The Emergence of the English Native Speaker: A Chapter in Nineteenth-Century Linguistic Thought 9781614511052, 9781614511403

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Stephanie Hackert The Emergence of the English Native Speaker

Language and Social Processes

Edited by Richard J. Watts and David Britain

Volume 4

Stephanie Hackert

The Emergence of the English Native Speaker A Chapter in Nineteenth-Century Linguistic Thought

ISBN 978-1-61451-140-3 e-ISBN 978-1-61451-105-2 ISSN 2192-2128 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2012 Walter de Gruyter, Inc., Boston/Berlin Typesetting: PTP-Berlin Protago-TEX-Production GmbH, Berlin Printing and binding: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Acknowledgements This study would not have been possible without the help of a number of people. I was motivated to carry it out by Prof. Dr. Edgar Schneider from the University of Regensburg, where I had the good fortune of being one of his staff members for a number of years. Even if he had a different project in mind, Edgar suggested that I look into the concept of the English native speaker. Here is what has come of that suggestion. I also thank Prof. Dr. Roswitha Fisher and Prof. Dr. Maria Thurmair, both from the University of Regensburg, for taking over the mentorship of my “Habilitation,” out of which this book grew. Thank you also to Prof. Dr. Volker Depkat, University of Regensburg, and to Prof. Dr. Susanne Mühleisen, University of Bayreuth, for both positive and critical feedback. Finally, I am grateful to the series editors, Richard J. Watts and David Britain, and the staff at Mouton de Gruyter for their generous support. A number of friends and colleagues provided much needed expertise and encouragement during the research process. I am grateful to Anja Stukenbrock, who helped me out with literature on historical discourse analysis; to Alexander Vazansky, who pointed me to a number of sources on Anglo-Saxonism; to Thomas Bartl, who provided me with material on identities and ideologies; to Diana Eades and Jeff Siegel, who encouraged me in my discourse approach to the native-speaker concept; and to Helge Nowak, who critically but sympathetically listened to many of my ideas and later proofread many a page from the manuscript. All faults and errors are, of course, my own. A huge thank you, finally, goes to my friends in Heidelberg and Regensburg, to my parents, and to Franz and Darius for seeing the native speaker through with me.

Contents Acknowledgements  1

Introduction 

 v  1

Part I: A discourse-historical approach to the English native speaker  2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.3.1 2.3.2 2.4 2.5 3

 7

The native speaker in contemporary linguistics   9 So what is the problem with the native speaker?   10 Defining the native speaker   12 The native speaker in the World Englishes context   14 Modeling World Englishes   15 The ownership question: Whose English is it?   21 Approaches to the native speaker: Features or historical construct?   26 The birth of the English native speaker   31

3.4 3.4.1 3.4.2 3.4.3

Identities, ideologies, and discourse: Toward a theoretical and methodological framework   33 Linguistic identities and ideologies   33 Discourse as a scientific object   35 Discourse as a linguistic object   37 Linguistic approaches to discourse I: Historical discourse analysis   37 Digression: Late-nineteenth century intertextuality and the notion of the discourse community   40 Linguistic approaches to discourse II: Critical Discourse Analysis   45 The corpus   50 Socio- and linguistic-historical background   51 Constitution of the corpus   57 A note on quoted material   60

4 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

The ideologies of Marsh (1859): A close reading   63 The introduction   64 Of native speakers, native languages, and native philology  Names for English and its speakers   77 Summary   88

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.3.1 3.3.2 3.3.3

 72

viii 

 Contents

Part II: “Good” English and the “best” speakers: The native speaker and standards of language, speech, and writing   89 5 5.1 5.2

5.2.1 5.2.2 6 6.1 6.1.1 6.1.2 6.1.3 6.1.4 6.1.5 6.1.6 6.1.7 6.1.8 6.1.9 6.2 6.2.1 6.2.2 6.2.3 6.2.4 6.2.5 6.2.6 7 7.1 7.1.1

 91 Defining and delimiting “English” and “standard English”  The native speaker and the standard language in the World Englishes context   94 Defining a language: Stability and staticity as theoretical and methodological necessities of nineteenth- and twentieth-century linguistics   103 Nineteenth-century attempts at solving the problem of linguistic heterogeneity   105 The “imagination” of standard English through the OED   108 The question of standard spoken English and the dialects   113 From written to spoken standards for English   113 Standard spoken English: Where is it to be found?   117 English = standard English   118 Standard English = educated English   119 Educated speakers are the “best” speakers   120 Can we not define the standard linguistically?   124 “Educated” = public-school educated   126 Of “natural” educated speakers “to the language born”   127 Educated English = a level of excellence which need not be homogenous in reality   129 Colloquial English and the naturalness problem   132 The standard and the dialects   136 Whence the new interest in the dialects?   136 The status of the dialects vis-à-vis the standard language   137 The dialects’ contribution to the historicization of the standard language: “Primitive” forms and “Anglo-Saxon” words   138 Preservation of the dialects: “Antique curiosities” or actual means of communication?   140 “Genuine” dialect and “authentic” speakers: The emergence of the NORM   143 Rural, traditional dialects vs. new, urban forms of speech   147 Spoken vs. written language and the native speaker  Why are there no native writers?    153 The spoken language, the native speaker, and linguistic theory   154

 153

Contents 

7.1.2 7.1.2.1 7.1.2.2 7.1.3 7.1.3.1

7.1.3.2 7.1.3.3 7.2

 ix

The relationship of speech and writing before the mid-nineteenth century   158 The Herderian notion of “Volksstimme”   160 Coleridge vs. Wordsworth: “Lingua communis” vs. authentic folk  161 speech  The ascendancy of spoken language   164 The significance of spoken language in the second half of the nineteenth century: Max Müller’s influential Lectures on the Science of Language   166 Late nineteenth-century thought on speech and writing   170 The late-nineteenth century concern with spelling reform and what it implies for the native speaker   176 Summary of Part II   179

Part III: Language, nation, and race: Of Anglo-Saxons and English speakers conquering the world   183 8 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.4.1 8.4.2 9 9.1 9.2 9.2.1 9.2.2 9.2.3 9.2.4

Nationalism, racism, and the native speaker   185 Nineteenth-century linguistic nationalism   189 Language and race   193 Language, nation, and race and the writings of Edward A. Freeman   198 Language and nation historically: The development of English and its speakers   205 The historical perspective on language, nation, and race: Constructing a venerable history for English   205 R. C. Trench on language as a nation’s “moral barometer”   208 Anglo-Saxonism and the English native speaker   213 The rise of Anglo-Saxonism in philology   214 Anglo-Saxonism in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and the U.S.A.   215 The origins myth: Anglo-Saxons and their religious and political heritage   217 Framing Anglo-Saxonism racially: Of superior and inferior peoples   218 Anglo-Saxonism in America   221 Closing the lines: British and U.S. Anglo-Saxons unite   223

x  9.3 9.3.1 9.3.2 9.3.3

 Contents

The development of nationalism in Britain and the U.S.   231 British national identity in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries   232  234 The “moment of Englishness”  Language and nationalism in the late nineteenth-century U.S.A.   236

10 10.1 10.1.1 10.1.2 10.1.3 10.2 10.2.1

The language of the world: In praise of English   241 English as the greatest language linguistically   242 Vocabulary: Mixed origins   244 English as the great borrowing language   246 English against French   249 The English-speaking community   251 The numerological tradition: Pride in the number of English speakers worldwide   251 10.2.2 The three C’s: Civilization, commerce, and Christianity   254 10.2.3 Of superior and inferior races and the “great law of contact”   257 10.3 Threats to the language   262 10.4 Summary of Part III   271 11

Conclusion 

 273

References   283 Historical sources   283 Other references   290 Author index  Subject index 

 301  303

1 Introduction The concept of nativity is one of the founding myths of Modern Linguistics. Like all other myths, nativity is not an isolated or a singleton belief, but a host of related and mutually supporting beliefs that are typically not interrogated from within the disciplinary boundaries. (Rajagopalan 1997: 226)

The notion of the native speaker is one of the central concepts of modern linguistics. This holds for all subdisciplines, or, as Coulmas (1981: 1) puts it, “there is no way of doing linguistics without taking account of him, he can be conceived of as a common reference point for all branches of linguistics.” Despite its centrality, the concept has been vehemently criticized in recent years. An important catalyst of this criticism has been the study of World Englishes, where it has become clear that reality is much more complex than the neat distinction into native and nonnative speakers suggests: “The more English becomes an international language, the more the division of its speakers into ‘native’ and ‘nonnative’ becomes inconsistent” (Brutt-Griffler and Samimy 2001: 105). So what is the problem with the native speaker? Traditionally, only native speakers have been regarded as fully competent speakers of their language; this competence has been thought to manifest itself first and foremost in their ability to pass grammaticality judgments. As the term implies, nativeness has generally been linked with language acquisition from birth onwards; the conventional view of a native speaker envisions a person being born into and growing up in a – preferably monolingual – speech community, in which he or she imbibes his or her native language with the mother’s milk – hence the close connection between the terms native speaker and mother tongue. The emergence of the so-called “New Englishes,” i.e., the increasingly independent varieties of the language spoken in countries such as Singapore, India, or Hong Kong, has thoroughly upset the traditional model in that, all of a sudden we find two groups of speakers who do not conform to it anymore: 1. speakers who have acquired English “the native way,” i.e., from birth onwards, but whose competence differs perceptibly from that of native speakers of what has been called “the traditional bases of English,” i.e., British or American English; and 2. speakers who, even though in purely chronological terms they have acquired another language first, now use English dominantly or even exclusively and who must therefore also be regarded as highly proficient speakers of the language.

2 

 Introduction

Such problems have led a number of linguists to criticize the concept’s application to the New Englishes. Others have even called for its abandonment altogether. Paikeday (1985: 87), in his assessment of the responses to a questionnaire about the term native speaker that he had sent to a number of linguists, psychologists, and philosophers, for example, came to the conclusion that The Native Speaker Is Dead! The question is, of course, whether it would be sensible, let alone possible, to abolish such a term. The present study takes a different approach and reconstructs the coming-into-being of the English native speaker via historical discourse analysis in order to probe into the origins of the problems surrounding the concept today. But why historical discourse analysis? The simple fact is that numerous other writers have suggested precisely such an approach without, however, actually putting this suggestion into practice. Thus, it is often pointed out that “nativeness constitutes a non-elective socially constructed identity rather than a linguistic category” (Brutt-Griffler and Samimy 2001: 100). The native speaker is described as an “imaginary construct” (Kramsch 1997: 363) surrounded by particular “discourses,” whose analysis is seen as “crucial to an adequate problematization of the concept” (Kandiah 1998: 105), and its rootedness in the history of Western linguistics is asserted (e.g., Dasgupta 1998). Such an approach to the concept of the native speaker falls squarely within the historiography of language ideologies as suggested by, e.g., Blommaert (1999). According to Blommaert (1999: 1), while the understanding of contemporary ideologies of language has already made significant strides, investigations into the historical production and reproduction of linguistic ideologies are still sorely lacking. In Blommaert’s view, however, if we are to understand the synchronic functioning of ideologies of language, we must also look into the ways in which certain discourses, beliefs, and attitudes toward languages and their speakers come into being, become dominant, or disappear again. The present study aims to contribute to this emerging area of research by providing a tentative historiography of one such ideology, that of the English native speaker. I will examine some of the discourses surrounding the emergence of the concept in the second half of the nineteenth century, focusing on the debate about standards for the English language and linguistic nationalism and racism. In doing so, I will apply the sociohistorical approach proposed by Blommaert (1999: 5), which is mindful of the “intrinsically historical, action-related and socioculturally anchored nature of all phenomena of language.” My discussion of the discourses surrounding the emergence of the English native speaker will thus be situated within a wider context of social and political issues. By providing extensive quotations, I will highlight the opinions of “the real historical actors” (1999: 7), i.e., academics, politicians, or educators, with par-

Introduction 

 3

ticular attention to “their interests, their alliances, their practices, and where they come from, in relation to the discourses they produce.” In order to do so, I will draw on a corpus of texts which includes not only the classics of the nineteenth-century linguistic literature but also numerous lesser-known articles from periodical journals of the time. The corpus consists of texts dealing with matters of lexicology and lexicography (e.g., Trench 1927a [1851]), the history and contemporary structure of English (e.g., Marsh 1874), linguistics as a science and the theories and methods of comparative-historical philology (e.g., Müller 1862, 1865), linguistic criticism (e.g., Alford 1864), the principles and methods of language teaching (e.g., Sweet 1964 [1899]), and varieties of English (e.g., Whitworth 1982 [1907]). The following study falls into three main parts. The first part is preparatory. It introduces theoretical and methodological issues and, by means of a close reading of the text in which the phrase native speaker is first attested, outlines the discourses to be examined in the following. Chapter 2 presents a survey of the contemporary literature on the native speaker. It first sketches some of the problems surrounding the concept and then turns to its double role in the World Englishes context, where the native/non-native distinction is not only invoked in modeling the historical spread and current status of English as a global language, but native speakers are also often seen as the “owners” of the language, i.e., as speakers variously privileged or burdened with establishing, maintaining, and distributing linguistic norms and standards through research and teaching. The chapter then turns to the question of features vs. historical construct and discusses the rationale for the approach chosen here. Chapter 3 establishes the methodological framework of the following investigation. It first comments on the terms identity and ideology, which play a central role in all calls for a discourse-based approach to the English native speaker, and then turns to discourse as a scientific object, outlining two linguistic approaches to it: historical discourse analysis, or what in German studies is labeled “(historische) Diskurssemantik” or “(linguistische) Diskursgeschichte,” and the “discourse-historical approach,” which is actually a branch of Critical Discourse Analysis. While historical discourse analysis provided important stimuli for the compilation and delimitation of my corpus, Critical Discourse Analysis endowed me with a number of analytical tools. Chapter 3 also describes the constitution of the corpus used for this study. It sketches the socio- and linguistic-historical background to the texts collected and analyzed, and then classifies and briefly describes these texts. All of them belong to the Victorian age; for the most part, they revolve around the educational, philological, and theological issues that had to do with the questions of what language was and how multilingualism, the origins of language, and language

