History of the English Language

English in Late Modern Times

English, since the beginning, is an immigrant language, it hasn't always been spoken where it is spoken today, as in America and Australia, but even in the British Isles it's immigrant because originally there were Celtic languages. The Roman conquest brought Latin to England, it spread to Scotland and Ireland at a later stage with Christianization. Romans only conquered England; they got to the outskirts of Edinburgh. When the Roman Empire fell, the Barbarians conquered the British Isles too, bringing Germanic languages from the continent. This gave rise to what scholars call Old English or Anglo-Saxon. There were different varieties of Old English, and at the same time, Latin continued to exist as the language of the Christian church when England and Ireland, and later Scotland, were Christianized as well.

In 1066, the Norman Conquest brought Old French to England. The outcome was the development of Anglo-Norman varieties that gradually developed into Middle English.

History of English

The history of English is characterized by constant multilingualism and language contact between Celtic and Romans, then contact with Germanic settlers, then Scandinavian, with French, and Latin that continued to be in the background as the language of religion, law, and education. Only in the 17^th century did English begin to take over as the language of scientific discovery and narratives. The first essays date from the late 16^th century. Scholars who wrote in English rather than Latin felt a bit guilty about it because the language of proper education was Latin. However, if they wanted their texts to be available for a larger audience, they had to be written in English.

The issue of education is closely connected with religion. In the 16^th century, the Reformation led churches to break away from the Catholic Church and begin to promote the use of the vernacular in religious discourse. They argued that the Bible and religious services should be accessible in the vernacular, with translations of the Bible into German and English. However, translations into Italian were not allowed unless in Protestant areas because the Catholic Church continued to use Latin up to the 1960s.

The argument for the use of the vernacular was that everybody should be able to access the language of religion, even ordinary people should be able to understand the Bible. Translations of the Bible into English were illegal for a long time, though it was only in the late 16^th century that the first translations began to be accepted.

The King James Bible and Education

The King James Bible became a model of discourse, published in 1611, and its influence has persisted for centuries, influencing Shakespeare’s work. The connection with education meant that if people were expected to be able to read the Bible in German or English, they needed to learn to read. This was not the same as learning to write, but it was a boost for education because even ordinary people could get at least minimally schooled. This explains why illiteracy was more widespread in Roman Catholic countries. Women were less educated than men, clearly.

Late Modern Times

Late Modern times, the 18^th century and the beginning of the 20^th century, are important because what was happening then has left a mark on present English as well, with some uses still found today. Shakespeare’s age is considered Early modern times, in the 16^th century and early 17^th century, marking the beginning of modernity.

Late Modern times are modern in the sense that they are not contemporary, but they are relatively late. You can see that something is changing visibly, and the way in which languages are represented and discussed will influence contemporaneity. Late Modern English usually goes from the beginning of the 18^th century to the beginning of the 20^th century. Some scholars argue that WWI is another mark on the history of languages, with linguistic features changed by external events.

Political Changes and Language Evolution

The external history of a language is connected to external events. A typical example is the Norman conquest in 1066, when William of Normandy invaded Southern England, causing dramatic changes in the language as Old English began to coexist with Norman French, vocabulary acquired by speakers, and lexical items borrowed into English.

What happens at the beginning of the 18^th century? Why do we take it as the beginning of Late Modern times? History is the key again. Political changes affect England and Scotland.

When Elizabeth I died, she had no descendants, and therefore the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, James VI, king of the Scots, became king of England and Scotland as King James I in 1603, marking the union of the crowns. A century later, in 1707, another step was taken as the parliaments of England and Scotland were also united for dynastic reasons. When Queen Anne died, parliament wanted to ensure that the next king or queen would be Protestant, not Roman Catholic. This was because halfway through the 17^th century, there had been a Civil War, and already when Elizabeth I had died, parliament wanted to ensure that the next king would be Protestant. They didn’t want England to be taken over by the Catholic Church again, fearing that Spain and France might want to take over (Spain fought with England). A Protestant monarch became the norm with James I in 1603, and then a Hannover king when Queen Anne Stuart died. However, James I was the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, so she was Catholic. He, instead, was raised by the Protestant nobility. The Civil War had been against the Catholic branch of the Stuart family, though, and parliament wanted to ensure there wouldn’t be another Catholic monarch. The Act of Succession appointed the branch of the family that was German, actually, and in 1707, George I was chosen as the king, he spoke German essentially.

With the union of parliaments, there were consequences on the language, particularly in certain parts of the country. With just one parliament in London (today there’s another one in Edinburgh, but this was reconvened in 1999), the court had moved away in 1603, and the parliament in 1607. People moved to the south because in the north there wasn’t much to do to improve social status. If you moved to a different part of the country because of that, you didn’t want to sound provincial but educated, like somebody who actually speaks well and can interact with the upper classes of the capital, you would be stigmatized. This explains why the 18^th century saw a huge number of publications dealing with the prescription of linguistic forms and the proscription of other linguistic forms. Late Modern English is sometimes called ‘the age of Prescriptivism’, the age when rules were set down, when correctness meant to be improved, and language had to be made certain so that it wouldn’t deteriorate.

Prescriptivism and Language Documentation

In the 18^th century, grammars, dictionaries, and pronunciation guides were published, continuing throughout the 19^th century. For historical linguists, this is a very interesting time because until recently, scholars assumed there wasn’t much going on in the 19^th century literature, but actually, it looks quite straightforward and easy to understand. At the beginning of the 3^rd millennium, in the 2000s, scholars began to think more critically about these centuries, and the first international conference on Late Modern English was organized in Edinburgh. It brought together a handful of scholars who began to explore these centuries. Since then, Late Modern English has become an extremely popular area of investigation because scholars have realized there’s a lot going on in vocabulary (new lexical items), grammar as well.

The connection between England and Scotland became even stronger in the 18^th century, and then WWI was another turning point in the history of the world. After 1918, nothing would be the same again, and it left a big scar on language too. Late Modern times include many interesting events: the French Revolution, American Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars… all sorts of events that in one way or another are reflected in language variation and change. Language change is constantly in progress; at that time, they wanted to stop it and fix it because otherwise, speakers would deteriorate it. In their view, language never improves but deteriorates.

Impact of Historical Events on Language

These events also had an impact on language history because the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars brought about a certain anti-French attitude, and the influence of French on English wasn’t perceived to be something valuable. Certain varieties were preferred because they were seen as closer to the original Saxon dialects. It was ideological; there was nothing intrinsically bad with French, but those two events had scared England terribly, and they were terrified that it might spread to England. This ideological attitude to languages and speakers is perceived in how languages were discussed and represented. Grammar books and dictionaries are not always neutral, even today. Particularly in Late Modern times, the ideological attitude could be perceived.

There’s also a mismatch between what grammars tell you what you should do and what people actually do. People don’t always use language in the way they are expected to. Socio-linguistics shows that if you only look at literature, grammars, dictionaries, and printed texts, who produced them? Highly educated people in order to be written in perfect English, a small percentage of what was in use, upper-class and educated use is the one represented in printed texts. What about the usage of partly educated people or with little education? We can access manuscripts like correspondences (letters).

It’s also a matter of gender. If you look at printed texts, a high percentage of them is authored by men. What about those authored by women or meant for the education of women? You can look at manuals for the professional preparation of governesses, providing linguistic and politeness (good manners) guidance. Variations were seen as a problem, aiming at standardizing usage.

Literary Documents and Education

Jane Eyre was a huge success in 1847. It's important to understand the importance of literary documents in Late Modern (LM) times and the education of women. Charlotte Bronte, in the fair copy (little self-corrections), doesn't use link-up words and doesn’t use long S, but she indicates with the underline trait the letters that should be raised. Also, there are spaces before and after punctuation. The dash sometimes replaces the full stop.

There are comments on manners, means, and language. Prescription and proscription in language in Late Modern times show that the idea of good manners, language, and social class were closely connected, even today they are. We take into consideration three cardinal points: geographical variation, social variation, and historical variation, on the basis of which we evaluate variation. The speaker associates manners with poverty, with the inability to be kind because you’re poor, which equals being rude or unkind.

Long S (Miss = MiSs) was also found in printed text, a feature of LM English. In manuscripts, self-corrections are rather unusual, but they are valuable because they allow us to glimpse what the author actually meant to write. This is the manuscript of a literary text; here, the author was working with the semantic value of the different lexical items (pragmatics). In other manuscripts, however, self-corrections make us see what the author perceived to be incorrect or mistakes. Finding self-corrections is relatively rare because manuals and textbooks indicated that you should avoid them; the text should be clean.

We find self-corrections in texts where authors either couldn’t rewrite everything like Bronte or couldn’t afford to rewrite all of it, typical of correspondences between ordinary people. "Child’s First Tales" consists of short moral tales aimed at young readers. Religious education was important for people; it was the reason why they had to learn to read, in Protestant countries. Moral tales were used to raise children in a religious way to make them good citizens, very much like catechism, and it teaches them about religion too. Picture and then the text begins imply multimodality, not only a 21^st century phenomenon. In LM times, the role of images could be just as important.

