Mugglestone - The Oxford History of English

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Commerce in (and about) English

The citation from the Indian minute book is taken from Islam (1978: 33). Despite archives bursting with commercial documents, the English of business has received only scant attention.

Science and English

Paulusz’s greatly enhanced (1989) edition of Knox’s Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon in the East Indies is the source of the quotations on p. 349 (see, respectively, Paulusz 1989, 2: 515, and 2: xxxi). For the history of the Royal Society, see further p. 240–1 of this volume. Like the English of commerce, the English of scientiWc writing has not been given much detailed attention. See, however, Taavitsainen and Pahta (2004) and Huddleston (1971).

A various language

Long’s account of Jamaican English can be found in Long (1774: 427); Lady Nugent’s opinions on Jamaican English can be found in Nugent (1907: 132). Silliman describes his encounter with the Tobagan youth in Silliman (1812, 2: 237). Recognition of American English in Britain is fully documented by Read (2002). Ideologies of English, more broadly, are treated historically in Bailey (1991), particularly the emergence of the idea of ‘world English’. Literary representations of the post-colonial anglophone world are discussed in the inXuential book by Ashcroft et al. (1989). Important programmatic statements are found in Ngug~ ~(1986) and Jussawalla and Dasenbrock (1992).

In general, writers of vernacular humour are only slightly represented in histories of English, despite their evident value as indicators of both values and behaviour. A collection of the American humourists of the nineteenth century whose taste ran to dialect was compiled by Blair and McDavid (1983). Winer (1997: 75) is the source of the cited conversation on pp. 351–2 . The satirists of Victorian Scotland are ably discussed by Donaldson (1986) (who has also published an anthology of this ephemeral work (1989)); the quotation on p. 352 is taken from Donaldson (1989: 183). McCulloch (2004) discusses twentieth-century developments within this tradition. Both the journalists and the higher-browed writers of late nineteenth-century America are discussed by Jones (1999). The impact of American varieties of English on the world scene is the subject of Bailey (2001).

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English International, Ltd.

There is an increasingly vast scholarship devoted to the spread of English around the world; see Hickey (2004) for an up-to-date collection of essays and a substantial bibliography of this work. The role of English and its impact on some of the other languages of Europe is discussed in Go¨rlach (2002). For the role of the British Council in spreading the language abroad, see Coombs (1988), and the following chapter in this volume. Ayto (1999) provides a useful foundation for studying lexical change in modern English.

english world-wide in the twentieth century 361

ing some novel names. In 1900, for most people, English was simply English or, more fully, either the English language or the English tongue, much as it had been for centuries. By the 1990s, however, a great deal had changed and several new labels had come into wide use, most notably world English, whose earliest OED citation is 1927 (‘1927 K. MALONE in Amer. Speech II. 323/2: ‘‘He . . . warns against a slavish conformity to the dictionary, i.e., to the prescriptions of standard English, or world-English, as some people call it’’ ’) but which was in fact in occasional, limited use several decades earlier. Thus, in the 1880s, the phonetician Alexander Melville Bell published a booklet with the title ‘WorldEnglish, The Universal Language’. However, the phrase remained rare until the 1980s, by which time it was being used to mean either all varieties of English world-wide or a more or less standard international variety. Also in the 1980s there emerged two radical plural forms, the Englishes and world Englishes, and in the 1990s the phrase the English languages took a novel place alongside such longestablished ‘family’ names as the Romance languages and the Germanic languages. The closing years of the twentieth century were therefore, at least in the study of this language/these languages, a time of radical terminological innovation.

The English language (to continue with the traditional usage) has, as Chapter 11 has explored, long been known for its dialects, such as West Country and Yorkshire. Until the sixteenth century, such dialects were to be found only in Britain and Ireland but, by the eighteenth century, comparable social and regional variations had begun to emerge in Britain’s North American colonies and, in due course, American and other commentators applied the same distinguishing label to them. Prior to the nineteenth century, as other chapters have noted, language scholars—at least in conventional histories of the language—paid relatively little attention to such regional variation, often being more interested in ‘reWned’ usage and the dissemination of a ‘standard’ variety of the language. Nevertheless, in that century, in addition to becoming fashionable in the dialogue of novels, kinds of dialect also became the focus of language surveys and related studies which crystallized into a novel scholarly discipline, dialectology, Wrst used in the Presidential Address given by James Murray to the London Philological Society in 1879. This, along with philology, was one of the ancestral forms of present-day linguistics.

