Politics and the Middle English Language

Politics and the Middle English Language Tim William Machan Marquette University, Milwaukee W ith characteristic insight and elan, Roger Lass has observed that linguistic change ‘‘occurs over ’geological’ time, beyond the capacity of humans to act, since no actor can see the consequences of his actions. A speaker engaged in a change is not an agent, but a victim .’’1 Lass’s concern is structural change, and his point is that given the time scheme and variable fashion in which such change typically takes place, individual speakers could not have been conscious of their role in initiating or propagating phenomena like those collectively known as the First Consonant Shift or the Great Vowel Shift. Speakers living at the conclusion of such a change might well be able to look back and describe its history, as seventeenth-century orthoepists were in fact able to characterize competing vowel articulations. But since not all synchronic variation results in diachronic change, speakers living during what can be retrospectively recognized as the beginning or spread of a change cannot know whether and how the variations that they notice will prove historically momentous; and the future of in-progress change is rendered even more obscure by the fact that much change transpires without the conscious recognition of the very speakers who propagate it. Though Lass’s concerns are specifically structural, they point to larger linguistic principles that can have significant utility for the study of language and the future of Chaucer studies. This is so because his critique of agency in structural change has relevance to the initiation and propagation of change in a language’s pragmatics, whether at the level of individual speech acts or, very generally, at the levels of the discursive uses of 1 Roger Lass, Historical Linguistics and Language Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 367. Lass is synthesizing points initially made in Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1921), pp. 165–66. 317 ................. 9680$$ CH12 11-01-10 12:36:19 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER a language or of the sociolinguistic ideas that frame these usages. Recent legislative attempts to make English the official language of the United States or to curtail the use and expansion of non-English languages in education, government, and business are cases in point. Retrospectively, such attempts appear as logical extensions—even fruitions—of the historical negotiation of American identity through language management in schools, courts, and popular myth. Yet the speakers whose ideas and remarks might be seen as the sources of this negotiation had no way of knowing the originary status their utterances would come to assume. When in his 1789 Dissertations on the English Language Noah Webster observed that a ‘‘national language is a band of national union,’’ he could not foresee traditions that would lead to the 1981 Select Committee on Immigration and Refugee Policy quoting his observation as part of the rationale behind the Committee’s recommendation that command of English remain a requirement for naturalization.2 Written retrospectively, structural or pragmatic linguistic history inescapably identifies the one variant among many that bears similarities to subsequently dominant structures or ideas and that can be seen to instigate inexorable progressions to them. The historical transformations of the status of English in England can be organized into one such retrospective linguistic history. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, English currently has dominance in all manner of public and private domains, a dominance that is reinforced by the various attempts of non-Anglophonic immigrants to acquire the language. Knowing this dominance, we can look back through English’s history to identify moments that represent states in a progression from unwritten vernacular to standardized global language: the transliteration of Old English by Irish monks; the thirteenth-century increase in written English; the advent of print; the publication of Johnson’s Dictionary; and so forth. A moment that has assumed increasing importance in some accounts of this history is the late Middle English period in general and specifically Chaucer’s sociolinguistic role in it. The production of English writing during the Peasants’ Revolt, the controversies surrounding the Wycliffites’ use of English...