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direction in which do was heading. Rissanen (1999b), moreover, has found that the first Acts of Parliament which were written in English in the 1480s reflect the language of the chancery but still show a large degree of variation. This suggests that the primary aim of standardisation, the suppression of optional variability in language, was not achieved all at once. This is a topic that we shall return to in Section 5.3, below.
What the standardisation process has in fact led to is the creation of a relatively focussed variety of the English language which is used as the written medium and as a medium felt to be appropriate to formal contexts. That this variety had its basis in the East Midland dialect is a matter of historical and geographical accident. If English kings had continued to travel around the country, or if they had settled their court elsewhere in the country, another Middle English dialect might well have been selected. And if the Norman Conquest had not happened, this would quite possibly have been West Saxon.
5.3A general and focussed language?
5.3.1 |
Introduction |
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In the previous sections we looked at the process of standardisation from an institutional perspective. Institutions such as the chancery had a leading role to play in setting linguistic models for others to follow. But the existence of such norm-setters did not mean a wholesale adoption of these norms by other institutions, let alone by the language community as a whole. Chancery forms were not followed, for instance, by the scribes copying the manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the fifteenth century, who continued to use the ‘colourless’ written language, a dialectal mixture of non-chancery forms, that had been well established in late Middle English. Even by the last quarter of the fifteenth century, these scribes had not adopted chancery forms for common items like these, their, given and through (Smith, 1996: 73–5). Although these Chaucer manuscripts show considerable variation in usage, they were written in a levelled dialect which shows no particular dialectal distinctiveness.
The chancery documents, too, contain a range of variation both in spelling and in morphology, alongside their preferred or majority forms discussed in Section 5.2.2. Spelling was the less regular of the two. Fisher (1996: 50) mentions that variation between non-distinctive pairs like i/y, u/v, u/w, ou/ow, and the presence or absence of final -e, could vary from word to word. It is obvious that even recognised institutional norms were far from fixed at the time. To explore this matter further, we shall adopt the term focussing, which is used by sociolinguists to refer to a high level of agreement in a language community as to what does and what does not constitute ‘the language’ at a given time (Trudgill, 1986: 86). Language communities differ considerably as to how much variation is tolerated in a given domain of language use and, conversely, how fixed the norms are to
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which speakers and writers are expected to adhere. In late medieval England these norms were clearly more diffuse than today.
To put the standardisation processes on a more concrete footing we also need to assess how and to what extent local and regional norms were replaced by supralocal ones in the course of time. Supralocalisation is here used as an umbrella term to refer to the geographical diffusion of linguistic features beyond their region of origin. When supralocalisation takes place, it typically results in dialect levelling, loss of marked and/or rare elements. In this respect it achieves the chief goal of standardisation, to reduce the amount of permissible variation. However, and this should be stressed, many processes of supralocalisation in English, both today and in the past, have been induced naturally by dialect contacts without any conscious effort towards producing an official standard language. This was already the case with the ‘colourless regional language’ of late Middle English. In the early modern period, non-localisable dialects were called the ‘usual’, ‘customary’ or ‘common’ language by contemporaries. In his Logonomia Anglica (1619), Alexander Gil combined regional and register criteria when dividing the dialects of England into ‘the general, the Northern, the Southern, the Eastern, the Western, and the Poetic’. His ‘general’ dialect is specifically identified as the language of ‘persons of genteel character and cultured upbringing’ (1619 [1972], vol. 2: 102, 104]). What Gil had in mind were the sociolects spoken by the wealthier sections of the population, particularly in the region around the capital.
As noted by J. Milroy (1994: 20), standardisation is often facilitated by the prior development of suitable supralocal norms, being, as it were, superimposed upon them. But as standardisation is a long-term process and involves centres of focussing that themselves are liable to be modified with time – for instance, as a result of migration and changes in dialect input – the norms that are codified as standard combine features from supralocal and focussed usages of various origins. In many respects, standard English therefore constitutes a composite dialect. The chancery forms of such and their are now part of standard English, not the levelled regional forms swich and hir found in the majority of the Canterbury Tales texts. Their, however, is not a native southern dialect form, but a northern one. The preferred chancery forms themselves are representative of various dialects. There are two explanations for this: the language spoken in London at the time was based on the southern dialect as modified by immigrants – as discussed in Section 5.2.2, many chancery clerks came from the northern counties – and the new official language was itself an amalgam of earlier written norms (Fisher, 1996: 50–1). Our aim here is to outline some of the major processes of supralocalisation and focussing that have shaped the norms of standard English at various levels of the language from the early Modern English period until the present day.
Standardisation presupposes focussing, but the relation between the two is not a simple one. It continues to be regionally and chronologically complicated by the fact that English is what Romaine (1998: 27) calls a ‘pluricentric’ language, ‘one whose norms are focussed in different local centres, capitals, centres of economy, publishing, education and political power’. Some aspects of the language were
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generalised throughout the country, and later on globally, becoming part of the standard language in all registers, in both speech and writing. This is, however, not the case with all aspects, but ‘competing magnets of prestige’ – to use a phrase coined by Smith (1996: 65) – continue to exert their influence to varying degrees in many areas of standard language use. To see how non-localisable norms actually became a codified part of standard English as we know it today, it is useful to consider spelling, grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation separately, because they showed different degrees of focussing when the various stages of standardisation were being implemented.