Until about 1970, however, there was a lack of organized knowledge about, and relatively little scholarly interest in, what had been happening, and what was continuing to happen, to English (and varieties of English) beyond Britain, Ireland, North America, and, to some degree, Australia. When such an interest did develop, it was most notably under the aegis of Randolph Quirk at University College, London, Wrst in the form of the Grammar of Contemporary English

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(1972), written with his colleagues Sidney Greenbaum, GeoVrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. This was followed, in 1985, by their Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, which drew upon the work of scholars of English world-wide as well as on the evidence of text corpora. However, whereas Quirk et al. were primarily concerned with the ‘standard’ language world-wide, Kachru and other non-Western scholars were already concerned with discussing and describing a fuller range of uses and styles, especially in territories where English was widely used but not indigenous. As a consequence of both areas of research, and others like them, the traditional term ‘dialect’ proved increasingly less relevant in the context of this kind of analysis.

As a result, many twentieth-century investigators took up the more neutral, Xexible, and safely vaguer term variety and, when talking about varieties of English world-wide, found the plural form Englishes useful—in large part because it lacked any immediate implication of superordination, subordination, hierarchy, or sociocultural primacy. However, in a mundane but real sense, in promoting this radical usage Kachru was fortunate in the name of the entity he was studying. Pluralizing English (while in the opinion of many people an eccentric and disreputable thing to do) did not create the kind of confusion that would have arisen with such pluralizations as *Frenches, *Germans, and *Chineses (if such languages had been the object of the same kind of attention at that time). Fortunately, from Kachru’s point of view, the word English was pluralizable and the idea of such plurality world-wide at least plausible. Yet the issues on which he focused at that time have been just as true for other large languages as, for example, with Quebec French (as opposed to, say, Mauritian French, and the less digestible French French), Austrian German (as opposed to Swiss German and German in Germany), and Singaporean Chinese (as opposed to Chinese in China). His radical approach prompted a great deal of discussion not only of variety in English but also in relation to other large languages. As regards English, however, the Wve following terminological areas at least proved to be of interest to scholars of linguistic variation, all of which have developed their own sets of labels:

1Geographical location, prompting such terms as African English, American English, Asian English, British English, Indian English, Irish English, London

English, Hong Kong English, New York English, New Zealand English.

2Linguistic and ethnic association, prompting such terms as Bengali English,

Chinese English, Maori English.

3Activities such as commerce, technology, education, culture, and social life, prompting such terms as airline English, legal English, medical English, Public

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School English (in the UK), and standard/Standard English generally [cf. also such parallel terms as Policespeak and Seaspeak].

4Combinations of location and activity, as with American legal English and British medical English, and including a large set containing the word standard, located either medially, as in Australian Standard English (where

Standard English is primary and Australian secondary) or initially, as in

Standard Canadian English (where Canadian English is primary and Standard secondary).

5 Usually informal and often tongue-in-cheek fusions of English with the names of other languages, providing names for what were in eVect Anglohybrids, as with: French-based franglais and English-based Frenglish; Hindlish and Hinglish as names for a mix of Hindi and English; Chinglish as the label for an informal hybrid of Chinese and English; and Japlish, Japalish, and Janglish as a range of mixes of Japanese and English (the third implying also a kind of chaos).

The wry humour that underpins the Wfth category of labels has tended to mask the social signiWcance, scale of use, and range of linguistic mixing which is highlighted in this informal way. It should come as no surprise, however, that terms of this kind have been adopted only reluctantly for scholarly purposes, although quite often there is no easy way round them: they are, indeed, part of the phenomenon itself. Hybridization of this kind has in fact been common for centuries, and has operated at various sociocultural levels. It occurred, for example, when, many centuries ago, Greek technical terms became fashionable in Latin, as with geographia (‘world writing/description’) and geologia (‘earth study’), which duly passed into French as ge´ographie and ge´ologie and then into English as geography and geology. As regards English itself, an initial wave of hybridization took place in the early Middle Ages between Anglo-Saxon and Danish that included, among many other items, that apparently most English of words: the. A second process began after the Norman Conquest in 1066, as Chapters 3 and 4 have illustrated, when English mixed with French, and began to draw, both through French as well as directly, on Latin and Greek for a wide range of cultural and technical vocabulary. Indeed, rather than being an exception, or an aVront to native culture, such hybridization is a normal and even at times predictable process, and in the twentieth century a range of such Xows of material has been commonplace. Indeed, they have often run both ways (as with English into Hindi, and Hindi into English in northern India), and have been not only useful for everyday purposes but also creative and productive.

