The Language Wars Read online

  The grumblers, fault-finders, quibblers and mud-slingers frequently profess their passion for English. ‘I care about English deeply, and I won’t tolerate your use of this vile word,’ says one. Another claims, ‘I love the language too much to let this solecism pass unremarked.’ They have a funny idea of love. Yet the descriptive approach does not provide a perfect alternative. Descriptive grammars are large, complex and in many cases astonishingly expensive. More to the point, they do not supply decisive, straightforward answers to the problems of everyday usage. These perceived problems may be rejected by the descriptivist as chimeras. But they feel uncomfortably real.

  It is often claimed that the study of English began in the nineteenth century. There are good grounds for this: there is scant evidence that English literature or the history of the language were taught to young people before about 1820. However, close attention was paid to the mechanisms of the language long before that. Ian Michael, a historian of education, states that ‘Formal teaching of the English language intended, in part at least, for schools, is apparent from 1586’.10 Self-consciousness about English usage dates back further than this.

  Tellingly, many early books dealing with grammar were packaged as self-help manuals. A volume dealing with writing skills might also instruct its readers about the best way to keep business records, cure a nosebleed or prune a fruit tree. So, for instance, William Mather’s Young Man’s Companion of 1685 explained how to cure madness (by holding the mad person underwater ‘a little and often’ and then administering sneezing powder), soften stiff eyelids with deer suet, and cure a sore throat with a plant unhappily known as Dogs-Turd.11 Mather’s book began with guidance on pronunciation, homophones, and how to use punctuation.

  We are all familiar with the experience of judging people by the ways they speak: we understand that these convey information to us. Schemes of self-help have frequently involved the development of grammatical confidence. William Pearson’s The Self-Help Grammar of the English Language (1865) is singular only in being quite so explicit about its conflation of the two concerns.

  As far back as we can see, grammatical failings have been associated with moral ones, and those whose grammar has publicly been found faulty – typically in a classroom – have associated grammar with humiliation. To abuse language has been to risk excommunication. St Augustine of Hippo wrote in his Confessions, ‘O Lord my God, be patient … with the men of this world as you watch them and see how strictly they obey the rules of grammar which have been handed down to them, and yet ignore the eternal rules of everlasting salvation.’ More than 1,500 years after Augustine’s death, this still feels apt. People bicker over the rules of English, complaining that Elvis Presley should say ‘I’m all shaken up’ rather than ‘I’m all shook up’, or arguing, less facetiously, that ‘From where do you come?’ is superior to ‘Where do you come from?’ They do this instead of struggling to observe what Augustine calls the eternal rules, because, in prospect at least, the fight for English looks easier to win.

  3

  The emergence of English

  Chaucer, Caxton, Cranmer

  Between the Norman Conquest and the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the status and character of English were passionately disputed. Arguments about the language mainly concerned its worth, not the little details of ways in which it was used. It was common to ask which purposes English suited. Today we might answer that it is suitable for all purposes, but until the Renaissance there was a narrow sense of the language’s potential.

  We like to think of English as an old language, but it is not. The origins of a spoken language cannot be pinpointed, so in making claims about the relative ages of languages we are in fact comparing the ages only of the literatures associated with them. Nevertheless, we can say that even within the British Isles there are living languages older than English – the most robust of these being Welsh – while the oldest European language is probably Basque.

  A very brisk summary of English’s early history may be helpful here. English originated in dialects brought to Britain by Germanic settlers in the fifth century. We know little of how these dialects established themselves. However, it is clear that they all but eliminated the Celtic languages previously spoken in Britain. The arrival of Christian missionaries at the end of the sixth century led to the development of a form of writing based on the Roman alphabet, and in due course Catholic monasteries were the main centres of (Latin) scholarship and education. From the end of the eighth century, several waves of Viking settlers introduced new elements to English. Under King Alfred, at the end of the ninth century, there was sturdy resistance to the Vikings. By then one Germanic dialect, West Saxon, was dominant, and Alfred vigorously promoted it. The Scandinavian connection remained, though, and became especially important between 1016 and 1042 when England had, in succession, three Danish kings. Soon after this, in 1066, came the Norman Conquest. This forced English into a position of subservience, from which it did not ascend till the fourteenth century.

  Our concern is the manner in which English reasserted itself after this period of repression. The development of a standard form of written English spanned the period from 1300 to 1800, mostly happening between 1400 and 1660. This summary is of course crude, not least in implying that by 1800 everything was in immaculate order. The story of standardization is matched – almost – by a countervailing story of dissolution, dissent and dissonance. Convergence, once achieved, creates opportunities for divergence. David Crystal’s excellent book The Stories of English provides an account of the language that, starting with its very title, makes clear that the orthodox history and the history of orthodoxy are parts of a larger, kaleidoscopic variety of stories (which are stories of variety). Nevertheless, we can say that during this central period from 1400 to 1660 the image of English altered dramatically; the language went from seeming quite precarious to being approved and applauded. In this phase, we can see two important features of English being established: use of the language is intimately linked to a sense of nationality and national purpose, and people’s experience of using it is fraught with insecurities.

