a different kind of society.

LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL FUNCTION

These considerations at once suggest the approach proposed in the Introduction: seeing language in terms of its functions, and relating language changes to changes of function. This is sometimes referred to as the sociolinguistic profile of a language. In the course of this chapter, we shall be attempting to sketch such profiles for the languages that came into contact with English until the end of the Middle Ages; also, of course, seeing how the profile of English itself changed, partly as a result of these contacts.

We have already referred to two of the most important factors: standardisation and literacy. These are so central to the sociolinguistic history and description of a language that in this book they are accorded a chapter to themselves. To recognise their importance, however, is not to say that a standardised, written language is in any way better or more important than its unwritten, unstandardised counterpart. Nor would it be true to say that languages of the latter type are inferior or handicapped. It means, rather, that the demands of speakers on their language are no more than those associated with the customary, local needs of small, technologically simple societies. A larger, more centralised society will make new demands on its language or languages, as specialised institutions – administrative, legal, religious, educational – are created. As we shall see in the next chapter, the adaptation of a language to such demands is closely bound up with the cultivation of standardised varieties and the written word.

We can see, then, that the range and kinds of functions that a language serves must be borne in mind when we describe its sociolinguistic profile. In general, languages that function in the domains of a centralised state have been described as developed, while the term oral vernacular has been used to denote languages with the alternative characteristics we have outlined. Both developed and vernacular languages can function in societies where they are the only languages their speakers need to know; and where this is the case, we can further describe them as autonomous. Thus, as a standardised, literate language of a modern state, English is autonomous today within England; but no less autonomous was the oral vernacular of the Germanic tribes who first settled here.

The notion of autonomy is important, since it enables us to describe the difference between a vernacular and a dialect. The term dialect is used in many different ways. Our description of a vernacular language may remind us of the characteristics usually associated with dialects, in that these are not normally written; neither are they used in the ‘higher’ domains of the centralised state. In fact, the term dialect has been used, confusingly, to refer to languages of this type: people have written of ‘the myriad dialects of Africa’. In contemporary England, however, we think of dialects as regional variants of a language which also has a standardised, and therefore non-regional form. The use of dialect in this sense is limited to certain ‘everyday’ domains – for instance, it is spoken among family and peer-group – but the standard variety can, in theory, be used for all purposes in all circumstances: it is fully developed, or omnifunctional. In general, then, the dialects in such a society are dominated by the existence of the more prestigious standard and are not, therefore, autonomous.

Dialects, then, can be described as undeveloped, oral varieties of a language that are heteronomous with respect to a standardised one. Unfortunately, different scholars at different times have used the term to denote different combinations of criteria, some social or functional, others more directly linguistic. In French usage, the term dialecte refers to a regional variety that has a written form, in opposition to a patois, which does not (we shall see the usefulness of this distinction throughout this book). Also, speech-varieties have been called dialects on the basis of purely linguistic similarities among them, such as shared words, similar sound-systems, grammatical patterns, and so on. Some scholars, therefore, have used the term to relate varieties that most of us would consider separate languages, and they have done this because they have drawn their lines on different parts of the linguistic continuum, as described in the Introduction. Thus, it has been said that the earliest speakers of English used a dialect of Germanic, similar in terms of linguistic structure to the other kinds of speech used by other, related, Germanic tribes. The term Germanic here denotes a kind of parent language. And in principle there is no knowing where to stop applying the term dialect, since it can be used, it seems, to relate any varieties that have some perceived linguistic feature in common. More often the line is drawn according to some notion of mutual intelligibility: when people stop understanding each other, they can be said to be speaking different languages. But this criterion is not nearly as useful as it seems. Unintelligibility can be total, or only partial; and it also depends very much on the motivation of speakers to understand each other. Indeed, some would argue that there are enough problems of intelligibility between different dialects in contemporary England to justify calling them separate languages.

Another crucial dimension in the sociolinguistic description of a language is the value placed on its different varieties by its speakers. Greater prestige tends to be attached to the notion of the standard, since it can function in higher domains, and has a written form. Developed languages, therefore, tend to be more prestigious than vernaculars. We shall see throughout this book that when developed languages come into contact with vernaculars, the latter tend to be influenced by the former. This is partly a reflection of power: developed languages tend to be used by societies that are more centralised politically, and these are usually better equipped to fight and survive in conflicts with less centralised ones. But it is also a reflection of attitudes to language. People who use a language with traditions of standardisation and literacy may develop a sense of historicity, a pride in their language’s past, and its continuity with the present. They tend to be more keenly aware of their language’s difference from other languages. They do not see their language as being under threat, and in danger of dying out: rather, they are aware of its vitality. These factors are extremely important in the modern world, when oppressed languages, such as the Celtic ones of Britain and France, and languages such as Pennsylvania German in the United States of America are being kept alive by their speakers. We shall bear all this in mind when we come to consider the status of Latin during the Roman Empire.

