The Languages of Nation

Attitudes and Norms

Carol Percy, Mary Catherine Davidson

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781847697820
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Teaching Language Arts
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This collection brings together research on linguistic prescriptivism and social identities, in specific contemporary and historical contexts of cross-cultural contact and awareness. Providing multilingual and multidisciplinary perspectives from language studies, lexicography, literature, and cultural studies, our contributors relate language norms to frameworks of identity beyond monolingual citizenship - nativeness, ethnicity, politics, religion, empire. Some chapters focus on traditional instruments of prescriptivism: language academies in Europe; government language planners in southeast Asia; dictionaries and grammars from Early Modern and imperial Britain, republican America, the postcolonial Caribbean, and modern Germany. Other chapters consider the roles of scholars in prescriptivism, as well as the more informal and populist mechanisms of enforcement expressed in newspapers. With a thematic introduction articulating links between its breadth of perspectives, this accessible book should engage everyone concerned with language norms.

1 Introduction: Multidisciplinary and Multilingual Perspectives on ‘Patriotic’ Prescriptivism

Carol Percy and Mary Catherine Davidson

Research in the area of language prescriptivism is often discussed in a monolingual context and ‘has generally focused on prescriptions aimed … at native speakers’ (McLelland, this volume). The Languages of Nation: Attitudes and Norms offers a rich overview of the breadth of approaches currently engaged by established scholars internationally for considering the mechanisms by which language norms more generally emerge, especially in contexts of contact and cross-cultural awareness. Our introduction summarizes the collection’s key themes, documenting the historical and geographical persistence of prescriptivisms while revealing their contextual specificity. John Edwards’ Foreword further surveys approaches to identity and language norms. By showing that the collective enforcement of norms was as much a key feature of language and belonging in the past as the national maintenance of ‘correct’ language usage remains today, he (like other authors in this collection) contests scholarly assumptions about nationalism as an exclusively modern phenomenon.

This collection, while contributing to debates over the origins of nationalism and the nature of group identity, introduces readers to approaches from a range of disciplines, periods and languages on the question of what constitute attitudes and norms in many frameworks of collective identity. International in scope and illustratively wide ranging in approach, contributions from scholars both specialist and interdisciplinary explore the roles of cross-cultural contacts in shaping language norms, offer comparisons in language planning across southeast Asian nations and early modern Wales, track popular attitudes toward contact languages in Africa and the Caribbean, and trace the ideological forces at work as much in present-day American bipartisan politics as in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. By drawing on an interdisciplinary range of contemporary anglophone scholarship, this collection aims to introduce its readers to the ways in which linguistic prescriptivism, broadly defined, has reflected multiple identities in a multilingual world. For instance, in ‘Susu not Sousou: Nationalism, prescriptivism and etymology in a postcolonial Creole language orthography’, lexicographer Lise Winer describes how conflicts among national, anticolonial and ethnic sentiments intensify the dilemmas of standardizing spelling in the Dictionary of the English/Creole of Trinidad & Tobago. The ethnolinguistic diversity of postcolonial nations points up the politics of codifying any standard.

Traditional prescriptivism has often centred on codifying texts to explore the means by which writers and readers select and enforce national language norms. This collection is indeed anchored within historical studies of standardization and codification, which such historians as Benedict Anderson have linked with the rise of print culture, nationalism and colonialism in early modern Europe. However, some of our contributors implicitly challenge scholarly notions of the enforcement of language norms through widespread literacy as a characteristic of nationhood. Surveying the ‘Mutual preservation of standard language and national identity in early modern Wales’, John D. Phillips reminds us that medieval manuscripts could also mediate written standards. His is one of several chapters in this collection demonstrating that religious affiliations complicate simple correspondences between language and nation. As shown by both Phillips and Marina Dossena, in her chapter on diasporic Scots, religious disputes played an important part in the dissemination or maintenance of specific varieties: for instance, the desire to disseminate Protestant doctrine led English politicians like Queen Elizabeth I’s Secretary of State William Cecil implicitly to encourage the maintenance of Standard Welsh, and Scottish clerics like John Knox to use English norms for published writings. Reconceptualizing themes from her account of the early modern Grammar Wars, Linda C. Mitchell notes how northern European Protestantism was one criterion of Englishness for the Swiss codifier of English, Guy Miège. Connections between language(s) and identities are often complex.

