Laura Wright: The multilingual origins of Standard English (Topics in English Linguistics 107)

For some time now, historical linguists researching the development of English into what was eventually labelled Standard English have been aware that what Wright labels the ‘Orthodox Version’ in this volume (p. 1), i.e., how a London-based ‘(Chancery) Standard’ was selected and subsequently disseminated in writing across the country, is no longer accepted. In the past few decades, scholars have highlighted numerous issues with the research and assumptions from works promoting this view (many of whom have contributed to this volume, but see most notably Benskin 2004; Wright 1994, 1996, 2000). As Stenroos (Chapter 2) points out, “most scholars see the process of standardisation as a considerably more complex and gradual one” (p. 41). However, whereas more recent hand- and textbooks no longer reiterate the orthodox version verbatim (as opposed to for example the classic history by Strang from 1970 [2015: 163]), elements such as Samuels’ (1963) four ‘incipient standards’ (or types), the influence of speakers from the East/Central midlands on London English, and the conflation of the latter with Standard English are still on occasion repeated. Consequently, with this volume editor Laura Wright – who is no stranger in addressing the issues with existing narratives on the origins of Standard English (cf. e.g. Wright 2000) – collaborates with 18 historical linguists to create a collection of papers that will (hopefully) lay the orthodox version to rest, and, in addition, present a “Revised Version” (p. 267) based on novel research to further our understanding of the history of Standard English.

To achieve this, the volume is divided up into two parts: “The Orthodox Version” and “The Revised Version”, which, as a rough division for the 18 chapters (not including the introduction), works well. The first part contains eight chapters, most of which are concerned with scrutinising specific publications and older views that have contributed to the orthodox version, either by means of new research on previously considered data (e.g., Carrillo-Linares and Williamson Chapter 3; Thaisen Chapter 5), or by considering new data in light of those older views (e.g., Stenroos Chapter 2; Gordon Chapter 6). The last two chapters of Part 1 by Hernández-Campoy (Chapter 7) and Nevalainen (Chapter 8) already gravitate somewhat towards the revised version presented in Part 2, but also highlight two of the main issues with the research behind the orthodox version: 1) a lack of considering the multilingual (and multidialectal) context of late medieval England, and 2) a lack of considering a wider variety of different text types.

The second part of the volume comprises 10 chapters, all of which consider previously under-researched linguistic features in light of the developing standard, most notably abbreviations (Honkapohja and Liira Chapter 9) and lexicon (e.g., Schendl Chapter 10; Sylvester Chapter 12; Ashdowne Chapter 14). Crucially, all contributions consider their respective features in the context of (late medieval) England as a multilingual society in which not only English but also Latin and Anglo-Norman French (as well as some [in]direct Italian influences, see Tiddeman Chapter 13) were used. Due to the size of the volume (532 pp. excluding the index), I am not able to equally discuss all 18 contributions in this review, although I wish to point out that each chapter contributes to either criticising the orthodox version or strengthening the revised version, and the volume as a whole is better off as a result of their inclusion.

After an introduction by Wright (pp. 3–15) that not only introduces some key concepts and terminology but also neatly summarises the revised version with a clear ‘where, when, who, how, why, etc.’ structure (pp. 12–14), Wright (Chapter 1) starts off the volume with a critical look at the previous accounts of how Standard English came into existence. After dividing a selection of handbooks into five groups that each advocate a variation on the orthodox version (most of which contradict each other), she discusses each group in terms of how its particular viewpoint came into the world, and in doing so Wright examines and criticises the works of Morsbach (1888), James and Hilda Murray (1910-1911), Ekwall (1956), Heuser (1914) and Samuels (1963). Crucially, Wright also places their work in the context of the developing field of English historical linguistics in the twentieth century, and acknowledges their importance in relation to our current understanding of the history of (Standard) English. Stenroos’ chapter (pp. 39–85) follows this up perfectly by discussing the work of Samuels (1963) as well as later publications such as that of Benskin (1992) in relation to local administrative documents, which the latter increasingly considered as “the decisive locus of standardisation” (p. 42). With the recent release of A Corpus of Middle English Local Documents (MELD 2017), Stenroos is able to explore how far the evidence supports a fifteenth-century process of standardisation in local administration. After discussing the functional use of English, French and Latin in local documentary material, five highly frequent lexical items are considered in light of their spelling: ‘abovesaid’, ‘lawful’, ‘other’, ‘seals’, and ‘these’. Based on detailed analyses (which are complemented by an extensive appendix [pp. 69–82]), Stenroos concludes that there was “no substantial change towards homogeneity”, and that “of the innovative forms […] that appear or become more frequent towards the end of the period, none survive into Standard English” (p. 68). As such, local administrative documents do not seem to be ‘leading’ a process of standardisation at the end of the fifteenth/start of the sixteenth century, and spelling was still highly variable in this text type in the early sixteenth century.

