ENGLISH LANGUAGE – 2° YEAR A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE Annalisa Federici, Ph.D. Textbook: J. Culpeper, History of English, Routledge (unit 11)

STANDARDISATION Some basic notions (Yule, The Study of Language, 2010): STANDARD LANGUAGE: an idealised variety of a language with no association to a specific region; the variety associated with administrative, commercial and educational centres, the press and the mass media, regardless of region (e.g. STANDARD BRITISH ENGLISH and STANDARD AMERICAN ENGLISH). DIALECT: a notion applying to features of grammar and vocabulary, as well as aspects of pronunciation. ACCENT: a notion restricted to the description of aspects of pronunciation that identify where an individual speaker is from, regionally or socially.

STANDARDISATION PIDGIN: a variety of a language that developed for some practical purposes (e.g. trading) among groups of people who had a lot of contact without knowing each other’s languages. It is characterised by an absence of any complex grammatical morphology and a limited vocabulary. CREOLE: a pidgin that develops beyond its role as a trade or contact language, becoming the first language of a social community.

STANDARDISATION FROM A LINGUISTIC POINT OF VIEW, NONE OF THE VARIETIES OF A LANGUAGE IS INHERENTLY BETTER THAN ANY OTHER: THEY ARE SIMPLY DIFFERENT. FROM A SOCIAL POINT OF VIEW, HOWEVER, SOME VARIETIES BECOME MORE PRESTIGIOUS. IN FACT, THE VARIETY THAT DEVELOPS AS THE STANDARD LANGUAGE HAS USUALLY BEEN A SOCIALLY PRESTIGIOUS DIALECT, ORIGINALLY ASSOCIATED WITH A CENTRE OF ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL POWER (e.g. London), WHILE THERE ALWAYS CONTINUE TO BE OTHER VARIETIES SPOKEN IN DIFFERENT REGIONS.

STANDARDISATION Over the centuries, the development of a STANDARD ENGLISH proceeded along different lines for speech and writing. The earliest attempt at standardisation dates back to the reign of King Alfred the Great (ninth century AD), and was aimed at making West Saxon the official language, to be used as an alternative medium – for teaching and scholarship – to Latin. By the tenth century, West Saxon was losing its regional function and it was developing into a supraregional dialect (one of the main characteristics of a standard language). Moreover, by being used as a written language, West Saxon gained in prestige, before it declined around the middle of the eleventh century (after the Norman conquest).

STANDARDISATION The ME period was one of great variety at every speech level, and William Caxton was one among those who lamented the lack of an agreed standard. Printing different versions of a book for every variety of English would have been very costly, thus Caxton needed to choose one variety which was widely understood and socially valued. The Midlands dialect was widely understood; as for prestige, the East Midlands dialect spoken in London (the centre of politics, commerce and administration) was dominant.

STANDARDISATION Reasons for the emergence of the East Midlands dialect:  It occupied a middle position between the extreme divergencies of the north and the south, sharing features of both  The East Midlands district was the largest and most populous of the major dialect areas  The universities of Oxford and Cambridge had replaced monasteries as centres of culture  London was obviously the capital city and the seat of political power

STANDARDISATION With the decline in prestige of French and Latin for official documentation, the administrative system needed an efficient medium for communication, and not a language understood by a small élite. The scribes of the Chancery of government (the country’s administrative office) adopted a variety of English that was based on London speech, but with some central Midlands elements (CHANCERY STANDARD). The final written standard that emerged lacks significant southern features, but also contains important northern ones (such as today’s third person plural forms they, them, their, descended from northern forms and Scandinavian in origin).

STANDARDISATION Thus we have an institution (the CHANCERY) producing official documents in one variety of English (the one spoken in London) then sent all over the country, which promoted the process of standardisation of language, also enhanced by printers through mass-production. Caxton set up his printing press in Westminster (1476) near the government offices, and thus adopted a London-based variety including features of the English of official circles.

STANDARDISATION Other factors contributing to the creation of a recognised national standard of written English: 1.Decline of such a prestigious language in written contexts as Latin. In the domain of religion, one important move was the Reformation and Henry VIII’s break from Rome (1534). Religious texts began to be produced in English: the first licensed English Bible (1537), the Book of Common Prayers (1549), King James I’s Bible or Authorised Version (1611). All this increased a national focus on English.

STANDARDISATION 2.From the sixteenth century onwards: growth of dictionaries, glossaries, grammar books and spelling books which CODIFIED the standard by offering authoritative consensus about the standard itself. Latin provided an important point of reference in codification, i.e. the laying down of rules for the language in grammars and dictionaries which would serve as authoritative sources for speakers. First lexicographical attempts to codify English in the Renaissance (mainly glossaries aimed at explaining meaning and settling orthography):  Richard Mulcaster’s Elementarie (1582) aimed to “gather all the words which we use in our English tung, whether naturall or incorporate […] into one dictionarie”.  Robert Cawdry’s A Table Alphabeticall (1604) aimed to facilitate the “understanding of hard usuall English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French” by way of explanations in “plaine English wordes” (first monolingual English dictionary).  Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755).

STANDARDISATION The language we use today can fall into three main categories: 1.Written (literary) standard: the result of the process of standardisation of English over time. 2.Spoken standard: the oral language that we use in formal or official contexts. 3.Popular speech or slang: the language we can use in informal contexts.

STANDARDISATION Some basic facts about these categories: It is not possible to draw a sharp line of demarcation between them: to a certain extent, they run into one another. Some interchange between one type and another is constantly going on: the written and spoken standards have been drawing closer, while words and locutions current among the masses sometimes enter the lower reaches of the spoken standard. From a linguistic point of view, each of the categories has its own right to exist; their differentiation is on a social level. Dialects are not merely a matter of geography: speakers vary in age, gender, social class and ethnicity.

STANDARDISATION As for a SPOKEN STANDARD, there is no accent (a variety of language characterised in terms of pronunciation only) matching the standard of written language, nor an accent used by the majority of people and enjoying high prestige, nor the notion of a majority form in spoken English.

STANDARDISATION However, we can talk about a prestige form: RECEIVED PRONUNCIATION (RP) or Queen’s English, or BBC English. Accents normally receive aesthetic and social judgments: from the sixteenth century, the speech of the upper classes and of the court of London was considered as a prestige form; in the nineteenth century, it was the accent of the ruling classes established through the public- school system. One effect of this was breaking down the regional associations of RP, as it was simply the accent acquired through the same education system. Nowadays, though the majority of RP speakers live in south-east England, the non-localised nature of RP is one of its features. An RP speaker is identified by social background, not by origin. In other words, it is a notion related to class, rather than geographical location.

STANDARDISATION Two other factors played a role in establishing the dominance of RP: 1.TECHNOLOGY: with the advent of radio broadcasting in the 1920s, the BBC needed to choose a spoken variety, and RP began to be used. 2.LINGUISTICS: RP was codified by British linguists in the twentieth century as the pronunciation given in dictionaries and taught to foreign learners of British English.

STANDARDISATION However, no accent is linguistically better: the correlation of certain accents with certain classes and high status is a social matter. Furthermore, today RP has less authority than it used to have in the first half of the twentieth century. It is less widely used now, and MODIFIED RP (a mixture of RP and regional features) is becoming more common.

STANDARDISATION Other accents: ESTUARY ENGLISH (an English accent associated with the south-east, especially the area along the Thames and its estuary, or Standard English spoken with the accent of the south-east of England) and COCKNEY (the accent traditionally spoken by working-class Londoners). The boundary between them is not clear-cut. Finally, the spread of English to many parts of the world has changed our conception of what constitutes STANDARD ENGLISH.