The prestige attached to standardised, written varieties of language is associated with the belief that they are the most correct forms of the language, and that they are perhaps the most ‘beautiful’. Aesthetic judgments of this kind are even shared by people who may be illiterate, and who have little access to the prestige variety. This is most likely to happen where a classical variety, enshrining a literature either sacred or secular, develops in a language spoken over a very wide area, and where literacy is the preserve of an elite. In such conditions, the everyday spoken varieties of such a language may diverge quite sharply from the classical one. The consequences of this divergence may be seen today in the case of Arabic. This language, to put it rather simply, has two forms: one based on an ancient, classical variety, the other on the colloquial usage of the present. No contemporary speaker of Arabic uses the form deriving from the ancient literary variety as a medium of everyday conversation. In fact, the two varieties are functionally differentiated, just as they are evaluated differently by their users. The classical form, which is considered more correct and beautiful than the colloquial forms, is used in the prestigious domains like law, religion and education, and has therefore been called the High variety of the language. The Low variety – which uses many words, grammatical constructions, and sounds that are different from the High one – is subject to great regional variation (as distinct from the ‘fixed’ classical form codified in dictionaries and grammars) and is used in more informal contexts.

The situation just described is known as diglossia and it demonstrates the value of describing languages or linguistic varieties according to the ways in which they function in society. We shall return to diglossia later, in our consideration of Latin, which, like Arabic, was once the official language of a large empire.

BILINGUALISM

People will readily acquire a second language if they need one, and if they have access to its speakers. This is particularly common when speakers of different languages intermarry, and their children grow up bilingual. In some circumstances, a first, or ‘native’ language, may not be as useful to an individual’s daily needs as a second language: this often happens when people migrate to other countries to work. And in some conditions people learn a simplified version of another language when contact with its speakers is only intermittent; and they use it for very limited purposes, such as trade. These simplified languages are known as pidgins.

Bilingualism can be of various kinds. Where one person commands more than one language, we can speak of individual bilingualism. But this need not mean that both languages are actually spoken: scholars, for instance, can be fluent only in the written form of another language, and translation from one language to another can introduce linguistic changes that are far-reaching. Such cultural bilingualism, as we shall call it, is of great importance in the early history of English.

Where a society regularly uses two or more languages to carry out its affairs, we can speak of societal bilingualism. The restriction of each language to certain areas is referred to as geographical bilingualism. In parts of Belgium for instance, French is spoken as a first language, whereas Flemish is natively spoken elsewhere; and both languages have official status. Some people, of course, will be bilingual; and in most bilingual societies, one language-group is more bilingual, at the individual level, than the other. This is particularly so in the very common cases where one language is the official one, used in High domains, and the other is relegated to functions that can be described as unofficial, where it is merely tolerated (as in the case of immigrant languages in English cities) or actually proscribed (see chapter six). The speakers of the Low language are much more likely to be bilingual than those whose first language is the High one. In such situations one language is clearly the dominant one, and we can adapt the term diglossia to describe them, and speak of diglossic bilingualism.

LATIN AS THE LANGUAGE OF EMPIRE

To anyone acquainted with the roles and status of English in the world today, a sociolinguistic profile of Latin at the time of the Roman Empire would make familiar reading. Latin was a developed, omnifunctional, autonomous, urbanised, highly standardised language. It had a classical variety which was codified by grammarians, and a writing system that could provide a model for other languages when it was their turn to require orthographies. This imperial language of a vast empire also became the language of an international religion, Christianity.

At first, the imposition of Roman rule over areas of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic heterogeneity would have led to the kind of bilingualism we have described as diglossic. Latin was the official language of High domains, while diverse local vernaculars served the everyday needs of many different subject populations. Thus, ordinary people would have been controlled in a language unfamiliar to them, as in so many parts of the world today. But it seems that this kind of societal bilingualism did not remain stable for long. The spread of Latin came to be not only geographical, but social as well. Subject peoples gradually, over the generations, acquired it as a second language, and subsequently as a first language. In short, the Roman Empire witnessed a process known to sociolinguists as language shift. The evidence for this is demonstrated by the fact that Latin formed the base of French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian as they are spoken today.