The following chapters highlight the importance of individual scribes’ (copying) behaviour when working on manuscripts during the Late Middle English period. First, Carrillo-Linares and Williamson (Chapter 3) focus on the copying behaviour of the so-called Beryn scribe, whose language in Alnwick Castle MS 455 was analysed and used as a linguistic profile in the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English, 1380–1450 (McIntosh et al. 1986) (number 6040, localised to South Essex). They reconsider certain ideas pertaining to this scribe, such as that he was trained in South Essex, migrated to London, and that features of his language can be “connected to the emergence of the written ‘standard’ language of 15th-century London” (p. 87). After detailed analyses of the scribe’s morphology and spelling in 10 different manuscripts, Carrillo-Linares and Williamson conclude that not only is the provenance of AC 455 tricky to establish with any certainty, there is “clear internal variation within each manuscript” (p. 135), as well as between the different works copied. In Chapter 4 (pp. 141–163), Olalla scrutinises the spelling in four manuscripts of Middle English medical prose (each by a different scribe), and concludes that the scribes “did not follow a standard collection of orthographic norms” (p. 160) but instead had their own. Importantly, Olalla does acknowledge that “some sort of standardization process […] must have been in motion by the late fifteenth century” (p. 159), and I think Carrillo-Linares and Williamson get to the crux of the matter when they state that “during the course of a copying career, […] scribes must have developed an awareness of and sensitivity to what was becoming more widely used within English manuscript culture. Thus, certain variants gained wider currency and acceptance. Such a scenario, we can propose, was the genesis of standardisation of English” (p. 137).

The next two chapters provide new evidence that successfully disputes much of what Samuels (1963) and Benskin (1982) have stated in relation to the aforementioned ‘incipient standards’ and the geographical distribution of <þ>, <th> and <y> (to represent the dental fricative) respectively. First, Thaisen (Chapter 5) questions the basis for Samuels’ (1963) Type II through a detailed n-gram analysis of the spelling of the six scribes of the Auchinleck manuscript (c. 1330–1340) (which according to Samuels best exemplifies Type II), as well as the hands that produced the immediate exemplars. He concludes that it is not only unclear what variables unite the Type II texts, but also what their relationship is with standardisation. The copying behaviour of the scribes does appear to align with the existence of a “community of book artisans in early to mid-fourteenth century London whose collaboration extended to them exchanging exemplars with one another” (pp. 186–187), which echoes Carrillo-Linares and Williamson’s point mentioned above. This is then followed up by Gordon in Chapter 6 (pp. 191–214), who considers new data from specific writing communities from Bristol (scriveners working on local administration and two correspondence collections) and reopens Benskin’s (1982) division concerning the use of <þ>, <th> and <y>. Both chapters, as well as the earlier ones, succeed in criticising (and sometimes disproving) previously made claims that informed the orthodox version of the history of Standard English, and help pave the way for the revised version.

As mentioned above, the final two chapters of Part I already gravitate towards the revised version, as the emphasis is more on considering inter- and intra-writer variation in a multilingual (and multidialectal) framework (Hernández-Campoy Chapter 7, who likewise considers communal practices with regard to the use of <þ> and <th>, this time in the Paston letters), and on scrutinising datasets that were not considered for the orthodox version (Nevalainen Chapter 8, who looks at syntax and morphology in two versions of the Book of Common Prayer), rather than criticising specific elements of works that endorse that version.

In the second part of the volume, alternative explanations to the orthodox version are outlined and explored, coinciding with a general shift in focus from spelling to lexicon. First, Honkapohja and Liira (Chapter 9) investigate the reduction in variation of the abbreviation system in Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon – allowing them to consider both Latin and English, as well as manuscript and print mediums – and contrast that to the reduction of variation in spelling in the same text across 13 different versions. They find that, even though “both abbreviation and spelling variation eventually disappeared, the processes were separate” (p. 309), and the rate of disappearance was different in Latin and English. Moreover, different abbreviation types disappeared at different rates depending on a variety of factors such as right-margin justification or type of script, further indicating that variation reduction in the Late Middle English period was not a linear and straightforward process. The following four chapters by Schendl, Durkin, Sylvester and Tiddeman all consider lexical items in multiple different text types and in the multilingual environment of the late medieval period. Schendl (Chapter 10) examines the Anglo-French article le (cf. Wright 2010) and lexical variation in Worcester’s Iteneraria – a collection of travel notes and descriptions from the late fifteenth century written in a mixture of English, medieval Latin, and some French. He concludes that although many passages “can be classified as code-switches in the traditional sense of the term, […] a great number of single-word ‘switches’ show a very intimate fusion of Latin and English, whose major function seems to be to establish the multilingualism of the text” (p. 339). Durkin (Chapter 11) considers both Latin and Anglo-Norman loanwords in light of the widespread narratives about those loans into English. Since an “empirically-derived set of significant loanwords may be particularly useful in testing assumptions” (p. 351), he scrutinises specific loanwords among the 1000 most frequent words in present-day published written English from the British National Corpus (BNC). Durkin’s examples suggest that the above-mentioned widespread narratives and assumptions are “only part of a much richer and more varied history, where borrowing from Anglo-Norman (and even Latin) affected the everyday lexis of many areas of life” (p. 357), including terminology related to areas such as farming, handcrafts, as well as trade and commerce.

