Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

  Language was not an explicit issue in the early days, before foreign domination had had a chance to spell out its effects over the generations; but when it did, it was English, and only English, which received the benefit of formal reinforcement. So when in 1366 the Norman authorities felt threatened by a resurgence of Gaelic influence in Ireland, causing that language to be used even in the English Pale around Dublin, their response was to issue (in French) the Statute of Kilkenny, which, after expressing a concern about the freedom of the Church and requiring strict apartheid in marriage compaternitie nurtur de enfantz concubinance ou de caise, ‘marriage, godparenting, fostering of children, concubinage or by amour’, curiously brackets a concern for language with proper saddle etiquette:

  iii. Also it is ordained and established, that every Englishman do use the English language, and be named by an English name, leaving off entirely the manner of naming used by the Irish; and that every Englishman use the English custom, fashion, mode of riding and apparel, according to his estate; and if any English, or Irish living among the English, use the Irish language among themselves, contrary to this ordinance, and thereof be attainted, his lands and tenements, if he have any, shall be seized and placed in the hands of his immediate lord, until he shall come to one of the places of our Lord the King, and find sufficient surety to adopt and use the English language … and also that beneficed persons of holy Church, living amongst the English, shall use the English language; and if they do not, that their ordinaries shall have issues of their benefices until they use the English language in the manner aforesaid; and they shall have respite in order to learn the English language, and to provide saddles, between this time and the feast of St Michael next coming.4

  Later, continued use of one of these Celtic languages was considered not so much a threat to the survival of English abroad as a token of dubious loyalty. So Henry VIII, though himself the son of a king who had taken power with Welsh and Cornish support, included the following in the Act of Union of 1536 (now delivered in English):

  Also be it enacted that all justices, Commissioners, sheriffs, coroners, escheators, stewards and their lieutenants, and all other officers and ministers of the law, shall proclaim and keep the sessions, courts, hundreds, leets, sheriff’s courts and all other courts in the English tongue; and all oaths of juries and inquests, and all other affidavits, verdicts and wagers of law to be given and done in the English tongue; and also that from henceforth no person or persons that use the Welsh speech or language shall have or enjoy any manner of office or fees within this realm of England, Wales or other the King’s dominion upon pain of forfeiting the same offices or fees, unless he or they use the English speech or tongue.5

  In the same year, King Henry was writing to the citizens of Galway in the west of Ireland, urging: ‘every inhabitante within the saide towne indever theym selfe to speke Englyshe, and to use theym selffe after the English facion; and specially that you, and every one of you, do put forth your childe to scole, to lerne to speke Englyshe’.6

  But five years later, the bill declaring Henry VIII king of Ireland still had to be presented in Irish both to the Irish Commons and Lords.7 Although the Norman invasions had caused use of English to spread into all parts of the British Isles, it had not thereby eliminated the use of other languages.

  The waning of Norman French

  Had the Norman and Angevin kings retained their twin domains on both sides of the Channel, it is possible that at some point there would have been enough flexibility in the social system to allow the prestige language, French, to trickle down, and become widespread all over their realm. But it was not to be. The French realm had never been able to abide the independence of the Norman kings, originally its vassals, and in 1204 King Philip II seized the opportunity to defeat one of them (King John) in battle, and so end their control of Normandy. Within the rigours of the feudal system, it was impossible for barons to maintain a divided loyalty: henceforth they must declare fealty either to the king of England or the king of France, and give up any lands they might hold in the other kingdom. In the sequel, English barons became determinedly English. Soon, as the Provisions of Oxford showed in 1258—a measure for the first time promulgated in English as well as French—they would no longer tolerate excess influence from France, even if coming from the king’s remaining fiefs in Anjou.

  … we hoaten all ure treowe, in pe treowpe pBætheo us o$nIen, pæt heo stedefæstliche healden and swerien to healden and to werien $pBo i-setnesses $pBæt beon i-makede $pBur$nI $pBan toforen i-seide rædesmen o$pBer $pBur$nI $pBe moare dæl of heom, also alse it is beforen i-seide…

  …comandons et enjoinons a tuz nos feaus et leans, en la fei k’il nus deivent, k’il fermement teignent, et jurgent a tenir et a maintenir les establissemenz ke sunt fet, u sunt a fere, par l’avant dit cunseil, u la greignure partie de eus, en la maniere k’il est dit desuz…

  …we command all our subjects, in the fealty which they owe us, that they steadfastly keep and swear to keep and to protect the ordinances that are made and are to be made by the aforesaid counsellors or by a majority of them, as is said above …8

  In England, from lack of day-to-day practice, French began to be a subject learnt at school, rather than the living language of the elite.