4 

 Introduction

change were to be explained. With regard to English specifically, what occupied the center of attention were the problems of delimiting the language in theoretical terms, its history and structure, and its teaching. Chapter 4 presents a close reading of an address delivered by George Perkins Marsh, an American philologist, businessman, lawyer, and politician, at Columbia College in New York in November 1858 and published in 1859. This address not only features the first attested use of the phrase native speaker but also beautifully exemplifies a number of the discourses surrounding the emergence of the concept. I first look at the speech’s introduction, illustrating the various discourse strategies employed by Marsh in arguing for the introduction of “native philology,” i.e., the study of English language and literature, at American universities, and then focus on his referential strategies for English and its speakers. These strategies clearly point to Anglo-Saxonism, which was arguably the most important historical theory and political ideology from roughly 1850 to World War I and therefore crucially shaped the concept of the English native speaker, too. Chapters 5 to 10 turn to the corpus at large. This obviously necessitates a change in approach from the micro-level of the text and the analysis of discourse strategies to the macro-level of the corpus, and the delimitation and interpretation of lines of argumentation. Chapters 5 to 7 outline the significance of the standard ideology for the concept of the native speaker. It begins by looking at the role of the standard in relation to the contemporary perception of the concept, again with a special focus on World Englishes, and then turns to the debate about standards for English in the nineteenth century. Whereas written English had actually become a highly codified and fairly homogenous variety by the end of the nineteenth century, with regard to spoken English, the standard ideology, i.e., the belief in an excellent level of speech to be emulated by all others, has proved much more influential. It is in this context that we find the distinction between the “more native speakers” (Whitney 1875: 156) and the others, the former being educated speakers of English in Britain. What also surfaces is the idea that the only “natural” way of acquiring a language is either from birth onwards or among native speakers and that the only “proper” teachers of the language are native speakers of “Good English, or Standard English, or Pure English” (Wyld 1907: 49). The nineteenth-century debate about standards for English is important for the contemporary perception of the native speaker in another way. One of the problems that the new science of language was facing in the nineteenth century was the delimitation of their object of study. What was a language? How was one to define the English language? What was to be done about linguistic heterogeneity? The idea of the standard provided a convenient solution to these questions

Introduction 

 5

and enabled nineteenth-century linguists to focus their efforts on the description of an invariant system – an idea which still lies at the heart of Chomsky’s “ideal speaker-listener” (1965: 3). Chapters 8 to 10 turn to the links between the native speaker, linguistic nationalism, and racism. The link between language and nation with regard to English could be made from two perspectives. Numerous authors, among them Marsh (1859), tied the fate of English speakers and their quest for global dominance to the rise of English to universal language status. Another perspective focused less on the external development of the language but approached the issue from a historical point of view. For authors like Trench, language was “fossil history” (1927a [1851]: 15), i.e., it revealed the past and, more specifically, how particular nations had developed morally and politically: “To study a people’s language will be to study them” (1927a [1851]: 40). The theoretical and methodological underpinnings of both perspectives may be found, first, in the adaptation of the principles of comparative-historical philology to the study of English and, second, in the development of nationalism as it took place in Britain and the U.S. in the second half of the nineteenth century. The English native speaker is thus a product not only of the standardization of the language but also of its “nationalization.” Nineteenth-century nationalism revolved not only around nations or peoples, however, but also, and perhaps centrally, around races; in fact, for nineteenth-century thinkers, language and race crucially combined to define a nation. Chapters 8 to 10 outline the background to these links, which crucially involves the rise and focusing of Anglo-Saxonism as a historical theory and political ideology. They also turn to the consequences of the new-found national and linguistic self-confidence of Britons and Americans: the construction of linguistic hierarchies and the idea of the impending world-wide dominance of English and its speakers. Chapter 11 offers some concluding remarks and ties the analysis presented back to contemporary perceptions of the English native speaker. It will become apparent that even though the phrase native speaker itself does not even occur all that frequently in the corpus used for this study, the discourses that dominate it are precisely the discourses that still cause trouble in the application of the concept in the contemporary World Englishes context. Thus, what the analysis of the discourses surrounding the emergence of the native speaker shows is that the second half of the nineteenth century was a period in which people started to think differently about languages and their speakers. As a new term characterizing particular language users and setting them off from other groups, the native speaker provided an important way of conceptualizing and labeling a particular linguistic identity and drawing boundaries between some speakers and others. In

6 

 Introduction

sum, if we are to understand the ideology of the English native speaker today, we need to understand, as fully as possible, the historical origins of the assumptions and beliefs upon which it rests.

Part I: A discourse-historical approach to the English native speaker

2 The native speaker in contemporary linguistics Although the rise of the idea of a (naive) native speaker can be […] traced as far back as […] the 19th century, the use of the expression native speaker has become prevalent in modern linguistics particularly since the Chomskyan intervention in linguistics. (Singh 2007a: 35)

The notion of the native speaker is one of the central concepts of modern linguistics. This holds for all subdisciplines, or, as Coulmas (1981a: 1) puts it, “there is no way of doing linguistics without taking account of him, he can be conceived of as a common reference point for all branches of linguistics.” For generative linguistics, for example, Chomsky’s assumption of an “ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogenous speech community” (1965: 3) is crucial. Native-speaker intuitions are tapped not only as a data source but also as the final arbiter of the grammaticality or acceptability of particular syntactic structures. For sociolinguists, the notions of native speaker, mother tongue, and speech community play a crucial role in relation to, for example, minority language rights (cf., e.g., Skutnabb-Kangas and Phillipson 1989), apart from the methodological focus on particular kinds of native speakers as authentic providers of speech data (cf.  Medgyes 1999). On a more practical note, in English Language Teaching (ELT), being a native speaker is the key to job opportunities (cf. Phillipson 1992a), but the native speaker functions as model not only in the classroom but also in second-language acquisition (SLA) research. Despite its centrality, the concept of the native speaker has been vehemently criticized in recent years. An important catalyst of this criticism has been the study of World Englishes,¹ where it has become clear that reality is much more complex than the neat distinction between native and non-native speakers of English would suggest:

1 Even though it is not explicitly discussed in creole studies, which, through its focus on language contact phenomena, is closely related to the study of World Englishes (cf. Schneider 2007: 11), the native/non-native distinction has been seriously questioned in that discipline, too. Conventional definitions of pidgins as simplified contact languages lacking native speakers and of creoles as having arisen out of pidgins through nativization are premised on it, as is Bickerton’s bioprogram theory of creole formation (1981). According to Jourdan (1991: 192), however, “the more we look, the more blurred the difference between pidgin and creole becomes,” and, in fact, the sociohistorical and textual evidence amassed in the past two decades or so clearly shows that adults are just as much involved in the structural expansion of pidgins as children, that pidgins can remain expanded pidgins without undergoing nativization, and that creoles can form without an antecedent pidgin stage (cf., e.g., Winford 2003: 332).

10 

 The native speaker in contemporary linguistics

Central as it may seem, the importance of being a native speaker of English has been questioned in recent years […]. While a traditional view holds that only native speakers fully command a language and have proper intuitions on its structural properties, it has been pointed out that in many parts of the world, especially in ESL/Outer Circle contexts, reality has turned out to be much more complicated […]. Competence in a language is tied to its constant use, and in such countries we find both indigenous native speakers of English in the narrow sense […], whose intuitions may differ significantly from those of British or American people, and speakers who, after having acquired an indigenous mother tongue, have sooner or later shifted to using English only or predominantly in all or many domains of everyday life. Such speakers can be classified as “first-language English” speakers, although they do not qualify as native speakers in the strict sense. It is undisputed, however, that their importance in their respective cultures as linguistic models and as users and owners of “New Englishes” is paramount. (Schneider 2003: 238)

2.1 So what is the problem with the native speaker? As Schneider (2003: 238) explains, traditionally, only native speakers have been regarded as fully competent speakers of their language (cf. Doerr 2009: 32); this competence has been thought to manifest itself first and foremost in their ability to pass grammaticality judgments. Or, as Chomsky (1965: 24) puts it, [a] grammar can be regarded as a theory of language; it is descriptively adequate to the extent that it correctly describes the intrinsic competence of the idealized native speaker. The structural descriptions assigned to sentences by the grammar, the distinctions that it makes between well-formed and deviant, and so on, must, for descriptive adequacy, correspond to the linguistic intuition of the native speaker (whether or not he may be immediately aware of this) in a substantial and significant class of crucial cases.

As the term implies, nativeness has been linked with language acquisition from birth onwards. The conventional view of a native speaker thus envisions a person being born into and growing up in a – preferably monolingual – speech community, in which he or she imbibes his or her native language with the mother’s milk, hence the close connection between the terms native speaker and mother tongue (cf. Bonfiglio 2010: 1). The emergence of the so-called “New Englishes,” i.e., the increasingly autonomous forms of the language spoken in former British colonies such as India or Singapore, has thoroughly upset the traditional model; all of a sudden we find two groups of speakers who do not conform to it anymore: 1. speakers who have acquired English “the native way,” i.e., from birth onwards, but whose competence differs perceptibly from that of native

So what is the problem with the native speaker? 

2.

 11

speakers of what has been called “the traditional bases of English,” i.e., British or American English; and speakers who, even though in purely chronological terms they have acquired another language first, now use English dominantly or even exclusively and who must therefore also be regarded as highly proficient speakers of the language.

Such problems have led a number of linguists to criticize the concept or its application to particular sociolinguistic situations such as that of the New Englishes. According to Rampton (2003: 107), for example, dissatisfaction with the terms native speaker and mother tongue is now very widespread. At the same time, these terms seem to be very resilient, and efforts to modify them just end up testifying indirectly to their power.

Rampton explicitly links the native speaker with the New Englishes, noting that “when these are described as the other tongue or nativized varieties, the English of the ethnic Anglos is still there in the background as the central reference point” (2003: 107). A similar concern is voiced by Acevedo Butcher, who describes the term native speaker as “the last manifestation of an old world order of British colonialism and American imperialism” (2005: 13), which is inappropriate in “the inclusive contexts required by a global community” (2005: 20). U.N. Singh (1998: 15), finally, states that [t]hose who are responsible for the design of the game plan to “other” their own people, try to lift the epithet of nativity up the ladder of verticalis so that there is always very little space on the vertex, and most people keep falling off the peak because they are disqualified on some count or the other […] it is only on the basis of this chain of ‘othering’ that some claim their own speech as a distinct variety (if it is not, they introduce differential features that mark others out – as Labov would testify) – as “the standard, obviously sufficiently modern,” and yet retaining ever-elusive purity. These are the native speakers who would claim copyright to communicative competence and mock others who are generally viewed as mere deviant performers.

Their intense dissatisfaction with the concept has prompted some researchers to call for the abandonment of the native speaker altogether. The earliest to do so was probably Ferguson (1982: vii): “The whole mystique of the native speaker and the mother tongue should probably be quietly dropped from the linguist’s set of professional myths about language.” A few years later, Paikeday, in his assessment of the responses to a questionnaire about the term native speaker that he had sent to a number of linguists, psychologists, and philosophers, came to the

12 

 The native speaker in contemporary linguistics

conclusion that The Native Speaker Is Dead! and proposed to replace the term with that of “proficient user of the specified language”: I am convinced that “native speaker” in the sense of sole arbiter of grammaticality or one who has intuitions of a proprietary nature about his or her mother tongue and which are shared only by others of his own tribe is a myth propagated by linguists […]. (1985: 87)

At the time, Paikeday’s collection seems to have been highly controversial, so controversial, in fact, that “no publisher would touch it, [and] he had to publish it himself, ‘and linguists and educators circulated it under the table’” (Kramsch 1997: 362). The intervening two decades have seen quite a drastic change of winds, and “native-speaker bashing” appears almost fashionable today: Linguistically, the native speaker concept is useless and should therefore be discarded. Socially, the “birthright mentality” that goes with it is debilitating and unfair, and should therefore be discarded, too. (Piller 2001: 121)

The question is, of course, whether it would be sensible, let alone possible, to abolish such a concept (cf. Mukherjee 2005: 20). The present study takes a different approach and attempts to reconstruct the discourses surrounding the emergence of the English native speaker in order to see when, how, and why it might have become problematic. First, however, the following sections take a closer look at definitions of the term native speaker in general and see what additional problems such definitions might bring to light.

2.2 Defining the native speaker Before the 1980s, the notion of the native speaker was not explicitly discussed. Two book-length treatments of the concept appeared in that decade (Coulmas 1981b; Paikeday 1985), but even today, a look at linguistic dictionaries and encyclopedias suggests an unproblematic understanding of what a native speaker is and that native speakers can be clearly and reliably distinguished from nonnative ones: if the item occurs at all (it does not in a number of works), its definition usually involves the criteria of early acquisition (e.g., “has spoken a language since early childhood”) and of authority in grammatical judgment (“are often appealed to […] over questions of correct usage”) (McArthur 1992: 682). According to Escudero and Sharwood-Smith (2001: 278), the “stereotypical/ traditional view” of the native speaker looks as follows:

Defining the native speaker 

 13

A native speaker of Di [i.e., a particular dialect] is someone who grew up in a community of speakers where (i) only Di was spoken, and (ii) the linguistic behavior of the individual in question is perceived both by members of that community of speakers, and by the individual him/herself, to be that of a full member.