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a debate at the start of the century

By and large, users of English who thought about ‘good English’ around 1900–1920 tended to suppose that it was much the same wherever it was used, despite such institutionalized diVerences as British and American spelling, and regardless of the casual hybridization at work in the world. They also tended to assume, notably in Great Britain and its empire, that ‘good English’ was a birthright of the upper reaches of society, whose children increasingly attended ‘good schools’. However, this expression did not refer to the greater eYciency with which some schools might be run, but only to the public schools—private fee-paying boarding schools, entirely unconnected with what came to be known as state schools: tax-supported institutions for the general population. As a consequence, the ‘good’ speech of young people in such private schools was a mutually reinforcing process undergone at a non-regional level, despite the fact that such speech ultimately derived from upper-class usage in the Home Counties (the counties around London). Such public school usage was ipso facto ‘correct’ in pronunciation and grammar, was lexically rich for social rather than educational reasons, and ‘standard’ for its social group (and by projection also for ‘the best’ speakers and writers in ‘society’, a sense of the word which, in use from 1823, did not mean the whole of British society, but ‘high society’ alone: ‘The aggregate of leisured, cultured, or fashionable persons regarded as forming a distinct class or body in a community’, as the OED conWrms).

Henry Cecil Wyld, professor of English Wrst at Liverpool University from 1904 and then, from 1920, at the University of Oxford, was one of the leading scholars of English in England over the Wrst three decades of the century. In his view, the adult speakers par excellence of ‘good English’ were army oYcers: holders of the king’s commission who spoke the King’s English in ways which, in terms of accent, revealed no trace of geographical origin. For this kind of usage he coined two terms: Wrst, Received Standard English, or simply Received Standard, then, for the institutions in which these oYcers acquired their speech style, Public School English (PSE). Wyld’s contemporary, the phonetician Daniel Jones, called the accent he chose for his model of British speech Public School Pronunciation (PSP), a title which, after discussion with Wyld, he changed to Received Pronunciation (RP), a term which had, as we have seen in Chapter 10, already been employed by Alexander Ellis in the late nineteenth century. Jones’s system, with only minor modiWcations, survives to the present day as the accent at which

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speakers of Standard English are those whose pronunciation, and language generally, least betray their locality’.4

We may note here the word betray. The following comments, which derive from two leading American language specialists a few years later, indicate, however, that the New World was already disinclined to toe such an Old World line.

Fred Newton Scott (1917): ‘In Wne, the idea that somewhere, in some linguistic utopia, there exists a standard English, which all cultural Englishmen use alike and cannot help using and to which distracted Americans may resort for chastening and absolution, is a pleasing hallucination’.5

H. L. Mencken (1919): ‘I think I have oVered suYcient evidence . . . that the American of today is much more honestly English . . . than the so-called Standard English of England

. . . . Standard English must always strike an American as a bit stilted and precious.’ 6

Scott’s and Mencken’s rejection of England’s class-centred norms and impositions has been a US theme since Noah Webster in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Nevertheless (and despite their strongly expressed feelings), their identiWcation of the term Standard English solely with stilted and precious class accents and attitudes in England did not catch on, in the USA or anywhere else. A majority of commentators later in the century, in the USA, the UK, and elsewhere, has instead tended to keep the concept ‘standardness’ distinct from any single pronunciation model, whether as the possession of a securely elevated social class or something achievable through elocution and phonetics, as in George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion (1912) and Alan Jay Lerner’s My Fair Lady, the later movie [in AmE] or Wlm [in traditional BrE] which was based on it. Shaw’s energetic and idiosyncratic phonetician, Professor Henry Higgins, it will be noted, shares a Wrst name with both Sweet and Wyld and, for an upmarket character, had as down-market a surname as Jones.

In 1919, the US phonetician George P. Krapp brought out a work titled [AmE]/ entitled [BrE] The Pronunciation of Standard English in America, which argued for independence in language as in all other things. He followed it in 1925 with

The English Language in America, in which he introduced the term General American (GA, GenAm), which oVers an alternative and American-based norm

4 H. Sweet, The Sounds of English, an Introduction to Phonetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908),

7–8.

5 F. N. Scott, ‘The Standard of American Speech,’ The English Journal 6 (1917). Cited in T. McArthur, The English Languages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 123.

6 H. L. Mencken, The American Language (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1919). Cited in McArthur (1988), 123.