  Earlier, when trying to explain the remarkable linguistic impact of the Anglo-Saxons, we conjectured that English originally established itself in Britain in the wake of a major epidemic, in the fifth century AD (see Chapter 7, ‘Einfall: Germanic and Slavic advances’, p. 313). But when it comes to the effects of the Black Death, no conjecture is necessary. This plague first reached England in 1348, and returned twice more before the century was out. No sector of society was safe, but by its nature—borne by fleas on people or rats—it was most virulent in highly populated areas, among them cities, courts and monasteries. England’s population was halved, and as an economic consequence net personal worth doubled. Even those who had no assets but their own health—or survival—benefited, since labour had become a scarce resource in relation to the still-constant amount of land. The result was massive disruption of the feudal system, including a rise in income at the lower end, and an increase in personal mobility, especially from country to town, as men became in effect free to seek their fortunes away from home. Linguistically, the position of the French-speaking nobility was undercut: professions throughout society were increasingly open to merit, but increasingly all that anyone really needed to make a career was literacy in Latin and English. A sign of the times was the Statute of Pleading of 1362: court proceedings would henceforth take place in English, though ‘enrolled in Latin’.

  John de Trevisa, a curate and former fellow of Oxford, commented on the situation in 1385, taking issue with a text he was translating. Ranulph Higden had written, in his Polychronicon (Universal History) of the mid-fourteenth century, that there were two reasons for the corruption he saw in many people’s language, namely that children were taught to construe (i.e. translate Latin) into French, not their own language, and that country people laboured to pass themselves off as gentlemen by affecting French. After translating this, Trevisa adds:

  This maner was moche used to fore the Grete Deth [i.e. the Black Death]. But syth it is somdele chaunged. For Sir John Cornouayl, a master of gramer, chayngede the lore in gramer scole and construction of Frenssh in to Englysshe. And other scoolmasters use the same way… and leve all Frenssh in scoles and use al construction in Englissh. Wherin they have avauntage one way, that is they lerne the sonner theyr gramer, and in another disavauntage, for now they lerne no Frenssh ne can none, which is hurte for them that shal pass the see, and also gentilmen have moche left to teche theyr children to speke Frenssh.9

  By the late fourteenth century, then, French had been dropped as a medium of education in England as a needless barrier to vernacular understanding; there was no more presumption that any children would grow up with French. It was now a language that was only of use in overseas travel, if at all; but
there was still a feeling that a proper gentleman should make sure that his sons had a decent grounding in it.*

  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.* 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.

  Stabilising the language

  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.†

  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.10

  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.11

  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.*

  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:

  Certaynly it is harde to playse every man by cause of dyversite & chaunge of langage. For in these dayes every man that is in ony reputacyon in his countre, wyll utter his commynycacyon and maters in suche maners & termes that fewe men shall understonde theym. And som honest and grete Clerkes have ben wyth me, and desired me to wryte the moste curyous termes that I coude fynde. And thus bytwene playn, rude & curyous, I stande abasshed. But in my judgemente the comyn terms that be dayli used ben lyghter to be understonde than the olde and auncyent englysshe. And for as moche as the present booke is not for a rude uplondyssh man to laboure therin, n
e rede it, but onely for a clerk & a noble gentylman that feleth and understondeth in faytes of armes, in love, & in noble chyvalrye, therfor in a meane bytwene bothe I have reduced & translated this sayd booke in to our englysshe, not ouer rude ne curyous, but in suche termes as shall be understanden, by goddys grace, accordynge to my copye.12

  Caxton, then, claimed to be following a classic English policy of reasonable compromise. But what he was actually doing was converting texts into London English. This is clear, for example, in the passage that begins this section, where the text that John de Trevisa had originally written is set out above the version published a century later by Caxton. Examined closely, it is a fairly slight set of changes—here using they for hy, eliminating the verbal ending -ep in the plural, and replacing b and z throughout with th and gh—but it is still amazing what a difference it makes in bringing a text into the ambit of readability for a speaker of modern English, even now, some five hundred years on. Standard English, as we now know it, still bears the mark of those decisions taken by Caxton and his contemporaries.

  Once this decision was taken, the growing availability of printed literature, in concert with growing powers of literacy among the public, strongly reinforced use of the particular dialect that was being printed. It helped that the main sources of book-writing in English, Oxford and Cambridge, were also located in the same broad dialect area, often known as southern West Midlands.* Printing, once enough people could read and did read, became the first of the mass media, with the polarising, ‘winner takes all’ effects now familiar from TV culture. People inevitably learnt from the books they read how English should be written, and the King’s English thereby became the people’s English too, at least on the page. ‘The English tongue’, for the first time, was being defined.