This definition makes two additional points: native speakers are generally assumed to be monolingual, and they must be accorded native-speaker status by their speech community as well as view themselves as native speakers of a particular language. All of these points become questionable when the notion is investigated in the World Englishes context; however, the concept also suffers from a number of other, more general problems. The first has to do with the fact that the term language is notoriously difficult to define. Obviously, in purely linguistic terms, there is no such thing as “the English language” defined as a monolithic entity with clear boundaries and internal homogeneity. A categorical definition of the native speaker according to structural criteria therefore appears impossible; what we seem to be left with is that everyone is a native speaker of his or her own idiolect (which is also something that has been suggested by way of definition), but such an approach reduces the concept to the trivial (cf. Davies 2003: 27–28). Another problem with a straightforward definition of the native speaker concerns the selection of linguistic properties. There appears to be agreement that – even if we were able to define a language structurally – structural definitions of nativeness would be inadequate. Escudero and Sharwood-Smith (2001: 277), for example, write that a purely linguistic definition would be circular: a speaker of Di is one whose performance reveals a given set of linguistic properties, and, alternatively, a speaker whose performance reveals these properties is a native speaker of that dialect.

Nevertheless, there also seems to be a consensus on the idea that native speakers can actually be recognized by particular linguistic behavior. The question, then, is which features are to be employed as indicators of native speakerhood. As Escudero and Sharwood-Smith (2001: 279) note, “[m]etalinguistic ability is clearly controversial in this regard, while […] phonetics and phonology are often regarded as crucial for distinguishing natives from non-natives.” Bonfiglio (2010: 16–17) also notes that “[t]he most salient difference between L1 and L2 speakers is accent.” The importance of accent, though, has also been questioned; particularly in the ELT context it is often pointed out that teachers tend to be hired on account of their native or native-like pronunciation only (which mostly means British or American standard English) but that such hiring practice puts ELT on a

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very narrow base, as phonology is considered a fairly superficial level of language (cf. Canagarajah 1999a: 83). Further complications arise when children and people suffering from language impairments or attrition are considered. Clearly, these speaker groups lack the “high level of competence in all domains of one’s first language” that is generally thought to typify the native speaker (Doerr 2009: 32). While pre-school children have their basic linguistic system in place, they lack, for example, a broad stylistic repertoire, a large vocabulary, and writing skills. So are they native speakers already? And what about speakers who lose part or all of their linguistic ability in their native language because of a medical condition? Or speakers who are cut off from their native speech community because of emigration? Are they still native speakers? Is it “once a native speaker, always a native speaker”? Or can one lose native speakerhood? A final difficulty is raised by literacy. As noted by Bonfiglio (2010: 8), “[t]he authority of any speaker – native or non-native – must be based on that speaker’s expertise in the written language in question.” Accordingly, the notion of the native speaker is frequently linked to education, competence in the standard (cf. Doerr 2009: 25–30), and writing skills. Some subfields of linguistics, however, explicitly shun these qualities in their definition of and search for native speakers. Traditional dialectology, for example, focused on so-called “NORMs,” i.e., nonmobile, older, rural males, as data sources and authorities on the variety investigated (cf. Chambers and Trudgill 1998: 29–30). Urban dialectology as it originated in the Anglo-American context of the 1960s concentrates on the vernacular, i.e., “that mode of speech that is acquired in pre-adolescent years” (Labov 1984: 29) and thus before exposure to the prescriptive norms of the written standard as mediated by the educational system. Could less literate or even illiterate speakers thus be the more authentic native speakers? To sum up, even when we think about it in the most general terms, the native speaker concept emerges as a highly problematic one. The study of World Englishes adds to the matter.

2.3 The native speaker in the World Englishes context In the study of World Englishes, the native speaker plays a crucial role in two respects: first, the native/non-native distinction is often invoked in modeling the historical spread and current status of English as a global language; second, native speakers are generally seen as the “owners” of the language, i.e., as speakers who have the task of establishing, maintaining, and distributing linguistic norms and standards through research and teaching.

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2.3.1 Modeling World Englishes Model making is, of course, crucial to any scientific endeavor. Whereas earlier models of language were predominantly chronological and/or biological in orientation and focused on the development of a unitary standard form of any language (cf. Bonfiglio 2010: 203), at least with regard to English, the last decades of the twentieth century saw a radical shift. Lesznyák (2004: 25), in fact, calls this shift “[o]ne of the most revolutionary changes in English studies in the last few decades,” as it resulted in an entirely new view of the research object as consisting of a set of linguistically equal varieties, or “Englishes.” The first prominent use of the plural form came after the first publications had espoused this “pluricentric” view of English (cf. Clyne 1992). In 1985, Braj B. Kachru and Larry E. Smith took over editorship of the journal World Language English (formerly a periodical for teachers of English as a second or foreign language) and renamed it World Englishes to underline their editorial stance that “all ‘world Englishes’ (native and non-native) belong equally to all who use them and merit serious and consistent study both individually and collectively” (McArthur 1998: 61). Kachru (1992: 2) explicitly comments on the plural form Englishes and connects the native speaker with the subject matter: Why the use of “Englishes” […]? The term symbolises the functional and formal variations, divergent sociolinguistic contexts, ranges and varieties of English in creativity, and various types of acculturation in parts of the Western and non-Western world. This concept emphasizes “WE-ness,” and not the dichotomy between us and them (the native and non-native users). In this sense, then, English is a valuable linguistic tool used for various functions. The approaches to the study of World Englishes, therefore, have to be interdisciplinary and integrative, and different methodologies must be used […].

As McArthur (1998: 61) points out, even though this use of Englishes was strikingly new, the form itself was not. In the seventeenth century, English was employed as a countable noun to designate, on the one hand, a sentence to be translated from English into a foreign language and, on the other, the English equivalent of a foreign word, as in The first column contains some Englishes from Walker’s Dictionary of English Particles (1679, quoted in McArthur 1998: 61). This use was abandoned, but in the 1970s a new countable use of English appeared, first, apparently, in Barbara Strang’s History of English: You will hear, perhaps, the English of your family, localised or non-localised; of shopkeepers and bus-conductors, probably localised; if you are a student, you will hear lecturers using different Englishes, probably at least one of them having a foreign accent. (1970: 19)

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Strang also seems to have been the first to propose a synchronic model of the language which distinguishes communities of speakers by means of their patterns of language acquisition and use (1970: 17–18): At the present time, English is spoken by perhaps 350 to 400m people who have it as their mother tongue. These people are scattered over the earth, in far-ranging communities of divergent status, history, cultural traditions and local affinities. I shall call them A-speakers, because they are the principal kind we think of in trying to choose a variety of English as a basis for description. The principal communities of A-speakers are those of the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. There are many millions more for whom English may not be quite the mother tongue, but who learnt it in early childhood, and who lived in communities in which English has a special status (whether or not as an official national language) as a, or the, language for advanced academic work and for participation in the affairs of men at the international, and possibly even the national level. These are the B-speakers, found extensively in Asia (especially India) and Africa (especially the former colonial territories). Then there are those throughout the world for whom English is a foreign language, its study required, often as the first foreign language, as part of their country’s educational curriculum, though the language has no official, or even traditional, standing in that country. These are the C-speakers.

Two years later, Strang’s categories were renamed by Quirk et al. (1972), and the still widely popular tripartite model distinguishing English as a native language (ENL) from English as a second language (ESL) and English as a foreign language (EFL) had come into being. This classification has been criticized in a number of respects. There are, for example, the issues of variation in ENL countries, of the classification of pidgins and creoles, and of the status of ENL speakers in ESL or EFL countries or, vice versa, of ESL or EFL speakers in ENL territories. The most serious points of criticism that have been leveled against the model, however, concern its traditional monolithic orientation and the role of native speakers in it. Thus, even though variation in terms of language functions is acknowledged and it is asserted that there are three distinct groups of users, there is still only one language, which is implicitly “owned” by the ENL group (McArthur 1998: 45): Although the divisions in the tripartite model are valid, they tend to obscure – and divert attention from – the more basic, longstanding binary division in most people’s minds between “native speakers” and “foreign learners”. The contrast here is between a group defined by birthright (widely taken to be a primary qualifying condition) and one defined by acquisition (usually preconceived as a consequence of education, and almost always taken to be secondary to birthright). In traditional terms, a “native” user is by definition prior (and implicitly superior) to a “foreign” user, no matter how inept the native or adept the foreigner. However, in a world where English has become Chevillet’s langue mondiale, unreflecting chauvinism at the heart of things is likely to be increasingly disputed. It is already

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challenged from time to time by competent but frustrated ESL and EFL users who know well that they have a richer command of the standard language than many born to English.

The most vocal critic of the ENL/ESL/EFL model has been Braj Kachru (1992: 3), according to whom [t]he unparalleled spread of English demands a fresh conceptualisation in terms of its range of functions, and the degree of penetration in different non-Western societal contexts […]. The traditional dichotomy between native and non-native is functionally uninsightful and linguistically questionable, particularly when discussing the functions of English in multilingual societies […]. The earlier distinction of English as a native (ENL), second (ESL) and foreign language has come under attack […].

In Kachru’s own circle model, a series of interlinked ovals emerges from an (earlier?) set of unnamed states of English. The first oval depicts the “Inner Circle” of the first English-speaking countries, or, as Kachru describes them (1992: 3), “the traditional bases of English, dominated by the ‘mother tongue’ varieties of the language.” These countries were either settled primarily by English-speaking people, or English-speaking people provided the linguistic model to other inhabitants (Melchers and Shaw 2003: 36). In the “Outer Circle” of post-colonial English-speaking countries, English was introduced without massive settlement or the displacement of indigenous languages and peoples; it now functions as an “additional language” in institutional contexts. The “Expanding Circle,” finally, comprises “the rest of the world,” where there was no colonization by Englishspeaking people, but where English is nevertheless the “primary foreign language” now (Kachru 1992: 3). Even though this classification of countries is based on the sociolinguistic criterion of the current status of English in a particular linguistic set-up, the model also lends itself to a historical interpretation in that the functions of English in any country today are, of course, the result of historical circumstances. Thus, whether or not as well as when and how a society was colonized by English speakers affected the original linguistic contact situation; this, in turn, obviously still influences the shapes and uses of English in the country today. What is crucial is the distinction between societies to which a sizeable number of English speakers emigrated along with their language, and societies where English was imposed on the indigenous population in the absence of a large community of speakers of English. As Bauer (2002: 24) puts it, “the inner circle represents places to which people were exported and the outer circle the places to which the language was exported.” The difficulty of disentangling historical from contemporary facts shows a problem that all models of English are fraught with: the classification criteria

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may be various, and they may not be made explicit. Generally speaking, forms of language may be grouped by linguistic characteristics alone, i.e., spelling, pronunciation, lexis, grammar, and pragmatics, but varieties usually differ in more ways than their features. Linguistically defined varieties may thus also be defined according to, for example, their degree of standardization, which involves the notions of elaboration, codification, and prestige, or they may be defined according to their occurrence in the community, i.e., according to status, function(s), and/or domain(s) of use. As Melchers and Shaw (2003: 30) point out, “the same cake can be cut up many different ways for different purposes”; what is important, however, is that it is made clear, first, what is being classified, i.e., a variety or language, a country or society, or a speaker, and, second, according to which criteria the object under investigation is classified, i.e., linguistic, sociolinguistic, historical, etc. The interaction of historical and sociolinguistic criteria results in problems in assigning a number of “English-speaking” countries to any particular circle. Kachru himself has pointed out that “countries such as South Africa […] and Jamaica […] are not placed within the above concentric circles, since their sociolinguistic situation is rather complex” (1992: 3), and Melchers and Shaw (2003: 36) draw attention to the fact that, even though in terms of settlement history, there are clear similarities between South Africa and Canada, a functional definition “makes South Africa clearly an outer-circle country […] and Canada an inner-circle one.” Incongruities may also be caused by shifts in language policy, which, in turn, result from developments in the sociohistorical context. Kachru himself (1985: 13–14) has conceded that “[t]he outer circle and the expanding circle cannot be viewed as clearly demarcated from each other; they have several shared characteristics, and the status of English in the language policies of such countries changes from time to time.” Thus, a number of former colonies have replaced English as an institutional language. Malaysia, for example, gradually substituted English throughout the administration and education systems with the national language Bahasa Malaysia from the early 1970s (Wong 1982: 270), and similar processes have taken place in Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Pakistan. In some expanding-circle countries, on the contrary, English is expanding its “range of functions” and “degree of penetration” into the society (Kachru 1992: 3); thus, in Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands, for example, English is on the rise in tertiary and even secondary education, in business, and in the media, which would move these countries towards the outer circle and cause another mismatch between sociolinguistic and historical criteria. More confusion may arise from lack of clarity as to the object of classification. Kachru’s circle model groups countries, but there is no indication as to the actual number of speakers within the country to whom the classification applies. The

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numbers given in, for example, Kachru (1992: 3) refer to total populations – but is English the mother tongue of all of the population of Canada? The mainland United States are clearly not entirely mother-tongue English-speaking, let alone overseas territories such as Puerto Rico. If proficiency is added as a criterion, the matter becomes even more complex. Thus, for outer-circle India, a number of statistics cite a single-digit percentage of the population as being proficient in English. As Krishnaswamy and Burde (1998: 13) report, for example, “English is used only by a few, typically in the urban areas of each region, and that too only in certain domains, and hardly ever as the language of intimacy.” In some expanding-circle countries such as the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, on the other hand, the number of speakers of comparable proficiency may be as high as sixty or seventy per cent (Shaw and Melchers 2003: 37). Tripathi (1992: 6), finally, suggests that [i]n our calculations, the quality and the identity of the language used should also be considered. The indifferent “English” in which many Indians and Nigerians convey some basic message can only with difficulty be construed as English. […] Achebe’s, or Okara’s, or Tutuola’s English, despite the canonical status of these authors, is not infrequently viewed by the native speaker (or, his alter-ego elsewhere) as arcane, outlandish, exotic, an esoteric curiosity and just that – which it is, in a descriptive, not pejorative sense.