Looking at processes of standardisation on these various linguistic levels, we find the regularisation of public spellings at the focussed end at an early stage. Printing-house practices were largely fixed in the course of the seventeenth century. Grammatical features, too, were focussed, but not to the same degree in the early Modern English period. A distinctive element in the history of standard English grammar is register-specific focussing: written registers typically come at the focussed end, with fixed norms, while many spoken registers, casual conversation in particular, allow more variation. Finally, despite the many references to a common southern usage in the sixteenth century, the national pronunciation norm (variously referred to as RP or Received Pronunciation, Oxford English, the Queen’s English or BBC English) reached the more focussed end of the scale in England only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Spelling reforms had been advocated already in the sixteenth century by John Hart and other orthoepists because of the discrepancy between spelling and pronunciation at the time. As a result of the early fixing of spelling as opposed to the much greater diffuseness of pronunciation, the two have drifted even further apart since then.
5.3.2 |
Spelling |
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When Caxton set up his printing press in Westminster in 1476, he was confronted with a spelling system that was characterised by a great amount of variability. However, rather than attempting to do something about it, as might perhaps be expected of a printer and as others did after him, his compositors made use of the abundance of spelling variants which appeared to be available to them, in order to be able to justify the lines. Thus, in the Concordance to Caxton’s Own Prose (Mizobata, 1990) we find do alongside doo, don alongside done, doon and doone, and depending on the amount of space needed, the compositor could select any of the variants. What is more, the early compositors, Wynkyn de Worde and Richard Pynson, were foreigners, and they could not be expected to direct a variable spelling system towards greater regularity. So, though around the end of the Middle Ages manuscript spelling had reached a fair amount of consistency and regularity, the introduction of printing in England at first made spelling considerably worse (Scragg, 1974: 64). With the next generation of printers the situation improved to a certain extent: Aronoff (1987) has shown that after he took over
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Caxton’s printing business, Wynkyn de Worde appears to have adopted a kind of style sheet for spelling, containing rules such as ‘The inflectional suffixes are spelled es, eth, ed, except after sonorant consonants (r, n, l), where there is no e’ (1987: 95). Unfortunately, the style sheet itself has not survived, and the spelling rules drawn up by Aronoff are reconstructions based on the available spelling evidence.
Although it is a much debated point whether we owe the regulation of English spelling to the printers or the sixteenth-century spelling reformers (cf. Scragg, 1974 as against Carney, 1994), there is increasing evidence of the important role played by the early printers in the development of English spelling (Salmon, 1989 and Caon, 2002). By the middle of the seventeenth century in any case, printing-house practice had reached a high degree of uniformity in spelling. Private writing, however, continued to show much more variation, but it is a kind of variation that shows a certain degree of regularity in its own right, to such an extent even that Osselton (1963 and 1984a) distinguishes between two spelling systems for the eighteenth century, a public and a private one. The public spelling system was that found in the printed texts of the time, which, apart from a few differences such as emperour, mirrour and superiour (Osselton, 1963: 269), was identical to that of present-day English, while the private spelling system allowed for spellings like Boswell’s beautyfull and agreable (Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 1996a). Private spelling as such eventually disappeared, and by the early nineteenth century spelling forms such as those found in Boswell’s private writings are rare and should perhaps be interpreted as mistakes rather than variants. Any random check of the British National Corpus will show the extent to which even educated writers today continue to be baffled by such seemingly illogical spelling distinctions as those between its and it’s.
At all times, spelling was one of the areas of language use that closely corresponded to the writer’s level of literacy. In the Middle English period writing was a professional skill, and a male preserve at that. Women’s general level of literacy was much lower then but also throughout the early Modern English period (Nevalainen & Raumolin-Brunberg, 2003: 42), down to the middle of the nineteenth century, when the educational opportunities for women increased significantly (Raftery, 1997). Although considerable sections of the population may have possessed rudimentary reading skills during the late Middle Ages, this was not true for writing, which was taught separately from reading. According to research based on signatures, no more than one-third of the male population in England around 1600 was able to both read and write (Cressy, 1980); the figures for women were considerably lower. Margaret Paston (1420?–84), for example, could read but not write, while Lady Brilliana Harley (1600?–43), the third wife of Sir Robert Harley, who is described as ‘a woman of intelligence and culture’, uses a ‘spelling system [which] is rather inconsistent and idiosyncratic, confusing standard forms with the writer’s own phonetic spellings’ (Burnley, 1992: 255– 6). Though lack of education is obviously linked to a writer’s gender, it would be dangerous to link poor spelling ability to the sex of the writer alone: Queen