  In 1300, French was the language of administration in England. But the linguistic climate was changing. This hastened with the outbreak in 1337 of what came to be known as the Hundred Years War. Already English poets and chroniclers, celebrating the stable and united kingdom of Edward I and condemning the disastrous reign of his successor Edward II, had endeavoured to project an idea of England and Englishness that was grounded in the English language. This they represented as something robust and clear-cut, bearing witness to the Anglo-Saxon ancestry of the people, and anchoring their patriotism and ethnic solidarity.1 Now French was the language of the enemy, and, while it remained useful in many careers, antagonism towards France was a fillip to English.

  Beginning in 1348, the Black Death killed about a third of Britain’s population. The peasants who survived found that labour was scarce; workers could command higher wages and, if unhappy with the way their masters treated them, knew they could quit their district and find employment elsewhere. As many peasants rebelled against the established labour laws, they craved a voice in government. English was their language of protest. From around 1350, the language was used in schools. In 1362 the Statute of Pleading was enacted, and English became the language of legal proceedings – although records still had to be kept in Latin, and French was not completely eradicated from the legal profession until 1733. These dates mark key moments in the emergence of English, and by the end of the century the Cornishman John Trevisa could claim that children at grammar school knew no more French than their left heel did.

  While the language of texts dating from the Middle English period (roughly 1100 to 1500) looks alien to us now, the attitudes to how authors should use the language are familiar. There were areas of broad agreement. Writing should be carefully structured, making dignified use of balance, and slang and archaisms ought largely to be avoided. The adoption of strange for
eign words should be limited. It was normal, also, to say that writing should please the ear. We still hear this today, though of course what pleases my ear may distress yours.

  People who wrote in English were apt to beg pardon for doing so. A note of apology can be heard in the works of even the most confident contemporary authors. Chaucer acknowledged the problems arising from English’s poor scope for rhyme and its lack of sophistication. He presented himself as the man to save the language and shape it. As authors such as Chaucer and William Langland developed a vernacular literature, and as the daily use of French and Latin diminished, English was employed for tasks it had not previously performed. The efforts of Chaucer and his fellow experimenters were part of a turbulent repositioning of the language.

  The central role of Chaucer in this period has led some to speak of him as the father of English. This is an overstatement, but it is easy enough to see how it has come about. He might easily have chosen to write in French, and may indeed have done so in the early part of his career. His friend and fellow poet John Gower wrote in both French and Latin, before turning to English for his masterpiece, Confessio Amantis. Chaucer’s decision to use not the languages of the cultural elite, but instead English, was bold. After all, he was writing works to be performed before a coterie of courtly associates, rather than targeting a large public. After his death, as his poetry circulated widely in manuscript, he was anointed as the inventor of English as a literary language.

  Chaucer expressed concern about the diversity of English – regionally and socially – and worried that scribes would mar his texts. But he also revelled in the potential for variety, which was fertile ground for a poet. In Middle English the range of regional variations is obvious. It existed because the language the Germanic settlers brought to Britain had itself exhibited some variation. The parties of settlers, who migrated in several waves, took different forms of the language to the different places where they established new bases. Subsequent influences on English, by Vikings and Normans, varied from place to place rather than having uniform effects. In the Old English period there were four major dialects: Kentish, Mercian (spoken from the Thames to the Humber), Northumbrian and West Saxon. By the Middle English period the picture had not changed greatly, and the standard division – which does not of course allow for subtleties of shading – marks five dialects: South-Eastern, South-Western, East Midland, West Midland and Northern. These large divisions make sense to us still. But in the Middle English period they were evident in writing as well as in speech. There is a clear gap between the Northern dialect of the Cursor Mundi, a religious text produced at Durham, and the East Midland dialect of the Lincolnshire monk Orm. Writers used their dialects without self-consciousness. Local ties were strong, and there was little sense of a need to conform to a nationwide standard; the very idea of something ‘nationwide’ would have seemed outlandish.

  The dialect used in Chaucer’s works was London English. Because of the large-scale fourteenth-century immigration into London of literate men from the East Midlands, London English had a distinctly East Midland character. By contrast, the unknown author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, writing at about the same time as Chaucer, used the West Midland dialect, which Londoners found difficult. To a modern audience, the language of Gawain poses greater challenges than that of The Canterbury Tales. The popularity of Chaucer’s writings helped formalize London English. It also consolidated national identity. Another factor in raising consciousness of English was the spread of the scriptures in English, beginning with the translation inspired by John Wyclif in the 1380s. Wyclif’s acolytes produced a version of the Bible that circulated widely in manuscript. It was viciously decried and suppressed, with opponents protesting that ‘The jewel of the clergy has become the toy of the laity’.