So, clearly, in describing the status and function(s) of English, countries have to be distinguished from speakers, and both of these, in turn, must be kept separate from varieties. The native/non-native criterion, however, well illustrates how precisely this distinction is often lacking. As the phrase native speaker already implies, the nativeness criterion is generally seen as applying to individuals. Depending on the view taken, speakers of Englishes worldwide could then be classified according to, for example, their type of proficiency in the language, which is usually seen to vary in accordance with age and mode of acquisition, or the scope of their proficiency, which would be either internationally effective, nationally effective, or locally effective (cf. Melchers and Shaw 2003: 39). What is important is that the distinction between native and non-native applies to single speakers – and not varieties or even countries. Nevertheless, even though, as indicated above, Kachru has rejected the native/non-native dichotomy, in a 1997 publication, he revives it in order to answer the question of what makes English an Asian language. What is important is that nativeness is regarded as a property “of the languages in our multilingual linguistic repertoires” (1997: 4). Kachru also distinguishes between “genetic” and “functional” nativeness. Genetic nativeness is described as follows:

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The historical relationship between, for example, Hindi, Kashmiri, and Bengali and India’s Indo-Aryan group of languages is genetic. This relationship is thus different from, for example, that of the Dravidian languages […] with Sanskrit. The interface between the Dravidian group […] and Sanskrit is the result of extended contact, convergence, and the underlying cultural traditions. It is through such contact that languages belonging to distinct language families have developed shared formal features. It is again on this basis that South Asia has been characterized a linguistic, sociolinguistic, and a literary area. (1997: 4)

Unfortunately, at no point in this description does it become clear what actually is “genetically native.” Is it Hindi, Kashmiri, and Bengali as languages spoken on the Indian subcontinent? Or does “genetic nativeness” describe the relationship between these languages and the Indo-Aryan family of languages? Or something entirely different? The definition of “functional nativeness” suffers from similar terminological impreciseness (1997: 4–5): Functional nativeness is not necessarily related to genetic nativeness. Functional parameters are determined by the range and depth of a language in a society: Range refers to the domains of function, and depth refers to the degree of social penetration of the language. These two variables provide good indicators of comparative functions of languages in a society and of acquired identities and types of acculturation represented by a transplanted language. In determining functional nativeness one must consider, for example: 1. the sociolinguistic status of a variety in its transplanted context; 2. the functional domains in which the language is used; 3. the creative processes used […] to articulate local identities; 4. the linguistic exponents of acculturation and nativization […].

A closer reading of this definition shows its tautological character. An important criterion of “functional nativeness” is range, which is described as “determining” functional parameters. (Is it a functional parameter itself, or does it “determine” functional parameters? If the latter is the case, what are these functional parameters?) Range is said to equal “the domains of function” of a language, but it is also described as an “indicator […] of comparative functions” of a language in a society. If we combine these two equations, we end up with a statement to the effect that the domains of function of a language indicate the comparative functions of this language – which appears at best confusing, at worst misleading. Other points of criticism leveled against Kachru’s descriptions concern his (non-)treatment of linguistic data and his exclusive focus on creative writing. Quoting Dasgupta (1993), Krishnaswamy and Burde (1998: 33), for example, say that “the main problem with Kachru’s account […] is the fact that it is not grounded in any systematic characterization, but proceeds anecdotally from item to item.” Numerous of Kachru’s publications (e.g., 1988, 1992, 1997), including even those containing a chapter on “Characteristics of world Englishes” (Kachru and Nelson

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2001: 10), do not deal with linguistic features at all. In Kachru (1983), a number of features characterizing the sound system, grammar, lexis, and semantics of Indian English are listed, but the examples given are not only repetitive but also mostly taken from creative writing. This has been commented by Krishnaswamy and Burde (1998: 32) as follows: Such Indianisms should be considered a part of the creative strategies employed by Indian authors writing in English to create an Indian milieu in their writing, keeping the audience in mind. But Kachru treats them as examples of the axiomatic “Indian” English […]. It is true that English has become indispensable for the Indian intelligentsia, and that a creative writer […] writing in English, has to convey “‘the spirit that is one’s own in a language that is not one’s own”. But the question is: Is it true of the vast majority of people in India? […] It is a pity that this has to be stated but it must be: the Taj Mahal is in India but the Taj Mahal alone is not India!

In sum, nativeness is a highly problematic concept when it comes to the description of the historical spread and current status of varieties of English worldwide.

2.3.2 The ownership question: Whose English is it? The question of ownership is implicit in models of English but becomes crucially relevant at the level of norms and standards in describing and teaching the language. Particularly with regard to the latter, native speakers are often seen as the legitimate “owners” of the language and therefore privileged as teachers, experts, and trainers. Native speakers are apportioned (or apportion to themselves) the rights and responsibilities not only of saying what is correct, grammatical, or acceptable in a language, but also of controlling the theory and practice of teaching in and research on the language (cf., e.g., Widdowson 1994: 386–388; Canagarajah 1999a: 78–82; McKay 2002: 42). But what does ownership mean with regard to language? And in what way can its native speakers be said to be the legitimate “owners” of a particular language? In principle, to claim ownership of a language implies a relationship of possession and control between a particular speaker group and that language. This relationship is metaphorical but obviously has real-world consequences, which have to do with authority in and power over the language (cf. Wee 2002: 283) and may or may not be controversial and contested. The idea of native-speaker ownership of a language appears to be tightly connected with the generative approach (cf. Singh 2007a: 35), which relies heavily on native-speaker intuition in distinguishing the grammatical from the ungrammatical. The chain of arguments leading to such deference to native-speaker judgment in terms of language com-

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petence and on to the notion of native-speaker ownership can be summarized as follows: A language is often equated with the combined usages of the body of “native speakers,” and so a doctrine has arisen that “the native speaker is always right,” because anything that he utters is considered part of the language […]. From this position it is but a short step to the view that the language belongs to the “native speakers,” who are the sole owners. (Christopherson 1988: 16)

A different approach to linguistic ownership is outlined by Wee (2002: 284), who views the concept not in terms of linguistic competence or performance but in terms of ethnicity and historicity: For a given language X, a prototypical native speaker of X is one who is assumed to be proficient in X by virtue of having grown up speaking X. The prototypical native speaker is also a member of a particular ethnic community, where this community has a strong historical association with X.

Linguistic ownership, in other words, implies the presence of a particular ethnically defined community of native speakers which has a strong historical association with its mother tongue. Native-speaker status is acquired by way of being born into a particular group, with proficiency a result of early and continued exposure to the language in question. What Wee describes as the “prototypical native speaker” corresponds closely to the traditional view of the ownership of English as caricatured by Widdowson (1994: 377–378). What is important is that there is an ethnically defined community which has a rightful claim to a language because of its history: England is where the language originated and this is where the English (for the most part) live. The language and the people are bound together by both morphology and history. So they can legitimately lay claim to this linguistic territory. It belongs to them. And they are the custodians. If you want real or proper English, this is where it is to be found, preserved, and listed like a property of the National Trust.

That this view is not just a caricature is shown by the following (in)famous quote by former British MP Enoch Powell (quoted in Romaine 1998a: 25): “Others may speak and read English – more or less – but it is our language not theirs. It was made in England by the English and it remains our distinctive property, however widely it is learnt or used.” What the quote from Powell already shows is that the worldwide spread of English has made the traditional stance problematic, and it is, in fact, in the World Englishes context that ownership has become a seriously contested

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concept. Speakers of the so-called “New Englishes,” for example, have begun to assert their rights to the language as proficient if non-native users, as the following excerpts illustrate: Discussion of World Englishes frequently makes a division of the different Englishes (or varieties of English) into two groups, labelled “Old/Native/Inner Circle” Englishes/Varieties, on the one hand, and “New/Non-native/Outer Circle” Englishes/Varieties on the other. What justifies this division? In particular, is there any linguistic justification for it? (Singh et al. 1998: 46) This distinction of “insiders” versus “outsiders” or a “we – they” distinction is something which the native speakers […] believe in. In their perception, outsiders are trying to occupy their space and their prized possession. Therefore, even when some groups of people have native-like competence in their own language, they invoke the other distinction of “inclusive – exclusive,” even under “we,” with the sole purpose of restricting the membership of their community to only those who are born of English/native parentage, preferably in the English/native surrounding. This exclusive native of their club is what is on attack now from those who wish to gatecrash into the club by virtue of their speech habits, length of association with the language and/or culture, creative achievements, if any, etc. (U. N. Singh 1998: 16) […] the proficient speaker – not necessarily the native speaker – should be the arbiter of language usage. […] There are […] several legitimate language varieties around the world, for instance, stable pidgins and indigenized varieties of European languages in former European colonies, which are typically spoken non-natively. The few minorities who speak them natively have no more authority on their norms than the majorities who speak them nonnatively and often make them. These facts suggest that proficiency in a language variety, which most native speakers develop and maintain, is more critical than native competence in assessing well-formedness and appropriateness in linguistic investigation. (Mufwene 1998: 122)

Another situation in which the traditional view of ownership has been challenged is that of English as an international language, i.e., as a worldwide lingua franca. In this context, as Widdowson (1994: 384) points out, native-speaker ownership is impossible by definition: if the language is to be truly international, it can no longer be the possession of a particular (national) speech community but belongs to everyone who uses it: The very fact that English is an international language means that no nation can have custody over it. […] It is a matter of considerable pride and satisfaction for native speakers of English that their language is an international means of communication. But the point is that it is only international to the extent that it is not their language. It is not a possession which they lease out to others, while still retaining the freehold. Other people actually own it.

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But why should linguistic ownership be such a significant concept in the World Englishes context? Why has it become so controversial recently? As noted by Widdowson (1994: 378–379), in business, an important argument for being protective of a particular brand has to do with quality control. If anyone were free to produce anything, the maintenance of standards would be impossible. Brand names, and the restrictions on ownership they bring about and indicate, therefore, are important guarantees of production standards and product quality. An identical argument underlies the traditional stance on linguistic ownership and thus traditional models of English in the world. The argument hinges on the notion of standard English. Only standard English, it is maintained, assures clear communication and standards of intelligibility. Without mutual intelligibility, though, two dangerous processes loom large: on the one hand, English, today’s most important lingua franca, will lose that status because a lingua franca ceases to be such once its speakers no longer understand each other, and, what is worse, English might lose its language status entirely once it has dispersed into a myriad of mutually unintelligible Englishes. What is behind this is the (in)famous language/dialect distinction: there is considerable confusion in linguistics with regard to the definition and distinction of the two terms, but a frequently mentioned criterion is mutual intelligibility. Two varieties, it is said, are dialects of the same language if they are mutually intelligible. Of course, intelligibility hinges on other criteria than purely linguistic ones, as the famous case of the Scandinavian languages shows (cf. Downes 1998: 25–26), and there are other cases where there is no overlap between mutual (un)intelligibility and language or dialect status. Nevertheless, as the supporters of the standard argument invariably point out, if mutual intelligibility between varieties of English is lost, we might be faced with a scenario that resembles that of Latin.² The worldwide spread of English will inevitably lead to variation and change in the language, but this change must be restricted to the periphery, in both linguistic and extralinguistic, i.e., social and geographical, terms. It must not be allowed to affect the “core” of the language, which is constituted by standard English. To sum up this argument, if standard English is an inevitable prerequisite for the continued usefulness of English as an international language and even its language status, then we must maintain this central reference point as an anchor of stability in a confusingly diversifying linguistic landscape.

2 This scenario is popularly labeled the “disintegration catastrophe” (Lesznyák 2004: 38), “Babelization” (McArthur 1994: 233), or “the Latin analogy” (McArthur 1987: 9). McArthur dates the first quotes to this effect to the mid-1980s, but, as will be shown below, the idea is actually much older.

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But how is this maintenance to be achieved? The establishment and maintenance of standards presupposes authority and power. As the term already suggests, the most “natural” authority in language is, of course, that implicated in native speaker status. Native speakers “own” the language, and they do so “naturally,” i.e., by birth. A major problem for this scenario results from the fact that a large number of those in whose hands the care of the standard language presumably rests do not even speak standard English: “[t]he majority of those who are to the language born speak nonstandard English and have themselves to be instructed in the standard at school” (Widdowson 1994: 379). But if a group of speakers does not speak the variety they are supposed to guard and maintain naturally or natively, how should they be able to fulfill this task? This is impossible, of course, and speakers of non-standard English must therefore be excluded from ownership: “The custodians of standard English are self-elected members of a rather exclusive club” (1994: 379). The properties of this club and prerequisites for admission have been and are subject to some controversy; as Widdowson (1994: 379) points out, however, “[i]t is […] very generally assumed that a particular subset of educated native speakers in England, or New England, or wherever, have the natural entitlement to custody of the language, that the preservation of its integrity is in their hands.” Romaine (1997: xiii) seconds this opinion: “It is significant that the standard has always been equated with a class of people, i.e., the educated upper middle class (by implication also white male), rather than with a set of actual linguistic features.” This idea and its association with the native speaker derive from the second half of the nineteenth century, as will be shown in the following chapters. To sum up, the notion of native-speaker ownership of English has become problematic in the context of the worldwide spread of the language and its indigenization not only in various post-colonial contexts but also in relation to English as a modern lingua franca. What all of these contexts have in common is that they have led to massive changes in the demography and socio-political constitution of the English-speaking world. This, in turn, has resulted in the development of new linguistic identities and loyalties, which have begun to cast doubt on the traditional ethno-cultural image of the language. Traditionally, language ownership was based on factors such as ethnic affiliation and history; in recent years, however, linguistic identity and loyalty have been claimed by speakers who possess neither the “right” ethnicity nor the right history. In other words, the ethnic and historical dimensions of linguistic ownership are being questioned, which, in turn, means that its traditional definition, which was based on the notion of the native speaker of English, is bound to be challenged and possibly changed.

