Acknowledgements

As always, there are huge numbers of people to whom I owe equally huge thanks for their support and encouragement during the writing of this book: without them, I may well have been history. Thanks to Eva Martinez and Lucy Schiavone at Arnold for their unfailing good cheer and patience; and thanks especially to Eva for her constructive feedback on drafts of the material. Thanks also to Susan Dunsmore, the copy-editor and Alison Kelly, the proof-reader.

Thanks as always to April McMahon and to Barbara Lalla, with both of whom I had my first student encounters with historical linguistics and the history of English, and who will remain on their pedestals forever. Special thanks too to Jennifer Coates, with whom I first co-taught a history of English language course at the University of Surrey Roehampton. Our long, enjoyable hours of putting together the course have inevitably fed into the material and approaches in the following chapters. More special thanks are also due to current colleagues: Clare Lees and Janet Cowen for their very helpful feedback on my forays into Old English and Middle English, and also generally for their continued support, encouragement and friendship. Many thanks too to my students, whose enthusiasm for the subject is always inspiring and wonderful to see; thanks especially to the class who took the history of English course in 2003–04 at King’s College London and happily submitted to road-testing material for this book. Particular thanks to Fiona Parsons and Kaleem Ashraf for reading parts of the manuscript and for constructive feedback; and also to Sarah Pace, Elizabeth Drew, Mark Lane and David Campbell, whose constant offers of help and coffee are much appreciated.

Last but never least, to the host of other friends whose support has been unwavering – Judith Broadbent, Pia Pichler, Mari Jones, Devyani Sharma, Michel de Graff, Mark Turner, Bob Mills, Kate Wenham, Wendy Russell Barter, Sarah Barrett Jones – thanks to you all. And of the last group, extremely, hugely special thanks to Devyani Sharma, and also to Andrew Pitman, both of whom did everything to ensure that my life was as easy as possible when I was lost in the book, and also made certain that I came out again.

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Introduction

The story of English in a historical context or, to use the well-known phrase, the history of the English language, is perhaps one of the few topics of linguistic research which has come to have popular appeal. In Britain, for example, the BBC ran The Story of English in 1986, and published an accompanying book of the same name in the same year (second edition 1992); Radio Four broadcast The Routes of English between 1999 and 2001 with a derivative television series (and of course, book) following in 2003. Robert Claiborne’s English – Its Life and Times (1990) continues to be a popular read in its anecdotal approach to linguistic change, and David Crystal’s more recent The Stories of English (2004), although a more academic treatment of the subject, promises to engender at the very least a similar amount of interest. For many of us, then, the history of the English language has been narrated, acted and documentarized into somewhat familiar territory: there are few who do not have at least some inkling of the rags-to-riches story of the language with humble and savage beginnings which grew to become the medium of literary genius for Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton and, eventually, to conquer the globe.

As every student of the language soon discovers, however, this particular narrative represents only one (romanticized) telling of one particular aspect of a constantly unfolding story that is so enormous in its scope that it is impossible to capture. Like every living language, English is far from being (and indeed, has never been) a monolithic entity changing through the centuries in exactly the same ways, and at the same times, for all of its speakers. In fact, it is only when we begin to deconstruct the notion of what a language actually is, that we see there can be no such thing as the one history. This becomes clearer, for instance, when we consider the fact that the English language is not the holistic entity the phrase implies but instead, a collection of lects which, despite sharing a linguistic ancestry and linguistic properties, vary regionally, socially and, ultimately, individually; which possess in themselves a significant range of registers and styles; which are each constantly undergoing processes of linguistic change and being affected by socio-cultural changes which impact on their users; and which in the past few centuries have significantly increased in number throughout the world.

Such an entity therefore has histories, strands of which are typically woven together to create the stories of English which have become well known. The same process has occurred within linguistics itself: texts dealing with the history of English actually construct and narrate a history of the language, intertwining various threads to produce a coherent and chronological picture of significant and interesting diachronic change. In case this seems like a patchwork job, we should

2The History of English

note that it is in fact no bad thing: given the enormity of the subject matter, and the limited time and resources of researchers, such an approach is the only way in which any aspect of English language history can be told. However, as Trudgill and Watts (2002: 1) have pointed out (with particular reference to linguistics texts), an unfortunate consequence has been that histories of the language typically follow much the same pattern in presenting ‘a system of self-perpetuating orthodox beliefs and approaches which is passed down from one generation of readers to the next’ and are rarely ever questioned.

This is a valid, but not easily resolved criticism. Certain stories of, and approaches to, the historical study of English are now well established in academic curricula and, until this changes, are ignored at an author’s peril. In addition, it is not often possible for authors to collate and research enough primary data to begin rewriting histories of the language, and many are therefore often dependent on the resources of their colleagues. However, Trudgill and Watts’ point is an important one in that it opens up the issue of whether there are ways in which the re-thinking and/or re-presentation of material can usefully be undertaken to produce, at the very least, variation on the established pattern of English language history.