In his Foreword defining this volume’s key concepts of ‘Language, prescriptivism, nationalism – and identity’, psychologist John Edwards contextualizes the contributions of lexicographers and academicians. In this cross-linguistic survey, Edwards demonstrates that English is distinctive in not having a state-sponsored language academy. A new piece of this old puzzle is presented by Ian Lancashire in his argument about ‘William Cecil and the rectification of English’. Whereas the Italian Accademia della Crusca (founded in 1582–1583) published an Italian Vocabolario in 1612, Cecil – by passively accepting dedications in multilingual dictionaries – thereby let the market regulate the extent to which ‘hard’ Latinate words elaborated Early Modern English. The dedication to Cecil of multilingual dictionaries exposes the principally mythical status of the ‘monolingual’ nation.

Monolingual dictionaries create and perpetuate an image of language as uniting a nation and stably conveying its values across time and space, an attitude called ‘pastoral’ in Lionel Wee’s chapter, and analyzed by him in contemporary Southeast Asia. Such myths are historicized in Martin Gill’s analysis of linguistic authenticity, and illustrated for English by the patriotic receptions of both Samuel Johnson’s dictionary (1755), and of what was originally called the New English Dictionary (1884–1928), set out in Mugglestone’s introduction to ‘Patriotism, empire and cultural prescriptivism: Images of anglicity in the OED’. In some respects, the spread of empire intensified connections between language and nation: Mugglestone’s study of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary explores the ways in which an overt agenda of descriptive empiricism could be undermined by ideologically charged configurations of ‘civilization’ and ‘savagery’, as well as by particular images of ‘anglicity’ which served to influence the representation of global varieties – and colonial discourse – in significant ways.

Opposition to foreigners is one way of forging unity. Many of our contributors confirm the function of the French language in defining the social boundary of who was truly English. Samuel Johnson’s gallophobia is reported by both Mugglestone and by Joan C. Beal in her account of ‘Linguistic patriotism and Francophobia in 18th-century Britain’. This discourse of opposition was vehemently deployed within national boundaries: the francophobia Beal describes was often directed at francophilic Britons. The role of multilingualism in shaping national attitudes and norms is further underscored by recurrent policing of immigrants’ English, here attested to in the present day by Gill and for the 17th and 18th centuries by Mitchell. Interpreting grammarians’ high expectations of immigrants, Mitchell shows how language norms are often used to exclude or marginalize non-natives within national boundaries. In contrast, Nicola McLelland’s study of grammars of German for learners in Britain reveals that variants stigmatized as errors or provincialisms in texts for native German speakers are more likely to be codified neutrally for speakers ‘untroubled by historical loyalties to a non-standard variety’. Finding a more relaxed and a more accurate treatment of variation in grammars for non-resident learners, McLelland confirms the conventional connections between national boundaries and standard languages.

Similarly prejudicial attitudes – in this case against ‘provincial’ varieties of English and their speakers – are sketched in Massimo Sturiale’s reception history of some 18th-century ‘Pronouncing dictionaries between patriotism and prescriptivism’. In the context of England’s colonization of its Celtic neighbours, the co-existence of regional and standard norms invited contrast yet provoked conflicting attitudes. Non-native codifiers like the Irish Thomas Sheridan, discussed by both Mitchell and Sturiale, promoted standard English and its unifying function, and (as Mitchell argues of Miège) ‘assume[d] a national identity in England’ by codifying norms of English. Yet especially for nostalgic commentators, ‘provincial’ norms had a kind of purity. Dossena documents a typical late modern sentiment that Scots was closer to the ‘Saxon original’ than standard English, less corrupted by ‘Norman invaders and tyrants’.

Many of our contributors show how both languages and codifying texts have crossed borders – from Europe to England, from Scotland to England and America, from Britain to India. Stable borders can change in nature, as former nations become colonies or provinces. And provincial norms can change in status beyond national boundaries, as Dossena and Sturiale confirm in their studies of Scots in America. Researching the reception in America of William Perry’s pronouncing dictionaries, Sturiale explains how ‘provincial’ language could be interpreted as either corrupting or pure. Dossena shows how for nostalgic emigrants, the non-standard language of Scots poetry might index such qualities as purity or freedom. As a former national language, Scots in the 19th century had perhaps more perceived poetical potential than such ‘barbarous’ dialects as Devon or Yorkshire.