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 The native speaker in contemporary linguistics

2.4 Approaches to the native speaker: Features or historical construct? The contemporary images of the native speaker have been well analyzed, and the automatic attribution of authority to the native speaker based on the fact that he or she was born into the specific matrix of culture and language has been well deconstructed […]. The most salient lacuna in this research […] is the fact that the problem in itself has never been historicized. (Bonfiglio 2010: 2)

As already indicated above, this study traces the coming-into-being of the English native speaker by means of a discourse-historical approach. But why historical discourse analysis? The simple fact is that numerous other writers have suggested precisely such an approach without, however, actually putting this suggestion into practice. Thus, it is often pointed out that the native/non-native distinction is something that has less to do with actual linguistic features than with attitudes, affiliation, or social identity and that therefore structural approaches are insufficient or even mistaken: […] a mere structural approach to the distinction between native and non-native varieties of English is neither enlightening nor productive. (Afendras et al. 1995: 304) […] native speaker status is about social identity and not about linguistic competence. […] the performance and, more crucially, the perception of native speaker status are not necessarily based on linguistic evidence but are always mediated by other facets of social identity such as nationality, gender, race, religion, heritage, or class. (Piller 2001: 114–115) “Native” […] is associated with language function, attitudes and especially affiliation. Its purely linguistic basis turns out to be elusive when we examine many languages […] nativeness is circumstantial; it is not a quality or skill with which to assess or evaluate individual speakers. At best […], it is a socio-politically-charged label like “race,” “gender” or “class”. […] Could such a label have any real linguistic basis […]? My guess is that there is none […]. If the label “native speaker” is indeed simply a social indicator of who is in and who is out in a specific socio-political system, a linguistic argument need not be made to demonstrate its validity. (Ikome 1998: 68–74)

Even Coppieters, who actually compares the intuitions of native and near-native speakers of French on a number of fundamental grammatical contrasts such as imparfait vs. passé composé, the third-person pronouns il and ce, and the placement of the adjective before or after the noun and finds that “the NS’s [i.e., native speakers] and NNS’s [i.e., non-native speakers] studied […] have developed significantly different grammars for French,” eventually concludes that “a speaker of French is someone who is accepted as such by the community referred to as that

Approaches to the native speaker: Features or historical construct? 

 27

of French speakers, not someone who is endowed with a specific formal underlying system” (1987: 565). Identity rather than linguistics defines the native speaker. In fact, some researchers doubt the validity of employing grammaticality judgments in comparing native to non-native or near-native speakers altogether. In “Passing for a native speaker,” Piller explains why investigations into the linguistic competence of highly proficient non-native speakers which build on experimental methods are fundamentally flawed. Among others, the “phonosyntactic bias” of ultimate attainment research has led to the neglect of, for example, discursive practices, whereas the “monolingual bias” has resulted in a “collective failure to study successful L2 speakers and their competence and performance in its [sic] own right, without recourse to baseline native speaker data” (2002: 183). To sum up, in her view, ultimate attainment research […] has been guided by the assumption that successful competence and performance are nothing more than the production of some sounds in an experimental setting or the evaluation of some grammatical structures (2002: 184)

whereas an ecologically valid and holistic approach to near-nativeness requires consideration of the insider perspective as well as attention to an entire range of “meaning-making systems and social processes” (2002: 185). A similar position is that of Cook, who argues that the research methods currently employed in comparing native to non-native competence and performance are biased against second-language speakers: The grammaticality judgments technique is bound to reveal differences between monolinguals and L2 users, because the actual measuring instrument is not neutral. (2002: 22)

More specifically, second-language speakers are by necessity multilingual, which affects their performance in grammaticality judgment tasks, which, in turn, impinges on the results obtained by means of the comparison technique. Cook vehemently argues against research methods “that treat the L2 user as a defective native speaker” (2002: 20) and, more generally, against comparing the competence or performance of second-language speakers to that of monolingual native speakers: The indisputable element in the definition of native speaker is that a person is a native speaker of the language learnt first; the other characteristics are incidental, describing how well an individual uses the language. Someone who did not learn a language in childhood cannot be a native speaker of the language. Later-learnt languages can never be native languages, by definition. […] Asserting that “adults usually fail to become native speakers” […] is like saying that ducks fail to become swans: Adults could never become native speakers without being reborn. (1999: 187)

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 The native speaker in contemporary linguistics

Bhatt (2007: 59) argues in a similar vein: Although studies in second language acquisition and teaching have predominantly used native/non-native interactions to demonstrate the logic of second language development, there have been voices of dissent […] [which] have shown that such methodologies suffer from “comparative fallacy”: referring to the researcher imposing the structure of the native/ target language onto interlanguage. These scholars have argued that the structure of the interlanguage at various stages should be considered on its own terms, not from the structural perspective of the target language.

Another point is made by Singh, who maintains that comparing native to nonnative speakers is “like mixing oranges and apples,” because the standard procedure of collecting data from non-native speakers and then subjecting it to grammaticality judgments by native speakers mixes up performance and competence, and “interlanguage speakers do not necessarily accept the structures they produce” themselves (2007a: 35). Backus, finally, points out that grammaticality judgments may be flawed for another reason, namely the fact that “they tend to reflect the sociolinguistic tendency to orient to outside standards” (2007: 52). What this means with regard to grammaticality judgments passed on the output of speakers of Indian or Singaporean English might be that, no matter who passes them, these grammaticality judgments will reflect prescriptive influences from standard English. This would, of course, affect the output of non-standard speakers of, for example, American or British English as well. Nevertheless, these speakers would still not be called “non-native” speakers of English, which once more demonstrates that features are not really what matters in characterizing the native speaker. In accordance with the position outlined at the beginning of this section, the English native speaker is sometimes described as an “imaginary” or political “construct,” something which is “to a considerable extent discursively constituted and created”: The native speaker is in fact an imaginary construct – a canonically literate monolingual middle-class member of a largely fictional national community whose citizens share a belief in a common history and a common destiny […]. And this ideal corresponds less and less to reality. (Kramsch 1997: 363) […] the political construct called the “native speaker” […]. Those who are responsible for the design of the game plan to “other” their own people, try to lift the epithet of nativity up the ladder of verticalis so that there is always very little space on the vertex, and most people keep falling off the peak because they are disqualified on some count or the other […]. This distinction of “insiders” versus “outsiders” or a “we – they” distinction is something which the native speakers […] believe in. (U.N. Singh 1998: 15–16)

Approaches to the native speaker: Features or historical construct? 

 29

[…] the “native speaker” […] of the English language turns out to be a particularly useful creature (that is, someone who is to a considerable extent discursively constituted and created for whatever purpose there is at hand) […]. (Kandiah 1998: 83, 85)

A number of the above quotes (e.g., Piller 2001: 114–115; Ikome 1998: 68–74) also assert links between native-speaker identity and socio-political or cultural categories such as nationality, race, or class. Sometimes, the rootedness of the native speaker in earlier phases of European linguistic thought is asserted. As noted above, however, the matter is not generally treated in greater detail: Much of the linguistic theorizing that bears on the subject matter of “native speaker” has been informed by languages spoken natively by most members of the communities with which they are associated. The tradition has thus been to select the native speaker (especially one who is monolingual and has not moved from his geographical and social environment […] in which his variety has been spoken) as the ultimate reliable source of information on the norm of that language. […] The preference for “uncontaminated” native speakers […] has to do with a conception of language which modern linguistics has inherited from Saussure (1916) […]. (Mufwene 1998: 113)

An exception is Bonfiglio (2010), who traces the ideology of linguistic nativism and its associations with nationality and race from Greco-Roman antiquity through the Middle Ages and into the nineteenth century. He also links the notion of “motherese,” i.e., infant-directed speech, with the “protectionist ideology of the mother tongue” (2010: 5) and uncovers the ideological basis of arboreal or family tree models of language, which have recently resurfaced in the context of the attempt at recovering the origins of and relationships between the world’s languages by means of methods developed in population genetics (e.g., CavalliSforza 2000). Whereas Bonfiglio (2010) offers a global perspective on the phenomenon, however, the present work is concerned exclusively with the Englishspeaking world and zooms in onto the nineteenth century and the discourses that immediately surround the emergence of the term native speaker. With regard to the latter, another author not only calls for but also performs an investigation into its historical uses. Most generally, Acevedo Butcher (2005: 13) argues that the current semantics of superiority attached to native speaker are a continuation of native’s long and checkered history, and that, although this phrase is currently in the linguistic ascendant, its history of slavery, colonialism, manifest destiny, and apartheid necessitates the acceptance of new globally-minded terms by linguists.

At first sight, Acevedo Butchers critique of the native speaker looks familiar: we need to get rid of the term because it is negatively loaded semantically. In order to

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 The native speaker in contemporary linguistics

substantiate her claim that the concept “is the last manifestation of an old world order of British colonialism and American imperialism” (2005: 13), which has no place in “the inclusive contexts required by a global community” (2005: 20), she surveys the OED and finds that (2005: 16) over fifty percent of the recorded uses for native are listed by the OED as “offensive,” “depreciative,” and/or otherwise condescending. […] twenty-five percent of the uses denote “belonging” or “not belonging” and smack of colonialism and/or nationalism. […] over 80% of the OED’s recorded uses for native are inhumane or somehow degrading to a fellow human being. […] From the very beginning, then, native […] was found in conjunction with all that is wrong with the world.

Unfortunately, Acevedo Butcher’s (2005) analysis is flawed in at least two respects: first, how do we get from all the negative, depreciative, demeaning uses of native to today’s native speaker, who, as Acevedo Butcher acknowledges (2005: 20), is associated with perceived linguistic superiority and exclusivity? At no point are the two uses of native linked; the only positive historical reference quoted by Acevedo Butcher is – interestingly – to oysters: native oysters are oysters “wholly or partly reared in British waters,” and in the London market “oysters are divided into two great classes – ‘natives’ and ‘commons’” (2005: 19). Inevitably, though, according to Acevedo Butcher, this sense of the word again “divide[s] oyster from oyster in a transference of colonial language.” The second problem is not unique to Acevedo Butcher’s analysis. In their indignation at the social and economic injustices that the insistence on contested concepts such as the native speaker entails, critical linguists sometimes fail to distinguish clearly between the word and the world, i.e., they subject discourses to the same judgments in terms of right and wrong or good and bad as one would actual facts. Obviously, however, discourses and facts must be separated (cf. Pennycook 1998: 138–139; Wodak 2001: 64–65). To summarize, at least according to a number of authors, what we are looking at if we look at the English native speaker is an imaginary or political construct, something which is discursively constituted and created, and which is about attitudes, affiliation, and social identity rather than about linguistic competence. Native-speaker identity is crucially linked to nation, race, and class; the native-speaker ideology is also connected to a number of other linguistic ideologies, such as the standard ideology. All of these ideologies have their basis in the history of linguistics, as it developed in Western Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such statements are frequently made in the literature without, however, being backed up by detailed evidence. This study aims to fill that void by reconstructing at least some of the discourses that surrounded the emergence of the English native speaker in order to see how such a concept could

The birth of the English native speaker 

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be “imagined” (cf. Anderson 1991) in the first place. I thereby attempt to shed some light on the historical and current implications of the term and when, how, and why it might have become problematic.

2.5 The birth of the English native speaker As just outlined, this study focuses on the coming-into-being of the English native speaker. An important preliminary question in this context is, of course, when the term first occurred. “When was the first use of the term? I cannot find anything earlier than Bloomfield’s Language (1933)” (Davies 2003: ix). Even though Davies quotes an early twentieth-century source, the phrase native speaker is actually older, as a look at the OED attests: in the late 1850s, George Perkins Marsh used it in an address at Columbia College in New York (1859), in which he argued for the introduction of “native,” i.e., English, philology as a subject at American universities. The term occurs again in William Dwight Whitney’s classic on The Life and Growth of Language, which was published in 1875, and then, in the early twentieth century, figures prominently in the works of Henry Cecil Wyld (1907, 1969 [1906]). At the same time, just like Marsh’s address, the linguistic literature of the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is obsessed with nativeness, as the following quotes from Jespersen’s Growth and Structure of the English Language illustrate: The Anglo-Saxon principle of adopting only such words as were easily assimilated with the native vocabulary, for the most part names of concrete things, and of turning to the greatest possible account native words and roots, especially for abstract notions – that principle may be taken as a symptom of a healthful condition of a language and a nation: witness Greek, where we have the most flourishing and vigorous growth of abstract and other scientifically serviceable terms on a native basis that the world has ever seen, and where the highest development of intellectual and artistic activity went hand in hand with the most extensive creation of indigenous words and an extremely limited importation of words from abroad. It is not, then, the Old English system of utilizing the vernacular stock of words, but the modern system of neglecting the native and borrowing from a foreign vocabulary that has to be accounted for as something out of the natural state of things. (1982 [1905]: 44–45) In old times, of course, many a Dane in England would speak his mother-tongue with a large admixture of English, but […] in course of time the descendants of the immigrants would no longer learn Scandinavian as their mother-tongue, but English. But that which is important is the fact of the English themselves intermingling their own native speech with Scandinavian elements. […] the culture or civilization of the Scandinavian settlers cannot have been of a higher order than that of the English […]. Neither can their state of culture have been

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much inferior to that of the English, for in that case they would have adopted the language of the natives without appreciably influencing it. (1982 [1905]: 73)

What this scenario – a few isolated occurrences of native speaker plus plenty of attestations of related terms – suggests is that the second half of the nineteenth century was a period in which people started to think differently about languages and their speakers. As a new term characterizing particular language users and setting them off from other groups, the native speaker provided an important way of conceptualizing and labeling a particular linguistic identity and drawing boundaries between some speakers and others. Before we move on to trace the first attestations of native speaker in the English linguistic literature, the following chapter outlines the theoretical and methodological basis of this study.