This seems an appropriate moment at which to point out that this book has no claim to having made significant changes in historical narratives of English: that is a task better left to much more expert authors and researchers. What I have tried to do, however, is consider areas in conventional histories where ‘orthodox beliefs’ and approaches could make room for updated and/or somewhat different perspectives. This particular aim, plus more practical considerations of word limits, has meant that certain topics which are typically treated in great detail in some texts receive either passing comment, or none at all, here. For example, I have not included discussion of English in America, which is covered in detail in texts such as Baugh and Cable (2002) and Fennell (2001), but have considered instead the establishment of English in other colonial territories. In addition, my inclusion of different perspectives and approaches has of course been necessarily selective, both in terms of the topic I have focused upon and the research which has been represented. Such selection has been partly a matter of personal preference and partly, again, of practicality – there is simply not enough room, or personal lifespan, available to cover every interesting paper on every topic in enough detail.

So to the following chapters. Chapter 1 (‘English as a Changing Language’) sets the general context for considering linguistic change by looking at some of the major processes and patterns that have affected English throughout the centuries, and continue to do so. Chapter 2 (‘Language Families and the PreHistory of English’) discusses the work of the nineteenth-century philologers and later linguistic palaeontologists on Proto-Indo-European language and culture and also looks at the current research by McMahon and McMahon into quantitative methods in language classification. Chapters 3 (‘Old English, 500–1100’), 4 (‘Middle English, 1100–1500’) and 5 (‘Modern English I: Early Modern English, 1500–1700’) outline a social and literary history for each period, and discuss some of the characteristic features of, and changes in, English at each

Introduction 3

point. Chapter 3, however, contains a particular focus on an Old English feature that typically engenders little discussion in histories of the language; namely the system of gender marking. Following the work of Anglo-Saxon/cultural and literary theory scholars, we explore the notion here that two competing but co-extant systems – grammatical gender and ‘natural’ gender – could be used in the Old English cultural construction, and reinforcement, of gender roles: a line of enquiry which has clear overlaps with the work of modern feminist linguists. Chapter 4 picks up a well-established debate on Middle English creolization, but attempts to apply a fresh perspective by considering the original hypothesis, as well as its established criticisms, in the light of current theories of creolization. This chapter also looks at certain ‘orthodox beliefs’ about the use of French and English in England after the Norman Conquest, and presents alternative and more current views that have surfaced in medieval literary scholarship. Chapter 5, which begins our look at English in the modern era, does not focus exclusively (as many histories tend to do – see Trudgill and Watts, 2002: 1–3), on the emergence of standard English but instead, highlights another dimension of the language’s life in this period, namely, its establishment in overseas colonies. We consider here the migration of Early Modern varieties of English to Barbados – one of the earliest colonies – and the changes they experienced through contact in this new environment. Chapter 6 (‘Modern English II, 1700 onwards’) deals with English at a time when, because of its explosive expansion into new territories as well as its burgeoning textual resources, it becomes difficult to establish a chronological and adequate history of all its significant changes and features. Histories of the language, therefore, often choose to devote consideration to changes in the standard form, and to the establishment of English in one important colony, America. While these are of course significant, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries do see the continued establishment of English-speaking territories around the world: a factor that would establish the pre-conditions for English as a global language in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As Trudgill (2002: 44) states, ‘after 1700, there is . . . no real excuse for histories of the language which confine themselves to England, or even to England and the United States’. Chapter 6, therefore, attempts to focus on this expansionist dimension of English language history in the modern period, and breaks with the pattern of the previous three by amalgamating three relevant ‘snapshots’ of English from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first looks at the rise of the prescriptive tradition in the eighteenth century and in particular, at the arguments put forward in Swift’s Proposal advocating the importance of a ‘fixed’ and stable form of English for a young and growing empire. The second considers the colonization of Singapore in the second ‘imperialist wave’ of the 1800s, as well as the linguistic outcome of such contact situations in a look at Singaporean English, in particular, Colloquial Singapore English. Finally, the third ‘snapshot’ considers some of the predictions made at the end of the twentieth century for the future use of English now that it has been established as a global language.

It is very likely that you will be familiar with some of the material in the following chapters but I hope that their combination – in particular that of

4The History of English

established and less well-known perspectives in the field – will offer something new in your journey through the histories of English. What I also hope becomes and will remain clear, is that these histories are far from over, and that many of the changes we observe in early periods recur constantly through time in new environments with new speakers and, indeed, are ongoing now. Histories of the language – of any living language – are therefore constantly unfolding, and it remains to be seen where they may end.

A final word on the material in the following chapters: each contains a number of ‘Study Questions’ that can be explored either individually or as part of group and seminar discussions. Some questions pertain to areas that I have been unable to devote much or any time to in the main discussion of the relevant chapter, but which are useful for increasing knowledge of a particular topic. All the questions necessitate further research to varying degrees and, where possible, I have included readings which will be helpful in beginning that process. Finally, the discussion of features and changes throughout the book assumes some familiarity with certain linguistic conventions, such as phonetic transcription. A list of the commonly used phonetic and other symbols is given at the beginning of this book.