There are a number of reasons why a process of language shift took place. The Romans conquered, but also administered; and their centralised rule lasted so long – several hundred years in many places – that Latin had the chance to take root. Since it was imposed over areas of great linguistic diversity, it could also function as a lingua franca for subject peoples. And finally, there were material advantages in learning it. The characteristic instrument of Roman rule was the town (supported by the agricultural economy of the villa), and to play any part in the life of the towns, it was necessary to learn Latin. Urbanisation, then, brought new influences, practices, and opportunities to people interested in exploiting them.

The successful spread of Latin over a vast area had much in common with the extension of other international languages in the ancient and early medieval worlds. The Hellenic Empire had spread Greek in the eastern Mediterranean, where Latin never displaced it. Later, over much of the Levant and parts of Africa, Islam extended the use of Arabic, religion being a powerful agency in its spread. And it has been argued that all three languages at different points in their history have exhibited the features associated with diglossia.

When today we speak of Latin we tend to think of the literary Latin used by writers like Cicero about two thousand years ago. This is because Classical Latin, as we usually call it, is the variety most often studied: it derives prestige from the great writers who used it, and it enjoys the air of regulation and fixity conferred upon it by the scholars who codified it in grammars. But we must not forget that Latin, like any language, had different varieties, just as many Classical writers themselves could not overlook the differences that were emerging between their metropolitan written usage (described as urbanus, which later came to denote refinement) and the local (rusticus) or popular (vulgaris) Latin which was to provide the basis for Christian writings in the following centuries. Classical Latin is certainly of great importance in the history of English, but it is on the spoken Latin, not of Rome, but of the Imperial provinces, that we must now concentrate.

We have already mentioned the significance of towns to the imposition of Roman rule. In the major Imperial cities, a small elite of Roman citizens used the Latin of Rome as the official language, teaching it in schools to the nobility of the conquered peoples. A major function of all towns was to raise enough cash to pay for the standing armies that were so essential to the maintenance of the Empire. It is in these armies that we can see the conditions for the genesis of new, local varieties of Latin. Drawing their complements from speakers of many different languages, the armies fostered Latin as a lingua franca: and it is likely that the spoken Latin of the soldiery bore the imprints of numerous mother-tongues, as a process of pidginisation occurred. Similar conditions existed among the trading sectors of the towns. As centres of commerce, the provincial towns attracted a mercantile element almost as multilingual in character as that of the army, and this would have assisted the spread of a local variety of Latin among the neighbouring population.

The spread of Latin was not as even, however, as the above account might suggest. In at least two parts of the Empire, its position was to prove tenuous. In the provinces of the east, Latin did not displace Greek, the prestigious language of an earlier Empire, as an official language. And in the western province known as Britain, and especially among the highland population, it seems unlikely that the language was widely learned at all.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE EMPIRE IN THE NORTH

The subject populations of both Britain and Gaul were farming peoples known as Celts. Their society was a tribal one, and their language an undeveloped vernacular. The Celts were not literate (although they had an alphabet which they used for inscriptions) and it is probable that the British variety of the language could be understood in Gaul, and vice versa; hence, they could be said to have spoken different dialects of Celtic, if we use dialect in the sense of ‘related language’, discussed above. Under the Romans, Celtic would have been the Low language, though the pattern of individual bilingualism may have varied widely. Thus, in the remoter, less urbanised areas, monoglot speakers of Celtic may have predominated, while in the towns Latin may have been the only language used. In the areas influenced by the towns bilingualism was probably quite common.

It is impossible to gauge the extent to which Latin displaced Celtic in either Gaul or Britain. But as one of its most enduring and valued possessions, Gaul is more likely to have been the more thoroughly Romanised. In Britain, however, bilingualism may have had a strongly geographical character. Throughout the more inaccessible northern and western regions, including much of what is now called England, Celtic customs, organisation, and language remained to threaten Roman rule; whereas it is at least conceivable that in certain areas Latin had displaced Celtic. Unfortunately, we can do little more than speculate on these matters; and, as we shall see, the oblique and even contradictory nature of what evidence exists...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• A Social History of English
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Author’s preface to the first edition
• Preface to the second edition
• Introduction
• Part I: Emergence and consolidation
• Part II: Changing patterns of usage
• Part III: Imposition and spread
• Part IV: Evidence, interpretation and theory
• Appendix: International phonetic alphabet consonant symbols
• Notes and suggested reading
• Bibliography