3 Identities, ideologies, and discourse: Toward a theoretical and methodological framework

3.1 Linguistic identities and ideologies Before moving on to the notion of discourse in linguistics, the following paragraphs comment on the terms identity and ideology, which play a central role in all calls for a discourse-based approach to the English native speaker. As for the term identity, anthropologists and historians and, to some extent, linguists have recently dedicated themselves to the task of demonstrating how identities in the religious, cultural, and political domains are established, maintained, and altered. Such demonstration is based on the assumption that collective identities are derived rather than inherent and, in most cases, recent rather than timeless. The perspective taken is thus non-essentialist and contingent. Identities and the boundaries between them, i.e., who “we” are and where “we” stand, as opposed to who “they” are and where “they” stand, are assumed to be subjective and elastic. However, as Jung (2000) points out, much of what has been written on political or socio-cultural identities focuses on the constitution rather than on the construction of such phenomena. This is problematic, as [c]onstitution is still inherently static, relying on impetus external to the model to explain variation over time. An explanation of the embedded construction of […] identity, on the other hand, assumes change through the constant interaction of changing variables. (2000: 18–19)

The actual process of establishing a common “groupness” involves elites attempting to mobilize a critical mass of individuals. In order to do so, they endow particular symbols with meaning. What is important is that this meaning-making practice must appeal to the experiences of the individuals being mobilized. Collective identity thus exists at both the collective and the individual levels; it is “the shared definition of a group that derives from members’ common interests, experiences, and solidarity” (Jung 2000: 20). This “shared definition” of the group implies the potential to change under the condition that one or more of the variables affecting the identity change. The English native speaker as a particular linguistic identity demonstrates very well how such processes of negotiation, construction, and change may work. Very briefly, the massive growth in the number of second-language speakers of

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 Identities, ideologies, and discourse

English, the indigenization of the language in post-colonial settings, and the acknowledgement of the rule-governed nature and legitimacy of non-standard varieties have dramatically affected the concept’s status and role in linguistics. Whereas at some point, the native speaker was heralded as the “owner” of the language and ultimate authority in matters of correctness, the concept is now labeled a “myth” and calls for its abandonment may be heard. Linguistic ideologies have been described variously as “sets of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalization or justification of perceived language structure and use” (Silverstein 1979: 193) or as “the cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests” (Irvine 1989: 255).³ But where do we find linguistic ideologies? According to Woolard (1998: 9), [i]deology is variously discovered in linguistic practice itself; in explicit talk about language, that is metalinguistic or metapragmatic discourse; and in the regimentation of language use through more implicit metapragmatics.⁴

In other words, linguistic ideologies are located in, among others, discourse about language, i.e., in metalinguistic statements or utterances. Their function in such metalinguistic talk is to endow it with a certain coherence by implicitly framing it with particular unexpressed assumptions, such assumptions, in turn, being particular to specific social groups. A fundamental emphasis of the study of linguistic ideologies is thus on the socially constituted nature of thought and its representation. Conceptualizations of language, as expressed in metalinguistic discourse, are socially derived and dimensioned; they originate in or are responsive to the experience of particular social positions.⁵

3 Note that none of these definitions implies the elements of deliberate distortion, illusion, or mystification that have been treated as central to the ideology concept in, for example, the Marxist tradition. 4 The latter “means linguistic signaling that is part of the stream of language use in process and that simultaneously indicates how to interpret that language-in-use” (Woolard 1998: 9). 5 This, of course, does not imply a view of society which considers material life and social relations as primary and the symbolic realm as derived. Rather, material, social, and symbolic phenomena are understood as mutually dependent and constitutive.

Discourse as a scientific object 

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3.2 Discourse as a scientific object This section deals with discourse as a key concept both in the social sciences and humanities and in linguistics specifically and explores how central ideas from various disciplines can be employed meaningfully in the investigation of the origins of the native-speaker concept in English As a scientific object, discourse has received a tremendous upsurge of interest in recent decades. This upsurge has to do at least in part with a fundamental change in perception with regard to the problem of academic knowledge, and perhaps all knowledge. The belief in traditional approaches to the origins and nature of the latter, such as empiricism or rationalism, has been thoroughly shattered, while a radical questioning of how human beings perceive and interpret their social and cultural environment has set in. What has moved center-stage is the question of how we build knowledge, and this is where issues of linguistic representation come into play. All academic endeavor, but even basic human experience, is built on classificatory operations. To identify and describe new phenomena, we must define boundaries between them and other known phenomena; we need to delimit conceptual categories, label them, and describe the relationships holding between them. Language is an essential tool in this. Seen from this angle, language is less a transparent, neutral medium for conveying pre-existing categories but rather an important, if not the most important, tool in constructing them. Many social sciences and humanities have recently come to appreciate the power of language in knowledge building. This general move is often labeled the “Foucauldian turn,” as much of the interest in the theorizing of knowledge and the role of language in it is more or less closely connected with the work of the French philosopher and psychologist Michel Foucault (e.g., 1965, 1972), to whom, in fact, much of the popularization of the idea of discourse as a scientific object is owed. A crucial question in Foucault’s work is how an object, concept, or practice comes into being. In one of his best-known works, for example, Foucault (1965) asks how the psychological or medical category of madness originated in the nineteenth century. In his view, mental illness was discursively constructed by various statements which all labeled it, described it, or attempted to explain it. In other words, it is through discourses that particular phenomena are created, institutionalized, and made into tradition by human agents. An extreme form of this position would be that discourses enable us to perceive things that are not “really” there. However, once a phenomenon exists in discourse, it cannot simply be done away with; it has become “real” in the sense that it can be named,

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 Identities, ideologies, and discourse

defined, and set off from other phenomena. In sum, discourses are systems of statements that constitute or construct social reality. Discourses also limit our thinking. They may determine, or at least influence, what is “true” and what is “false” and make it impossible, or at least difficult, to think that which is not compatible with the discourse itself. Since discourses itself are socio-historically situated, meaning, truth, and knowledge as produced in discourses are relative, an idea which Foucault, contra Kant, labels the “historical apriori.” The analysis of discourses also involves the analysis of power, for, in contrast to other analysts, Foucault does not view power as a property of groups or individuals, i.e., agents, or as residing in particular structures, e.g., the economic base in the Marxist view, but sees it as intrinsically related to knowledge and its production, which, in turn, are located at the level of discursive formations. For Foucault discourse is inseparable from power, because discourse is the governing and ordering medium of every institution. Discourse determines what can be said, what the criteria of “truth” are, who is allowed to speak with authority, and where and how this can be done. In sum, in Foucault’s view, power relations are immanent to discursive formations, which not only create certain truths and meanings but also make possible certain agents and structures (cf. Apperley 1997: 15–17). For the present research question, which deals with the origins of the native speaker concept in English and how particular associations came to be attached to it, at least three of Foucault’s points may be well taken. First, language has a constitutive nature in the formation of phenomena, and this probably holds at least as much for linguistics as for any other field of inquiry in the social sciences and the humanities. Second, the socio-historical specificity of the statements constituting a discourse is an important fact to be kept in mind in any investigation that looks critically at the terminological and conceptual foundations of a scientific discipline. The basis of many of the assumptions still surrounding the English native speaker is to be found in the particular socio-political, historical, and language-philosophical conditions in which the formation of the concept took place in the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century. Third, one’s own epistemological basis must be reflected in the same way as that of the writers who were involved in the discourses that brought about the phenomenon of inquiry. However, the reflection of one’s own (possibly unexpressed) assumptions is, of course, a crucial part of every critical approach to science.

Discourse as a linguistic object 

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3.3 Discourse as a linguistic object The term discourse is certainly one of the most frequently and variedly used terms in linguistics (cf. Blackledge 2005: 7; Spitzmüller 2005: 30). This study follows Wodak (2001: 66), according to whom “[d]iscourse” can […] be understood as a complex bundle of simultaneous and sequential interrelated linguistic acts, which manifest themselves within and across the social fields of action as thematically interrelated semiotic, oral or written tokens, very often as “texts,” that belong to specific semiotic types, that is genres.

While Wodak’s definition explains how discourse is related to the social (“linguistic acts, which manifest themselves within and across the social fields of action”) and also provides for a way of distinguishing discourse and text,⁶ it still leaves open the question of how to identify and delimit specific discourses as objects of analysis. Important help in this respect comes from historical discourse analysis as practiced in German studies⁷ with its incorporation of corpus-linguistic ideas and its focus on methodological problems and more specifically on issues of representativity and objectivity (Bluhm et al. 2000: 11).

3.3.1 Linguistic approaches to discourse I: Historical discourse analysis Following Busse and Teubert (1994: 14), we may define any discourse as a virtual corpus of texts whose constitution is determined largely by semantic criteria; thus, the texts included in such a corpus must all be relevant to the subject or topic of the investigation; they must all fall within particular limits of time, space, social group, communicative intention, and text type; and they must refer to each other explicitly and/or implicitly. A specific corpus, i.e., a corpus that may be

6 Texts, according to Wodak, are “materially durable products of linguistic actions.” The term genre is defined as “the conventionalized, more or less schematically fixed use of language associated with a particular activity.” Fields of action, finally, are “segments of the respective societal ‘reality’, which contribute to constituting and shaping the ‘frame’ of discourse” (2001: 66). 7 With the term historical discourse analysis, I refer to what in German studies is labeled “(historische) Diskurssemantik” or “(linguistische) Diskursgeschichte” (cf. Spitzmüller 2005: 43). Even though the terms are easily confounded, the former must be distinguished from what has been labeled the “discourse-historical approach.” The latter is a branch of Critical Discourse Analysis and inseparably connected with the “Vienna school” of discourse analysis (cf., e.g., Wodak et al. 1999).

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used as the basis of an actual investigation, will always comprise a subset of such a discourse, determined often by pragmatic criteria such as the availability of sources but also by content criteria such as redundancy. The specific linguistic manifestations to be investigated by historical discourse analysis are not self-evident. At what linguistic level do discourses instantiate the positions of those involved in them or, more generally, attitudes, identities, and ideologies? As Busse and Teubert (1994: 13) point out, historical discourse analysis resembles traditional word history but also transcends it in very important ways. Thus, the aim of historical discourse analysis is not just the analysis of single words or phrases and their meanings in the contexts in which they occur, but the semantic and epistemic relationships that can be discovered within a discourse. In their view (1994: 22–23), such relationships manifest themselves not only between individual words or phrases but also, and possibly even more importantly, between statements or complexes of statements and even between the implicit prerequisites that make possible the occurrence of particular statements. Intertextual and interdiscursive relations entertained by such statements are important as well. Thus, apart from key terms and their usage as well as metaphors, metonymies, and other stylistic devices at the word or phrase level, a crucial focus of historical discourse analysis is on the expression of meaning at the sentence level and beyond, i.e., on the analysis of strategies of argumentation (cf. Spitzmüller 2005: 56; Jung 2005: 182–183). This focus unites historical discourse analysis with the Foucauldian notion of discourse, which views discourses as systems of statements (cf. Busse and Teubert 1994: 23). Attention to that which is not explicitly said or not openly stated is another crucial characteristic of Foucauldian discourse analysis in that the notion of the “historical apriori” introduced above takes into account not only the fact that the emergence of objects or concepts is constrained by particular socio-historical and epistemological conditions but also that those conditions are not necessarily made explicit by or even known to the participants in the discourse. Their uncovering or laying bare is thus an important step in discourse analysis (cf. Spitzmüller 2005: 56). In sum, historical discourse analysis has two main thrusts: first, it aims at the description of the terminological constitution or construction of particular discursive formations, and second, it attempts to lay open the implicit prerequisites that underlie those formations. A focus on the latter is particularly important in a case such as that of the English native speaker, which, as a term, occurs fairly infrequently during the first fifty years or so of its existence. Obviously, if a term does not occur, it cannot be analyzed by means of word history. This, however, does not mean that the implications, connotations, or associations later carried

Discourse as a linguistic object 

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by the term may not already have been present. A look at the text in which the first use of native speaker is attested is illuminating in this respect and will be provided in Chapter 4. A helpful criterion in assessing the coherence or unity of a discourse corpus is intertextuality (cf. below). A number of researchers have pointed to the importance of texts commenting on or summarizing other texts or even the discourse as a whole. According to Bluhm et al. (2000: 14), such texts are important in that they lift the discourse from the metalevel to the object level in that it becomes “real” not only to the researcher but also to those participating in the discourse themselves. According to Spitzmüller (2005: 45), there is often an awareness among the contributors to the discourse of having a share in a larger discursive entity, which not only affects their discursive practices but may also enhance the representativeness of the discourse corpus by endowing it with real-life rather than merely discourse-internal cohesion and coherence. In describing the social construction of standard English through the discourse practices of eighteenth-century grammar writers, Watts (1999) introduces the notion of discourse community, which adequately captures much of what has just been described. Watts defines a discourse community as a set of individuals who can be interpreted as constituting a community on the basis of the ways in which their oral or written discourse practices reveal common interests, goals and beliefs […]. The members of the community may or may not be conscious of sharing these discourse practices […], and the community itself may only become “visible” through the course of time. (1999: 43)

In other words, even though a discourse community may emerge only in hindsight through the analysis of the discursive practices of a number of individuals contributing to a particular discourse, it is nevertheless real and based on these individuals’ “common interests, goals and beliefs.” Particular discourse practices resulting in intertextuality provide the link between the members of the discourse community: The most salient types of discourse practice which instantiate membership in a discourse community are explicit references to earlier works and the reworking of sections of text from earlier works, with or without acknowledgement of the source. Both types of discourse practice represent forms of intertextuality which allow us to trace the lines of a common discourse. (1999: 44)

Thus, Watts, too, views discourses as real-world entities which may be discovered by way of the analysis of particular discursive practices creating intertextuality.