From Sturiale’s account of the American reception of British codifying works, we see that in a postcolonial world the connections between language(s) and identity are particularly complex. In newly independent America, not everyone repudiated the idea of British linguistic standards. A London-based linguistic standard was upheld by the lexicographer Joseph Worcester, although his competitor Noah Webster’s linguistic reforms and professedly democratic attitude to the Scottish codifier Perry influentially expressed the new nation’s political self-definition in opposition to Britain. Standard English was no longer just a national language, and new Englishes indigenized in colonial contexts. Winer reminds us that, in the often multilingual contexts of former colonial countries, languages like Trinidad & Tobago English Creole can still gain status through ‘alliance’ with standard English or other languages as well as through ‘distance’ from English. These strategies are in particular tension when standardizing spelling.

These examples cumulatively show that ‘foreign’ norms can acquire identity functions beyond their original contexts. Codifying the English/Creole orthography of the former British colony Trinidad & Tobago, Winer observes that French spellings here convey both prestige and resistance to English. For descendants of slaves or indentured labourers in the postcolonial Caribbean, African languages or Hindi can positively index ethnic affiliations. Yet in postcolonial contexts, indigenized varieties of English can also acquire identity functions that are said to transcend ethnic differences. For the anglophone Cameroonians surveyed by Kouega, Pidgin English signals group solidarity and patriotism, transcending ethnic boundaries. In multiracial Singapore, as an unintended consequence of that nation’s language policy, English is not only the intended ‘inter-ethnic lingua franca and … a language for engaging with the global economy’, but seems to be serving identity and cultural functions. In his contrastive account of language policies in Singapore, Malaysia and South Korea, Lionel Wee has explored the consequences of ‘the perceived importance [of English] as a language of modernization and economic success’. In South Korea, the connection of English with socio-economic mobility has led ‘Koreans who are perceived to be too enthusiastic in their pursuit of English [to have] their “Korean-ness” questioned’.

When foreign norms index an individual’s education and/or class, they can mark or even create group divisions. South Korea is, in Wee’s words, ‘a relatively monolingual society’, but as a consequence of the international prestige of English ‘there may well emerge a class divide amongst Koreans themselves: those who speak English well and those who don’t or not at all’. In contemporary Cameroon, access to standard English marks similar internal boundaries, as Jean-Paul Kouega acknowledges in his account of ‘English and Pidgin in Cameroon’. In 16th-century England, Ian Lancashire argues that the influx of Latinate loanwords created two Englishes, one similarly inaccessible to the un(der)educated. Eighteenth-century Britons’ use of French (as described by Beal) or Scots’ use of Standard English might have asserted a similar educated status, in addition to being a political act. Considering the stereotype of Scots as spoken by porters and ploughmen, Dossena indeed notes that the opposition between regionally marked and standard varieties of English has become increasingly associated with class.

Of course, since language use is an index of a person’s social identity, even educated speakers may sometimes choose to use variants or varieties that convey a more covert prestige. As Dossena demonstrates, the Scottish poet Robert Burns chose to pose as an unlettered peasant, despite his ‘thorough grounding in English’. Sometimes such a choice has pragmatically political motives. In his account of ‘Popular prescriptivism in the politics of the United States’, Don Chapman argues that the deployment of the ‘uneducated style’ by some Republican politicians is one cause of the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon of left-wing prescriptivism. Analyzing perceived connections between education and language, Chapman explains why some professedly liberal citizens claim that other individuals’ use of language indexes their inability to govern a nation.

Different norms are often context dependent: surveying the attitudes of anglophone Cameroonians to Pidgin and Standard English and analyzing the results, Kouega argues that standard and vernacular norms coexist peaceably because their distribution is complementary. Yet conflicts between norms – written and oral, for instance – are attested throughout our collection. Considering popular proscriptions of American politicians’ public language, Chapman observes that it is difficult to impose the rules for written usage on extempore speech. This tension is particularly tricky for authors of codifying texts. McLelland notes the difficulties for the authors of any language textbook attempting to codify variable speech for foreign learners. Winer demonstrates the difficulty of lemmatizing dictionary headwords from a primarily (though by no means exclusively) oral language with input from many cultures. In postcolonial contexts, more ‘oral’ norms of writing may signal symbolic distance from Standard English and thus from Britain. Winer describes how such publicly popular symbolic spellings do not accurately reflect the etymologies revealed by scholarly research.