Sylvester (Chapter 12) and Tiddeman (Chapter 13) likewise emphasise the relevance of foreign borrowings in light of the standardisation of English. Sylvester first points out that “multilingualism […] appears to be key to the notion of standardisation of the lexicon” (p. 366), before discussing two examples from the Lexis of Cloth and Clothing Project database and the Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in Medieval England. She subsequently posits that what emerged in the Late Middle English period was not a “resurgence of Old English […] merely enriched by extra French additions”, and that “standardisation of vocabulary led to variation of expression within the same conceptual area” (p. 375). Tiddeman’s contribution focuses on a specialist lexicon, i.e., that of England’s sugar and spice trade, arguing that “the semantic field of trade offers the ideal background to investigate the overlap and exchange of vocabulary from numerous languages in an ‘everyday’ context” (p. 381). She goes on to discuss eight “likely Italianisms in Anglo-Norman” (p. 389) that found their way into Middle English, and in doing so confirms Rothwell’s (1999) suggestion that Italian dialects were instrumental as an intermediary, and acted as a “bridge between East and West” by “bringing Arabic lexis into England” (pp. 405–406).

In Chapter 14 (pp. 411–441), Ashdowne considers the opposite direction of transfer, i.e., from English into other languages, since “evidence for English lexical history is available in sources written in a variety of languages by users from a variety of linguistic heritages” (p. 440). He examines a variety of Latin words that borrowed the element -mannus (OED mann, ME man), e.g., acremannus, aldermannus and sagemannus, and groups them into four different types before discussing each type in greater detail. In doing so, Ashdowne successfully demonstrates that “accounts of English standardisation must consider the functions for which it was and was not used as the process went on” (pp. 439–440).

Chapters 15 (pp. 443–466) and 16 (pp. 467–486) by Conde-Silvestre and Romero-Barranco respectively touch upon communities of practice and correspondence in light of the standardisation of English. Conde Silvestre, who scrutinises both spelling and lexicon in the Stonor family letters, argues that “the relationship of focusing to identity construction must have been instrumental, in certain contexts, in the formation of protostandards” (p. 445), and subsequently makes use of the concept of community of practice to point out that there is “a higher degree of spelling focussing in the letters by members of the community of practice” (p. 462). Romero-Barranco (Chapter 16), on the other hand, analyses the competition between (and spread of) English and French nominal suffixes in the Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence (1420–1681) (Nevalainen et al. 2006), which, he concludes, point to “the demise of mixed-language writing in the later fifteenth century as a precursor to, and catalyst of, the diffusion of French-derived nominal suffixes into monolingual Standard English” (p. 483).

The penultimate chapter of the volume by Kopaczyk (pp. 487–513) provides a comparative background to the previous chapters on English by looking at the textual standardisation of Scots, “the other standardising Germanic language in the island of Great Britain in the medieval and early modern times” (p. 487). Specifically, Kopaczyk considers legal texts in both Latin and Scots (Leges Burgorum and Lawis of burrowys) and compares them to discuss various linguistic aspects of the Scots version that appear to be due to Latin influence, including lexical and structural choices. Her findings indicate that “Scots […] had its own means to produce seeds of textual standardisation”, and she concludes that “the people who produced the texts – scribes, clerks, notaries, and the communities of practice within which they operated – should be seen as the agents of linguistic standardisation on the level of the text (as well as on other levels)” (p. 505). This foregrounding of the importance of the individuals who produced the texts, as well as the communities they worked in, is a recurring topic throughout the volume, and the contributions in it have repeatedly shown that it is a worthwhile one to investigate further to better understand the various processes that led to Standard English during the late medieval and early modern periods.

Finally, Wright (Chapter 18) concludes the volume – coming full circle after her introduction and first chapter – with an overview of the socio-historical background of late medieval England, a discussion on the multilingual nature of the data, some examples of variant reduction, and a list of linguistic features from a set of late medieval London accounts. She uses the latter to emphasise that “Standard English has none of these features” (p. 528), circling back to the first part of the volume in criticising the conflation of London English with Standard English. Wright then concludes her chapter – and the volume – by indicating that Standard English was the result of “a slow accumulation of features from below, rather than a sudden official imposition from above” (p. 529). Furthermore, she rightly draws attention to the use of the phrase ‘selection of a (single) linguistic feature’ in many handbooks promoting the orthodox version, which in her opinion is better expressed as “‘reduction to a single feature’, […] as ‘selection’ implies agency” (p. 530).

To conclude, The multilingual origins of Standard English not only lays the ‘orthodox version’ conclusively to rest, but also presents a clear starting point for future research on the development of Standard English. The contributions, which are well-structured and often cross-reference each other, each present strong research on a range of different topics, methods, and text types that all consider the multilingual reality of the time during which English started showing signs of variation reduction. As such, this volume can be considered a milestone when it comes to researching the history of Standard English, and is essential reading for anyone looking to acquaint themselves with the topic.