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3.3.2 Digression: Late-nineteenth century intertextuality and the notion of the discourse community The corpus employed for the following investigation is replete with the discourse practices just mentioned. Both references to the works of other authors and quoted material, “with or without acknowledgement of the source,” are exceedingly frequent. A host of examples illustrating the former may be found in Brander Matthews’s essay on “Americanisms and Briticisms” (1892). In voicing his protest against the wholesale denouncement of American usages by British critics, Matthews marshals a whole array of prominent figures from linguistics as well as other disciplines: Sometimes – and indeed one might say often – a word or usage is denounced by some British critic without due examination of the evidence on its behalf. Professor Freeman, for example, who is frequently finicky in his choice of words, objected strongly to the use of metropolis as descriptive of the chief city of a country […], and Mr. Skeat has admitted the validity of the objection. But Mr. R. O. Williams, in his recent suggestive paper on “Good English for Americans,” informs us that metropolis was employed to indicate the most important city of the State by Macaulay, an author most careful in the use of words, and by De Quincey, a purist of the strictest sect. […] In like manner Dr. Fitzedward Hall had no difficulty in showing that reliable, often objurgated as an Americanism, is to be found in a letter written in 1624 by one Richard Montagu […], and that it owes its introduction into literature to Coleridge, who used it in 1800. Dr. Hall has also shown that scientist, which Mr. A. J. Ellis saw fit to denounce as an “American barbaric trisyllable,” was first used by an Englishman, Dr. Whewell, in 1840. (1892: 24–25)

Elsewhere, Matthews decries British usage, noting that there are “Briticisms as worthy of reproof as the worst specimen of ‘the mongrel speech adopted by some humorists in America’” (1892: 14). In his view, “[i]n the ordinary speech of Englishmen there are not a few vocables which grate on American ears” (1892: 15). He supports his point with quotes from a number of sources: The use of like for as, not uncommon in the Southern States, has there always been regarded as an indefensible colloquialism; but in England it is heard in the conversation of literary men of high standing […]. And Walter Bagehot represents the dwellers in old manorhouses and in rural parsonages asking, “Why can’t they [the French] have Kings, Lords, and Commons, like we have?” Here occasion serves to remark that Bagehot’s own writing is besprinkled with Briticisms; his style is slouchy beyond belief; it is impossible to imagine a Frenchman or an American capable of thinking as clearly and as cogently as Bagehot, and willing to write as carelessly. […] Equally noteworthy is the misuse of without for unless, condemned in America as a vulgarism, but discoverable in England in the pages of important periodical publications; for example, in the number of the New Review for August, 1890, we find Sir Charles Dilke, who, as a member of her Majesty’s Privy Council, ought to be familiar

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with the Queen’s English, writing that “nothing can be brought before the Vestry without the Vestry is duly summoned.” (1892: 16–17)

In this quote, Matthews criticizes the language use of one prominent scholar colleague while admiring his intellectual caliber (“it is impossible to imagine a Frenchman or an American capable of thinking as clearly and cogently as Bagehot, and willing to write as carelessly”) and, with an ironical allusion to Alford’s Queen’s English (1864), an exceedingly prominent but strictly normative guidebook to English usage, denounces outright that of another (“Charles Dilke, who, as a member of her Majesty’s Privy Council, ought to be familiar with the Queen’s English”). The significance of these comments can only be appreciated in the context of Matthews’s essay and with the help of historical background knowledge. Asserting American linguistic independence and self-confidence (“We know now that the mother-tongue is a heritage and not a loan. It is ours to use as we needs must;” 1892: 5), Matthews nevertheless denies the danger of a linguistic breakup (“That there will ever be any broad divergence between the English language and American speech, such, for example, as differentiates the Portuguese from the Spanish, is now altogether unlikely;” 1892: 30). In his view, “[t]he existence of Briticisms and of Americanisms […] is a sign of healthy vitality” of the language (1982: 29). English is a pluricentric language (“To declare a single standard of speech is impossible;” 1892: 30) and needs the guidance neither of pedantic “school-masters” attempting “to strait-jacket our speech into formulas borrowed from the Latin” (1892: 23) nor of British critics “attempting to cramp our mothertongue by limiting bug to a single offensive species” (1892: 21). What is wanted is attention to “the best usage of those who speak English” (1892: 14), wherever they may be found. Nevertheless, in the competition of varieties, the one spoken by the most gifted branch of the “Anglo-Saxon stock” will eventually prevail: We may be sure that that branch of our Anglo-Saxon stock will use the best English, and will perhaps see its standards of speech accepted by the other branches, which is most vigorous physically, mentally, and morally, which has the most intelligence, and which knows its duty best and does it most fearlessly. (1892: 31)

This quote links Matthews’s work with the late-nineteenth century Anglo-Saxonist movement, and it is in this context that the names Walter Bagehot and Charles Dilke quoted above assume significance. In the second half of the nineteenth century, an ideology had emerged that was based on a belief in the superiority of the English-speaking nations; descent from the Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain was thought to have resulted in innate

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racial characteristics that explained the observable and growing primacy of English and American civilization in the world. Americans, in turn, generally viewed themselves as the vanguard of the Anglo-Saxon race, destined to spread not only common virtues but also their unique capacity for freedom and democracy, first across the North American continent and then, crossing the Pacific, around the world (cf. Horsman 1981: 298–303). The movement also drew on Darwin’s theories of evolution, which were taken to imply the consequence that lower races would be eliminated by higher ones. Walter Bagehot specifically applied this evolutionary theory to society; the Teutonic origins theory was popularized by Oxford historians William Stubbs and Edward A. Freeman (who is plausibly referred to in the first of the two longer quotes from Matthews 1892).⁸ British parliamentarian Charles Dilke, finally, having made a “racial grand tour through ‘English-speaking or […] English-governed lands’” (Kramer 2002: 19), popularized a “Greater Britain” comprising exclusively white settlement colonies and providing a linguistic and racial base for Anglo-Saxon expansionism. To sum up, by means of very specific name dropping, Matthews places himself squarely within the discourse of Anglo-Saxonism and, by applauding the writings of particular authors, positions himself within the discourse. A similar note is struck and instantiated via the same strategy by Brander Matthews’s compatriot and quasi-namesake William Mathews. In Words; Their Use and Abuse, Mathews also renounces Alford’s accusations, refusing to plead guilty for the corruption of the language: The abuse of the Queen’s English to which we have called attention, did not begin with Americans. It began with our trans-Atlantic cousins, who employed “ink-horn” terms and outlandish phrases at a very early period. (1876: 104)

8 As a historian, Freeman apparently showed an unusually serious interest in linguistics. As Parker (1981: 825) describes, he “maintained important personal contacts with a wide circle of academics, publishers and politicians […], and the philologists A. H. Sayce and Max Müller.” Philology “provided the broad theoretical base for Freeman’s ideas on race,” which will be discussed below (1981: 834). He was closely familiar with Müller’s writings and “sought the advice of Müller throughout 1870 and after. They discussed philology and associated ideas, generally agreeing with each other, and sending each other copies of their lectures and essays” (1981: 835). Freeman himself contributed to the discourse on Americanisms (1882), noting that “[p]eople talk of ‘Americanisms’ and of ‘Scotticisms,’ as if they were in all cases corruptions, or at all events changes, introduced by Americans and Scotsmen […]. But I maintain that the great mass of both classes […] is, for the more part, some perfectly good English word or phrase, which has gone out of use in England, but which has lived on in America or in Scotland” (Freeman 1995 [1877]: 289).

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Just like Brander Matthews a few years later, William Mathews appealed to historian Freeman as principal witness: Mr. E. A. Freeman, the English historian, complained in a recent lecture that our language had few friends and many foes, its only friends being plow-boys and a few scholars. (1876: 105)

As these examples show, the notion of discourse community is useful in describing not only the discourse practices of eighteenth-century grammar writers. The discourses surrounding the emergence of the native-speaker concept are replete with appeals to other authors and their works; such appeals allow the contributors to signal their status as insiders to the discourse as well as flag their own standpoint within it. A single example will suffice to illustrate the second of the discourse practices mentioned by Watts (1999: 44), the “reworking of sections of text from earlier works, with or without acknowledgement of the source.” The example is part of the construction of other languages as lesser languages and their speakers as lesser beings. There is clearly a constant reciprocity between the constructions of the “other” and the “self,” so that if the “other” is constructed as inferior, the “self” comes out as superior. What is at stake is the presence or absence in languages “of a spiritual and ethical nomenclature” (Mathews 1876: 70). English, as a superior language, obviously possesses a sufficiently large and differentiated vocabulary to express such concepts, whereas other languages do not, which is a source of constant frustration in the translation and evangelical work of Englishspeaking missionaries. What other languages do possess, however, is a host of vocabulary distinctions which are sometimes irrelevant, at other times outright reprehensible. The “native language of Van Diemen’s Land” provides an example of the latter: It is a striking fact, noted by an English traveler, that the native language of Van Diemen’s Land has four words to express the idea of taking life, not one of which indicates the deeplying distinction between to kill and to murder; while any word for love is wanting to it altogether. (Mathews 1876: 70)

Twenty-five years earlier, Trench had already employed the same example in correlating “savage” languages with their speakers’ decrepit intellectual and moral state, reporting on the plight of the missionary: But what does their language on close inspection prove? In every case what they are themselves, the remnant and ruin of a better and a nobler past. […] And as there is no such witness to the degradation of the savage as the brutal poverty of his language, so is there nothing that so effectually tends to keep him in the depths to which he has fallen. […] Lan-

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guage is as truly on one side the limit and restraint of thought, as on the other side that which feeds and unfolds it. Thus it is the ever-repeated complaint of the missionary that the very terms are wholly or nearly wholly wanting in the dialect of the savage whereby to impart to him heavenly truths, or indeed even the nobler emotions of the human heart. (1927a [1851]: 18–19)

The following text passage features the Van Diemen’s Land example: And I have been informed, on the authority of one excellently capable of knowing, an English scholar long resident in Van Diemen’s Land, that in the native language of that island there are four words to express the taking of human life – one to express a father’s killing of a son, another a son’s killing of a father, with other varieties of murder; and that in no one of these lies the slightest moral reprobation, or the sense of the deep-lying distinction between to kill and to murder; while at the same time, of that language so richly and so fearfully provided with expressions for this extreme utterance of hate, he also reports that any word for “love” is wanting in it altogether. (1927a [1851]: 20)

What we are presented with in these two quotes is a beautiful example of intertextuality created by means of the incorporation and adaptation of passages from other works. Whether the Van Diemen’s Land example originated with Trench (1927a [1851]) or not remains unclear to me; in any case, it resurfaced on other occasions involving the distinction between superior and inferior languages and speakers. The terminology of taking life must have become unpalatable to Western observers in the course of time; what remained, however, is the contrast between the abstract and/or important distinctions made by the English language and the overly specific and/or irrelevant ones made by others. The following chain of quotes, commenting on the lack of the general category “tree” (and the act of washing) among non-European languages, illustrates this. Note how “savage languages” and “primitive peoples” are now labeled by more neutral terms but the “facts” described remain the same: The same deficiency of abstract terms, that is, of words in which the subjective predominates over the objective element, marks many barbarous languages. The Malayans, for instance, have words to signify different sorts and parts of trees, but none to signify “tree” itself […]. Similarly the Cherokee possesses thirteen different verbs to denote particular kinds of “washing” but none to denote “washing” in a general sense. (Sayce 1874: 78–79).⁹

9 Sayce (1874: 78) quotes Milligan’s “Vocabulary of the Dialects of some of the Aboriginal Tribes of Tasmania,” but without attributing a date to it. It is possible that this is the source of the “tree” comparison: “It has already been implied that the aborigines of Tasmania had acquired very limited powers of abstraction or generalisation. They possessed no words representing

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Often in speaking a foreign language we seek in vain for a precise equivalent for some native word or idiom […]. Sometimes the difficulty arises from want of an abstract general germ, as when in savage languages there is no word for “tree” but only names for the different kinds of trees, or no word for “wash” but only words for washing the feet, washing the hands and so on. (Sweet 1900: 137–138) It is characteristic of primitive peoples that their languages are highly specialized, so that where we are contented with one generic word they have several specific terms. The aborigines of Tasmania had a name for each variety of gum-tree and wattle-tree, etc., but they had no equivalent for the expression “a tree.” (Jespersen 1982 [1905]: 49) The residents of the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea have 100 words for yams, while the Maoris of New Zealand have thirty-five words for dung (don’t ask me why). Meanwhile, the Arabs are said (a little unbelievably, perhaps) to have 6,000 words for camels and camel equipment. The aborigines of Tasmania have a word for every type of tree, but no word that just means “tree.” (Bryson 1990: 5)

In sum, as the preceding sections have shown, the corpus employed for the present study is replete with instances of intertextuality as described by Watts (1999: 44). Such instances of intertextuality aid in uncovering the links between the texts constituting a discourse and between the participants in the discourse community.

3.3.3 Linguistic approaches to discourse II: Critical Discourse Analysis Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has established itself over the past two decades as an influential approach to the role of discourse in social life, drawing on both social and linguistic theory. It thus offers a “transdisciplinary” (Blackledge 2005: 6–7) way of looking at the linguistic character of social categories, structures, and processes. CDA is closely associated with the names Fairclough (e.g., 1992, 1995, and 2001), van Dijk (e.g., 1993), and Wodak (e.g., Wodak et al. 1999), but numerous other researchers have recently published studies that can be subsumed under the label (cf. Blackledge 2005: 239–248). As the name implies, an important component of CDA is the critical standpoint adopted. As van Dijk (2001: 96) puts it, CDA is “discourse analysis with an attitude.” In other words, “CDA emphatically opposes those who abuse text and talk in order to establish, confirm or legitimate their abuse of power” (Black-

abstract ideas; for each variety of gum-tree and wattle-tree, &c., &c., they had a name, but they had not equivalent for the expression ‘a tree.’”

