Николас Остлер - Empires of the Word - A language History of the World

In the century after the Black Death, even royalty stopped using French. Richard II, with his deft handling of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, showed that he was quite able to appeal to a common crowd in English. After deposing him, Henry IV made his coronation speech of 1399 in English—the first of its kind, as were his son Henry V’s dispatches from the Agincourt campaign of 1415. [181]So ultimately, the Normans lost their French too, just as four hundred years earlier they had lost their Norse. The language vanished like a last ghostly reminder of their former identity, for by the fifteenth century there were no more Normans anywhere.

Also Englischmen, peyz hy hadde from pe bygynnyng pre maner speche, Souperon, Norperon, and Myddel speche (in pe myddel of pe lond), as hy com of pre people of Germania, nopeles, by commyxstion and mellyng furst wip Danes and afterward wip Normans, in menye pe contray longage ys apeyred, som usep strange wlaffyng, chyteryng, harry ng and garryng grisbittyng.

Also englysshmen though they had fro the begynnyng thre maner speches Southern northern and myddel speche in the middel of the londe as they come of thre maner of people of Germania. Netheless by commyxtion and medlyng first with dans and afterward with normans In many thynges the countreye langage is appayred // for somme use straunge wlaffyng // chyteryng harryng garryng and grisbytyng. [182]

John de Trevisa, Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden , i, 59 Original text, Cornwall, 1385; William Caxton’s transcription, London, 1482

This book has deliberately avoided much talk of distinct dialects. No language is totally homogeneous, and all widespread languages have their regional variants. But by their nature dialects have a much vaguer identity than full languages: they do not define the boundaries of language communities as wholes, but rather regional identities within them. Lacking a clear group identity, they tend to overlap, even to merge at the edges; and linguists often find it easier to speak of distinct features, such as an unrounded pronunciation of u, a verb plural ending in - en , a tendency to delay verbs to the end of the clause, or a particular choice of words, such as eyren instead of eggs , and map these across the whole language area, than to try to characterise each regional variant as a discrete whole sub-language with its own separate phonology, grammar and vocabulary. It is far easier to count languages than to count the dialects within a language.

The preferred ‘standard’ form of a language is, from a formal point of view, just one of the dialects, a preferred selection of features from among all the alternatives that are in use somewhere in the language community’s territories. Nevertheless, it is not always easy to reach agreement on which dialect should be taken as the standard. Early Modern Irish, for example, had a distinct code for courtly and literary use, which was lost when Gaelic lordship was overthrown at the end of the sixteenth century, and which it has been very hard to rebuild out of the three main varieties of the language current in twentieth-century Irish. In the history of English, it is still debated how close the language had come to having a national standard in the tenth and eleventh centuries before the Normans took over; but clearly, in the period of its re-emergence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was very difficult for anyone to decide what sort of language should be dignified with the title of ‘the best English’. And at first, no decision was made. The literature that has survived tends to show the speech style and vocabulary of the writer in idiosyncratic combinations that nonetheless usually identify him as a Midlander, a Londoner, a Kentishman, a Southerner, a Northerner or a Scot. When writing was all in manuscript, and important writing was all in Latin anyway, perhaps it mattered little that books in the vernacular were hard to read outside their local region. If a good book needed to be read more widely, someone could always convert its dialect, as the author of the Cursor Mundi did the story of the Assumption of Mary.

In sotherin englis was it draun , In southern English it was drawn

A nd turnd it haue i till our aun And I have turned it to our own

Langage o northrin lede , Language of northern folk

pat can nan oiper englis rede. That can read no other English. [658]

But the absence of a standard came to be a problem in two major areas of language use, the official and the literary. Once the sovereign and his courts again spoke English, it would have to be the pre-eminent English: but how should they express themselves in official laws and proclamations, so that they could be published, understood and acted upon, all over the land? And England was not just a government. It was a nation, increasingly felt to have a distinctive character, and a part to play in the world, and hence needing a distinctive, and distinct, voice. It was all very well to blandly name this ‘the English tongue’. But when an author got down to writing, which variety of all the English words and inflexions on offer should prevail, in the books that would more and more be known as English literature? This question became much more urgent when the printing presses began mass production of books in the late fifteenth century. Henceforth, identical copies of a single book might expect to go to all parts of the kingdom: what form of the language should appear in them to take full advantage of the new economies of scale?

This is not an artificial question of historians, put to dramatise a predicament confronting society as a whole, to which an answer emerged as if blindly. For some people it presented itself quite explicitly. Geoffrey Chaucer, in the final envoi of his poem Troilus and Criseide , written in London English in the 1380s, adds a verse:

And for ther is so gret diversit And because there is such great diversity

In Englissh and in writyng of oure longe , In English and in writing of our tongue,

So prey I God that non myswrite the , So pray I God that none mis-write you,

ne the mysmetre for defaute of tonge. Nor mis-scan you for ignorance of language.

And red wherso thou be, or elles songe And wherever you are read, or else sung,

That thou be understonde, God I biseehe! I beseech God that you be understood,

But yet to purpos of my rather speche. and in the sense meant by my earlier words. [659]

Here he is apparently as much worried about the corruption of the text that may come from copying from one dialect to another as he is for the poor reader or listener trying to make sense of the text. [183]

One possible solution that never seems to have suggested itself in England was for different dialects to become standard for different types of writing, although we have seen that this is what had happened in the early days of Greek literature, and to some extent also in Iberia, when Portuguese developed a role as the vehicle of love poetry, even in Spain. It would have been conceivable, for example, that the success of ‘The Owl and the Nightingale’, and ‘The Fox and the Wolf, two beast dialogues in verse of the thirteenth century, might have made Southern English the preferred language for this type of conceit. But nothing like this ever happened. Instead, a single dialect came to be preferred for all.

William Caxton, the first English printer and publisher, faced the problem in the most extreme form, and was highly influential in solving it. We can predict what the answer would be: overwhelmingly (as we shall note in Chapter 13, p. 529) the dialect spoken in a capital city has become the standard for its national language. Before declaring his policy, Caxton did point out the predicament: