The Development of Standard English, 1300-1800: Theories, Descriptions, Conflicts (review)

Even linguists sometimes take the origin of Standard English for granted. For many years a predominant view, largely due to the work of Michael Louis Samuels and John Hurt Fisher, has been that the British Standard developed from a Central Midlands dialect propagated by clerks in the Chancery, the medieval writing office of the king. The twelve papers in The development of Standard English, 1300–1800 reconsider this hypothesis, identifying a number of complexities and alternatives and suggesting that Standard English had no single source dialect.

The book is divided into two roughly equal parts, one on ‘Theory and methodology’ (Chs. 1–6) and another on ‘Processes of the standardisation of English’ (Chs. 7–12). The book begins with a short ‘Introduction’ by editor Laura Wright. This is followed by Jim Milroy’s essay on the impact of standard-language ideology on historical description, which suggests how the idea of a written standard drives the view that variation is unstructured. Milroy also emphasizes the distinction between stigma and prestige as factors in standardization. Ch. 2 by Richard J. Watts discusses prescriptive attitudes that existed prior to the eighteenth century, beginning with Latin grammars of the sixteenth century. Ch. 3 is a short essay by Jonathan Hope which looks at the false biological metaphor of parent languages having dialect children. In Ch. 4, Raymond Hickey examines Irish English and the means by which usages become salient and stigmatized. Ch. 5 is Gabriella Mazzon’s contribution which looks at the standard as a colonial instrument. Mazzon focuses on the history of colonial (or extraterritorial) Englishes and the sociolinguistic assumptions that arise in these situations. Historian Derek Keene’s essay on migration and cultural norms completes Part 1. Keene shows how historians analyze details of migrations between London and the provinces and stresses the importance of everyday events and personal negotiations for language change.

Part 2 focuses on particular case studies. In Ch. 7, Matti Rissanen focuses on spelling standardization in statutory texts that arose after the re-emergence of English in the fourteenth century. Ch. 8, ‘Scientific language and spelling standardization 1375–1550’ by Irma Taavitsainen, looks at Chancery spelling in the medical manuscripts of the fifteenth century, showing that Central Midlands spelling was robustly adopted in scientific texts. In Ch. 9, Anneli Meurman-Solin looks at variation in two corpora of Scottish English, focusing on the details of deanglicization and descottisization and emphasizing the importance of a text’s social function (public vs. private) in conditioning the rate of change. Ch. 10 by Merja Kytö and Suzanne Romaine compares the diffusion of inflectional and periphrastic comparatives in British and American English to show how change proceeds on different trajectories. Ch. 11 by Susan Fitzmaurice considers the factors that led to prescriptivism in terms of the influence of commentators and writers involved with The spectator. The book concludes with its single phonological study, Roger Lass’s chapter, ‘A branching path: Low vowel lengthening and its friends in the emerging standard’. Lass examines the spread of the ME /a/ and /o/ in the cat/path distinction and the pot/off distinction, arguing that standardization was not fully established until the early twentieth century.

The development of Standard English, 1300–1800 is a fine collection, contributing both to the broader issue of standardization and to the understanding of particular details of Standard English. The book makes a convincing case that the origin of the standard is considerably more complex than is often assumed.