5 Standardisation

Terttu Nevalainen and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade

5.1Introduction

If William the Conqueror had not invaded England in the year 1066, standard English would have looked completely different today. Not only would the enormous French component in the English vocabulary have been considerably smaller, the standard language would in all likelihood have had its origin in a different dialect as well. While present-day standard English derives primarily from the east midland dialects, as the end product of a process which began after the age of Chaucer, a standardisation process was already going on well before that time, in the tenth century. This process affected the West Saxon dialect, with Winchester as its main cultural centre. The Norman Conquest, which introduced French as the language of the government and of administration alongside Latin as the language of the church, brought this situation to an abrupt end. English effectively ceased to be a written language, with the Peterborough Chronicle one of the very few witnesses to what proved to be a futile attempt to keep the medium alive. With the exception of some local pockets where the English literary tradition continued unbroken, English was consequently reduced to a spoken medium.

The earliest standardisation attempts, which go back as far as the reign of King Alfred (b. 849–901) and even beyond, aimed at making English – or rather West Saxon – the official language, to be used as the medium of teaching and of scholarship. While previously these functions had been the sole domain of Latin, the adoption of West Saxon as the language of writing suggests that this vernacular was beginning to emancipate itself from Latin. By the tenth century West Saxon was losing its regional function, and it was developing into a supraregional dialect, which is one of the main characteristics of a standard language. Furthermore, by being used as a written language, West Saxon gained in prestige, another important development in a standardisation process. But before this process could continue any further, the West Saxon linguistic hegemony came to an end around the middle of the eleventh century.

The importance of the role played by Latin goes back to the introduction of Christianity in England at the end of the sixth century, when the Anglo-Saxons were confronted not only with a new language but also with a new medium: Latin as the language – the written language – of the church. While theirs had been an oral culture – Anglo-Saxon runes cannot really be seen as a written

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code because they were used only in restricted circumstances – the church had a long tradition of Latin writing, and this new medium introduced itself in England along with the new religion. In sociolinguistic terms this meant that Anglo-Saxon England became a diglossic society, in that one language came to be used in one set of circumstances, i.e. Latin as the language of religion, scholarship and education, while another language, English, was used in an entirely different set of circumstances, namely in all those contexts in which Latin was not used. In other words, Latin became the High language and English, in its many different dialects, the Low language. Other High functions of a language are its use as the language of the law and of literature. Interestingly, the Anglo-Saxon kings were apparently very quick to discover the advantages of the new medium, for already in the early seventh century, King Ine of Wessex had his law code put into writing. He and his council must have realised that writing down the laws of the country was a better guarantee of their preservation than the former custom, characteristic of oral societies, of handing them down in memorised form. Yet, at the same time, we see in this process the beginnings of the emancipation of the vernacular language, an early effect of the elaboration of function which the West Saxon dialect underwent by adopting at least one of the functions of a High language. It is clear that kings and governments play an important role in guaranteeing the success of such a process, by imposing the new code as it were from above, just as, earlier, the new religion had been imposed from above as well. As such, we have here a clear case of what is known in sociolinguistics as ‘change from above’, or conscious change. Another High domain of the vernacular during the Anglo-Saxon period would have been its use for literature, but it is unfortunate that the main body of Old English literature has come down to us only in the form of tenth-century manuscripts. Because most of the poetry has an oral basis, we do not know how much of it was written down prior to that time. It may well be that, in contrast to the laws, its preservation was regarded as of less political consequence, so that the need to record works of literature did not present itself. Poetry and laws simply belonged to completely different linguistic modes.

This diglossic situation was complicated by the coming of the Normans in 1066, when the High functions of the English language which had evolved were suddenly taken over by French. Because the situation as regards Latin did not change – Latin continued to be primarily the language of religion, scholarship and education – we now have what might be referred to as a triglossic situation, with English once more reduced to a Low language, and the High functions of the language shared by Latin and French. At the same time, a social distinction was introduced within the spoken medium, in that the Low language was used by the common people while one of the High languages, French, became the language of the aristocracy. The use of the other High language, Latin, at first remained strictly defined as the medium of the church, though eventually it would be adopted for administrative purposes as well. In between the two extremes, of French and Latin on the one hand and English on the other, there was a lot of French–English bilingualism, due to the fact that there were large numbers