  Meanwhile the political status of English was changing. Henry IV, who seized the throne in 1399, was the first English king since the eleventh century to have English as his mother tongue, and he used it when claiming the Crown. At this time, official writing was done in either Latin or French. Under his son, that changed. When in 1415 Henry V inspired a significantly outnumbered English army to victory at Agincourt, the success legitimized his kingship in the eyes of his subjects. Agincourt provided an opportunity for favourable publicity, and two years later Henry found another way to achieve this: having previously conducted his correspondence in French, he chose for the first time to write his letters home in English. This was a premeditated move. It was undoubtedly calculated to stimulate national feeling, and it affected the practices of London’s guildsmen, who began to use English for their own documents. English was used alongside French by the London pepperers as early as 1345, and London’s brewers resolved in 1422 to note down all their affairs in their mother tongue, a language which they felt ‘hath in modern days begun to be honorably enlarged and adorned’.2

  As a greater number of important documents were written in English, the inconsistencies of English spelling became a source of anxiety. Did one write of a knight, a knyght, a knyht, a knict, a knith or a cniht? There had in fact been a pretty rigid system of spelling in the early eleventh century, thanks to the successful efforts of West Saxon scribes, but, although demand for books was high, the number produced at that time was not great. The West Saxon standard held on for nearly a century after the upheaval of the Norman Conquest, but eventually collapsed. The monk Orm, writing in the twelfth century, was an exceptional and particularly dogged exponent of spelling systematically. When a syllable ended with a consonant and contained a short vowel, he doubled the consonant that followed the vowel: he wrote and as annd and under as unnderr. It looks odd, but he was scrupulously consistent. Others were not. The stabilization of spelling was actively pursued again only in the fourteenth century, at a time when writing materials suddenly became much cheaper.3

  According to the established histories of English, in the early part of the fifteenth century there were institutional efforts to promote a standard, consistently spelled form of English. It is orthodox to say that, beginning around 1420, government cultivated an artificial standard form of written English. Supposedly it had attained maturity by 1430, and was used, for reasons of functional efficiency rather than prestige, in the records kept by scribes in the offices of the Court of Chancery. Some accounts enlarge on this, noting that this standard emerged from four sources: not just Chancery, but also the offices of Parliament, the Signet and the Privy Seal. The problem here is that, having become a familiar part of the story of English, this version of events is rarely examined. Its reception is symptomatic of the way myths about language get recycled. An article published in 1963 by M. L. Samuels is commonly treated as the definitive account of Chancery Standard. Its arguments have repeatedly been amplified.

  While the orthodox story is not a grotesque misrepresentation, it is not true that the Court of Chancery was the centre of a rigorously planned attempt at standardizing written English. It comprised about 120 clerks responsible for producing legal documents, and there is some evidence of what one might call a house style. Among other things the clerks mostly spelled should without a c (previously it had been schould), any with a rather than o as its first letter, and adverbs with -ly at the end rather than a variety of endings such as -li and -lich. They also favoured the spellings such, not and but, where earlier writers had used swich, nat and bot. But their style was a matter of fashion rather than policy. It seems likely that the Chancery clerks, rather than being trailblazers, were copying and approving forms that were already in use. In any case most of Chancery’s writs were in Latin, not English.4

  Nevertheless, by the time William Caxton set up his famous printing press at Westminster in 1476, a move towards uniformity was under way. Caxton was a transmitter rather than an innovator, an entrepreneur rather than a scholar. His most astute move was to publish only in English. After all, printed books in other languages could already be imported from the Continent. Books in English were also being printed abroad
, but as an Englishman Caxton had an advantage over the printers of Bruges, Cologne and Paris when it came to selling English-language books in the English marketplace. Caxton’s main concern was to run a profitable business, and it was important to produce books that would sell well over a long period. He recognized that unless the English language were better governed it would not be adequate for good translations of works in French and Latin, and that stabilizing English would help extend his books’ commercial life.

  Having spent, so he said, thirty years abroad, Caxton was struck on his return to England by what he saw as a north–south divide. He worried also about his contemporaries’ affection for ‘curyous termes’, and was conscious that his roots in Kent had accustomed him to what he called ‘brode and rude’ English – rude at that time meant ‘inexpert’ or ‘uneducated’ as well as ‘impolite’. While he was not the first to perceive the differences, he used them to justify making an effort towards standardization. Noting that London English was the most popular written form, he made the decision to print his texts accordingly; the books he published perpetuated the forms of English used by government administrators. So, for instance, when he released Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur in 1485 he tweaked Malory’s Midland forms to make them conform to southern usage. In The Description of Britayne (1480) and in his prologue to Enyedos (1490) he discussed the difficulties of this practice.