Importance of Religious Texts and Education

Sunday meant going to church and reading the Bible. The kind of short stories meant to educate children, both in relation to good behavior and linguistic teaching, were small books and inexpensive. When people began to learn how to read and write, they started very gradually. This happened also up to the 60s in Italy: you begin to form graphs, then graphemes, vowels, consonants, then syllables, etc. The problem was that with this gradual education, by the time you got to paragraphs and punctuation, not everybody could afford to go to school for a considerable length of time. There are hardly a number of uneducated subjects, however, there are many minimally schooled subjects.

LM education included educated people who could afford it, while others were partly educated. Education wasn’t compulsory until relatively late; it was compulsory in Scotland before it became compulsory in England. Another interesting development is the rise of mechanic institutes at the beginning of the 19^th century, created in 1821 for working men who wanted to educate themselves on different subjects.

Digital collection of old schoolbooks includes spellers, arithmetic, sciences, geographies, histories, art, penmanship (the art of writing well, calligraphy, important if you want to get a job in an office, because all was handwritten). In some pages, there are words at the end that are repeated on the next page because pages were printed one by one. To assemble them, you had to make sure you put them in the right order, so words at the end help you to do that; you can do it without numbers.

Thy and Linguistic Evolution

The use of ‘thy’ was the genitive case of the second person singular pronoun. In Old English, there was ‘þū’, which became ‘thou’ thanks to the Great Vowel Shift. ‘You’ was for plural. Gradually, ‘you’ took over, not just because ‘you’ that used to be the object became the subject as well, but also because ‘you’ began to be used for singular subjects as well. ‘Thy’ could express familiarity and contempt. ‘You’ as the plural form could be considered more polite, so it gradually took over. Another reason was the simplification of the system. However, in religious discourse, ‘thou’, ‘thee’, ‘thy’, continued to be used. Why? Because religious discourse included verses, prayers learned by heart, so it continued to show crystallized features. These kinds of crystallized phrases are also to be found in later documents, even of partly schooled writers, because they were learned by heart.

Both historians and language historians look at history from different perspectives: you can look at battles, queens; but also from below, from the way ordinary people lived through historical events. The same happens with historical linguistics: internal vs external history of a language. Looking at language from below, from everyday exchanges.

Popular Culture and Chapbooks

The British Library offers resources like "Discovering Literature: Romantics & Victorians", which include popular culture and chapbooks. Chapbooks were small, affordable forms of literature for children and adults that were sold on the streets, covering a range of subjects from fairy tales and ghost stories to news of politics, crime, or disaster.

The subject matter depends on the audience they were addressing: for children, you could find hymns, songs, spelling books, riddles, jokes. For adults, you could have horoscopes, fortune-telling, prophecies, adaptations of literatures (short versions of literary texts). They were sold in the streets and were relatively small because you had to carry them around. Examples include "The Groans of the Gallows", 1846, one piece of paper folded and cut, easy to prepare and inexpensive. Alliteration in the title, supposed to be the collection of two stories by the hangman who tells about criminals, the capital punishments carried out in Newgate.

Who would want to read the biography of a hangman? It’s the 19^th century, and this kind of sensational literature was quite popular, like ballads. Although they aren’t only songs, they could be collections of various stories dealing with:

• Crime
• Politics
• Romance
• Historical events
• Tragedy
• Royalty
• Superstition
• Sports
• Emigration
• Body-snatching

Body-snatching occurred when it was still illegal to carry out anatomy lessons on bodies that hadn’t been executed, so criminals’ bodies weren’t sufficient for students to study on. Two figures, William Burke and William Hare, murdered people in order to sell the corpses to doctors and medical students. One of them was executed, and there was the danger of dug-up bodies being sold. This body-snatching or body-stealing was associated with these crimes.

Jacobites, last words of criminals before being executed (a picture to draw the attention of the reader), when compared, these texts are remarkably similar in terms of context and structure: confessions, where the criminal asks for forgiveness and invites the public not to fall in the trap of sin. Such similarity makes us suspect they were not all authentic. Not entirely, at least, as they cannot be used as instances of the language of criminals because their English is quite grammatical, probably edited, containing many legal terms not used in everyday language. There is a mixture of legal and religious discourse, showing the pervasiveness of religious discourse. However, you could also find parodies of these speeches with typical phrases like ‘Come all good people…’ These ballads could be in English or in local varieties like Scots.

Sometimes in these ballads of various types, you have an indication of the tune of an already popular song. There were various reasons for this cultural phenomenon during Late Modern times.