Many of the chapters in our collection contrast the linguistic attitudes of professional academics and the public. Edwards charts the changing roles of scholars and exposes their assumptions in both forming and challenging language norms: for instance, while Mugglestone shows that even descriptive icons such as the Oxford English Dictionary can reveal the consequences of cultural prescriptivism (and naturalized ideologies) in a range of ways, it is clear that modern scholars are far more likely now to champion ‘descriptive’ norms of usage. Contextualizing conceptions of linguistic authenticity, Gill explains how linguists have shifted from privileging the standardized writing of native speakers to the natural and variable speech of learners. Yet prescriptive norms remain popular with the public: as both Gill and Chapman demonstrate, the internet is a very popular medium for their expression of prescriptive attitudes.

In his Foreword, Edwards makes the disconcerting observation that, while linguists distance themselves from prescriptivism, they often engage in language planning: both activities, he observes, involve managing language in an ideological framework. Our collection, by widening the topic of prescriptivism to include different disciplinary perspectives and language norms more generally, demonstrates the ongoing presence of norms in work and at work in disciplines in ways which their various fields typically do not or cannot question. Representing such disciplines as language studies, historical linguistics, psychology and literary studies, our contributors find norms across languages, periods and continents. However, more than illustrating a seemingly universal enforcement of norms, these papers, we also argue, constitute a significant scholarly contribution: by juxtaposing disciplinary perspectives, our collection’s structure uniquely reveals historical, political, cultural and disciplinary contexts and mechanisms of prescriptivism.

Reflecting the complexity of the subject, the collection is organized thematically. Sub-sections are by no means restrictive in arrangement but constitute an introduction to approaches which are arranged less by methodology than by cultural perspective. By linking colonial as well as national forces to literate practices, contributions to Part 3, ‘Transmarine and Transatlantic Allegiances’ can equally reveal language biases implicit in projects of dictionary making regardless of period or location. A contribution on variation and standardization in early modern Wales in Part 2, ‘Colonialism and Literary Canons’, considers the quotidian roles of literary language and invites a postcolonial assessment which is not restricted to English and European colonial expansion in Africa, Asia or the Caribbean.

In Part 1, ‘Managing Language Policies’, our contributors engage distinct methods from linguistics and literary studies for considering formulations of national language identity in situations of language contact over a very wide range of centuries. In the first contribution, Ian Lancashire situates conceptions of the nation in language attitudes at the royal court as early as the Early Modern period. In the second, Lionel Wee comparatively analyzes the means by which state language policies in Singapore, Malaysia and South Korea uniquely address the status of English. Showing the attraction and value of foreign, unpatriotic language norms for some privileged citizens, this opening section also reveals how prescriptive practices have long contrasted literate and popular formulations of the nation and of native-ness. It also presents contrasting strategies of pragmatism for involving scholars in managing language attitudes. While Lancashire claims that Queen Elizabeth I’s Secretary of State left the standardization of Early Modern English to the market, the fate of redundant Latinisms or ‘inkhorn terms’ being sealed at least temporarily by the popularity of works by Cambridge men like Thomas Wilson, Wee suggests that some Southeast Asian national language authorities could use ‘discourse planning’ to discuss and even determine citizens’ attitudes and practices.

Parts 2 and 3 analyze how cross-cultural contact can serve to shape such behaviour. Examining norms enforced within the nation in Part 2, ‘Colonialism and Literary Canons’, John D. Phillips and Marina Dossena analyze how the literary conscription of language varieties fashions texts themselves as borders. As media for sacred and poetical texts, regional varieties of language both symbolically index and sometimes practically facilitate the proud freedom and distinctness from England that Acts of Union with Wales (1536) and then Scotland (1707) had politically effaced. Interpreting North American reviews of Scots poetry, Dossena argues that it was especially in diasporic contexts that the merely ‘provincial’ dialect became ‘crucially distinctive’ and also a symbol of increasingly multiple loyalties and new and complex identities. These studies illustrate how literary reviews as well as sacred texts renew metropolitan norms from beyond.

What happens when speakers and norms cross borders is the topic of Part 3, ‘Transmarine and Transatlantic Allegiances’. This section demonstrates the strength of the i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• 1 Introduction: Multidisciplinary and Multilingual Perspectives on ‘Patriotic’ Prescriptivism
• 2 Foreword: Language, Prescriptivism, Nationalism – and Identity
• Part 1: Managing Language Policies
• Part 2: Colonialism and Literary Canons
• Part 3: Transmarine and Transatlantic Allegiances
• Part 4: Re-defining Boundaries: Ideology and Language Norms
• Part 5: Identifying Norms and Attitudes in Postcolonial Contexts
• Part 6: Prescribing Norms Beyond Borders: Foreign Language Teaching
• Index