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ledge 2005: 3). Whereas a primarily critical standpoint by itself will, of course, not necessarily generate new insights into the function of language in social life, CDA also implies a number of theoretical and methodological premises that have proved fruitful in the investigation to be described in the following chapters. First, CDA views language as social practice. This means that language use is always socially determined and has social effects, i.e., language activity is not merely a reflection of social processes, structures, and categories, but is a crucial part of the latter and at least partly co-determines them. Discourse, as a form of language use, is thus socially conditioned as well as socially constitutive, and this, at least according to Fairclough (2001: 19), is what differentiates the notions of discourse and text. If discourse is socially constitutive, however, it may either help to sustain and reproduce social identities and relations or contribute to transforming them. As Reisigl and Wodak point out (2001: 40), for example, discourse may serve to construct categories such as race, nation, or class, but it may also serve to destroy or dismantle them. Second, CDA is interested in language and power. In his influential volume of the same title, one of Fairclough’s aims is to correct what he views as a widespread underestimation of the role of language in the production, maintenance, and change of unequal relations of power (2001: viii). Power in this sense is defined differently than by Foucault in that language is not viewed as containing power itself but as being ascribed power by the use powerful agents make of it. In this context, CDA is interested in investigating how social inequality is expressed, constituted, and legitimized in discourse. Power is seen as indexed or expressed by language; conversely, language is involved where power is challenged. Third, CDA views texts not as isolated units but as determined by their position within larger discourses. Texts relate to other texts as well as to the specific social and historical circumstances of their production. Texts, in sum, must always be viewed in their context – an idea which resembles Foucault’s emphasis on the network character and situational foundation of “discursive formations” (cf. Apperley 1997: 15–17). Finally, and in close relation to the last point, CDA assumes that texts are heterogeneous in terms of “voice” as well, i.e., a single text may contain several “voices,” some of which may be in harmony with the main perspective of the text, while others may represent different perspectives, and others again may be present only implicitly. In the notion of “voice,” CDA has been crucially influenced by the work of the early-twentieth century Russian literary critic and theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, who was concerned with the struggle between monological and dialogical “worldviews” and forms of discourse (cf. Crowley 1996: 32). According to Bakhtin, any utterance occurring within a particular discourse is informed and influenced by the discourse at large, which consists of a complex network of

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utterances by different participants. It is therefore not at all uncommon for more than a single perspective to co-exist within a text, as the discourse participants draw on other participants’ contributions in order to shape their own. Discourse, in short, and even the units of discourse, such as texts and utterances, are “multivoiced” (Blackledge 2005: 14). A common point of criticism that has been leveled against CDA is that the critical standpoint may lead the researcher toward politicizing rather than toward careful analysis. Some critics (e.g., Widdowson 1995, 1998) have warned, for example, that CDA may not obey the principle of accountability in that researchers may start from a specific ideological position and select, analyze, or display only material that confirms this position. Apart from the fact that an entirely value-free science is impossible, and any piece of research involves a host of social, cultural, and individual presuppositions, CDA aims at minimizing ideological bias by way of careful attention to methodology. In her exposition of “The discourse-historical approach,” Wodak (2001: 65) argues that one way for CDA to do so is to follow the principle of “triangulation,” which, most generally, involves working “with different approaches, multimethodically and on the basis of a variety of empirical data as well as background information.” In other words, CDA attempts to base its conclusions on both a broad range of empirical data and a large amount of socio-political and historical information. Texts are thus not only related to other texts but, crucially, to knowledge about historical sources and the socio-political environment in which specific discourses are embedded. The principle of triangulation thus centers around the notion of “context,” which, according to Wodak (2001: 67), involves four levels: 1. 2. 3. 4.

the immediate, language or text internal co-text; the intertextual and interdiscursive relationship between utterances, texts, genres and discourses; the extralinguistic social/sociological variables and institutional frames of a specific “context of situation” […]; the broader sociopolitical and historical contexts, which the discursive practices are embedded in and related to.

Apart from text-internal relationships such as, for example, lexical relationships, implications and presuppositions, or cohesion and coherence, the discoursehistorical notion of context thus comprises inter-textual links as well as a text’s sociolinguistic situation (involving setting, participants, ends, formality, etc.; cf. Hymes 1972) and the broader socio-political and historical background. The three analytical dimensions of the discourse-historical approach include “the specific contents or topics of a particular discourse,” the “discursive strat-

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egies (including argumentation strategies)” employed, and “the linguistic means (as types) and the specific, context-dependent linguistic realizations (as tokens)” by which those discursive strategies are realized (Wodak 2001: 72). The “contents or topics” of a discourse obviously relate to its thematic concerns but also include its socio-political and historical embeddedness. “Discursive strategies” involve “a more or less accurate and more or less intentional plan of practices (including discursive practices) adopted to achieve a particular social, political, psychological or linguistic aim” (2001: 73). In the case of discriminatory discourse, as focused centrally by the discourse-historical approach to CDA, such discursive strategies often serve the creation of collective identity, which generally involves comparison, discrimination, and the creation of difference (cf. Jung 2000: 2). Identities are centrally bound by a distinction between “us” and “them”; this distinction often involves a positive self- and negative otherpresentation (Wodak 2001: 73). As we shall see shortly, the establishment of the English native speaker in the second half of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries may also be viewed as having taken place in a kind of discriminatory discourse involving the creation of a new linguistic identity and of various us/them distinctions. The uncovering of the linguistic means by which such discursive strategies are realized proceeds according to “five simple, but not at all randomly selected questions” (2001: 72): 1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

How are persons named and referred to linguistically? What traits, characteristics, qualities and features are attributed to them? By means of what arguments and argumentation schemes do specific persons or social groups try to justify and legitimize the exclusion, discrimination, suppression, and exploitation of others? From what perspective or point of view are these labels, attributions and arguments expressed? Are the respective utterances articulated overtly? Are they intensified or are they mitigated?

The five types of discursive strategy are located at different levels of linguistic organization. The question of how persons are named and referred to linguistically often involves categorization and evaluation. Strategies may be chosen which represent the “self” as positive, the “other” as negative. Such referential strategies are often metaphorical or metonymic. The attribution of characteristics and features involves predication, which is identified as the very basic process and result of linguistically assigning qualities to persons, animals, objects, events, actions and social phenomena. Through predication, persons, things, events and practices are specified and characterised with respect to quality, quantity, space,

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time and so on. Predications are linguistically more or less evaluative (deprecatory or appreciative), explicit or implicit and – like reference and argumentation – specific or vague/ evasive. (Reisigl and Wodak 2001: 54)

In linguistic terms, predication involves the sentence level, the predicate being defined as that part of the sentence which serves to make an assertion or denial about the sentence’s subject. People or groups may be attributed a host of characteristics from the most varied domains; nation, ethnicity, language, religion, and sex are probably the most frequently employed. This often serves to evaluate the person or group and contrast it with others. Metaphor and metonymy may also be crucially involved in predication. Argumentation centers around the justification or weighing of positions in discourse, the “for” and “against.” A key concept in argumentation theory and a key argumentation strategy is the topos. According to Wodak (2001: 74), topoi are “content-related warrants or ‘conclusion rules’ which connect the argument or arguments with the conclusion,” justifying the transition from the latter to the former. Topoi constitute an important means of tracking an argument through a discourse. They build on particular referential or predicational patterns but must, of course, be kept separate from them. A common topos in nineteenth-century (but, to some extent, also contemporary) discourse on the worldwide spread of English is the topos of danger or threat, which can be paraphrased as follows: English transplanted to other places will be subject to varying and uncontrollable influences; thus, transplanted English will be different from, and probably worse than, metropolitan British English. If a common standard is not maintained, the many influences are likely to pull apart the language, as happened to Latin before; thus, the worldwide spread of the language entails danger and threat. Perspectivation strategies have to do with the expression of involvement by the discourse participants as well as with the establishment of the points of view from which naming, attribution, or argumentation proceeds. This entire complex is referred to in CDA as “framing” (Blackledge 2005: 25). Framing is crucially linked to the concept of “voice” described above in that it is the dimension at which the incorporation of voices into texts takes place. Framing thus involves questions of reporting, description, narration, or quotation; it basically refers to the linguistic means by which particular voices are represented, which, in turn, may affect their authority and status. Intensification and mitigation strategies, finally, can be employed to modify the epistemic status of a predication. Mitigation strategies include structures such as it appears that, the use of interrogative or negative instead of declarative or positive sentences, and mitigating adverbs such as probably. They play an important role in expressing involvement or detachment and establishing points

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of view or positions. They complete the set of discourse strategies employed particularly in the discourse-historical approach to CDA (Wodak 2001: 72–73; Blackledge 2005: 21–26); if viewed from the analyst’s perspective, they may also be perceived as tools aiding both in uncovering discursively constituted or constructed meaning and in providing CDA with a methodological basis. It is this methodological basis which has proved to be the most fruitful contribution of CDA to the present study. In at least one crucial respect, however, what follows differs drastically from the approach as usually envisaged: there is not – and obviously cannot be – any claim to active participation in the social practices reflected in the discourses analyzed. If, as indicated above, discourse is viewed as socially constitutive as well as socially constituted and CDA takes an explicitly critical sociopolitical standpoint, then one of its primary goals must be – and actually is (cf. Blackledge 2005: 3–4) – intervention in the object of investigation, i.e., a contribution to the discourses under scrutiny with the aim of transforming them. Even if one had wanted to do so in present case, this would have been impossible, as the discourses to be discussed shortly are historical discourses. To sum up, while the present study takes up CDA theoretically in that language is viewed as social practice and texts are seen as intertextually and sociohistorically embedded entities, the prime input of CDA to the following analyses has been in terms of methodology.

3.4 The corpus An important question is how linguistic ideologies may be investigated in practice. If we are interested in ideologies from a historical point of view, we need a corpus of historical metalinguistic statements. Since, as already indicated, the phrase native speaker does not actually occur with great frequency, the corpus to be explored must include not only texts which contain it but also – and primarily – those texts instantiating the discourses that surround the emergence of the English native speaker. As outlined above, in historical discourse analysis, corpus construction is assumed to be a protracted process which crucially builds on semantic criteria and thus involves circular, hermeneutical procedures. Obviously, however, a corpus’s validity and representativeness are enhanced if criteria can be found which externally delimit it. The following paragraphs outline a number of sociohistorical and linguistic-historical developments which suggest that the origins of the English native speaker must be searched in the period between roughly 1850 and World War I.

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3.4.1 Socio- and linguistic-historical background The phrase native speaker is first attested in George Perkins Marsh’s Columbia address (1859), to be treated in detail below, so obviously the middle of the nineteenth century must be part of the period to be investigated. But what are its beginning and end? The nineteenth century appears as an obvious unit, as the 1850s stand at its very center. As Görlach, however, points out (1999: 5), “[t]here are no convincing landmarks in political history, the arts, economy or language development to demarcate a period within the boundaries of 1800 and 1900.” He suggests that the 1830s mark the start of a new phase, which would then begin with the social and economic reforms of the decade and the accession of Queen Victoria to the throne in 1837. The Victorian age was a paradoxical age. After the excitements of the 1830s, the Victorian period saw a great expansion of wealth, power, and culture. From the early 1850s until the early 1870s, in fact, almost all sections of the population profited from relative prosperity. Only the Crimean War (1854–56) strained society, government, and the economy during this period. At the same time, “Victorianism” came to represent a cluster of restraining moral attributes: character, duty, earnestness, respectable behavior, and thrift. These virtues were embraced not only by the striving and thriving bourgeoisie, but also appealed to other classes, from aristocratic to trade-unionist. Social discipline was strong, and selfhelp books were popular; there was consensus that class lines were “natural” and there to stay, provided that individuals in each class could move. Still, great individual creative power was set free, and it was during the mid-1850s that the word “Victorian” began to be employed to designate a new self-consciousness, both with regard to the nation and to the times it was experiencing. Mid-Victorian society and culture was characterized by considerable patriotism and optimism. The Victorian era proper ended in 1901 with the death of the Queen. An even more decisive event, however, was the beginning of World War I, which “saw a stable world going to pieces, a catastrophe also reflected in linguistic terms” (Görlach 1999: 5). The First World War has long been recognized as a decisive turning point not only in political history, but also in language, literature, and the arts (cf. Baldick 1987: 86). It thus appears as a natural boundary to the period to be delimited here and investigated in the following study. However, what the preceding periodization lacks is the linguistic correlation, i.e., the link between socio-political, economic, and cultural history and linguistic developments. This link is described in fairly great detail in Bailey (1996), Görlach (1999), and Beal (2004); it is therefore not rehashed here. The following historical discourse analysis uses metalinguistic statements as its data base; it thus appears at least commendable, if not necessary, to establish

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a periodization of linguistic thought in and on English as well and see if the years between the mid-nineteenth century and World War I emerge as a discernible unit in this respect, too. According to Dowling (1986: 51), “Britain at the beginning of the Victorian era was a country rich in philological resources, and yet relatively poor in philological achievements.” It had, of course, been Sir William Jones, whose revolutionary pronouncement in 1789 on the common origins of Sanskrit and the European languages had laid the foundation for comparativehistorical philology, but “after Jones, Englishmen had contributed relatively little to the development of the new science” (1986: 51). Even the study of the native language and literature was in the hands of foreigners; thus, the Danish philologist Rasmus Rask (1817) not only anticipated the publication of the first “homemade” Anglo-Saxon grammar, that of Joseph Bosworth (1823), but is also generally considered to have outperformed the latter by far (cf. Aarsleff 1967: 173). The “new philology” arrived in England only in the 1830s but then had a vehement impact. In fact, according to Marggraf Turley (2001: 234), “a period of barely more than ten years proved seminal for the systematic, scientific study of language in Britain.” First, the 1830s saw the publication of a number of works which were founded upon Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik (1819) and which constituted the “inlets” through which the comparative-historical approach entered British scholarly thought. Second, between 1834 and 1836, the so-called “AngloSaxon controversy” raged, “a heated debate over issues arising from the collision of the imported philology with a sceptical and openly hostile British scholarship” (Marggraf Turley 2001: 234). The latter was represented by the so-called “old Saxonists,” i.e., “antiquaries in the English tradition rather than philologists” (Aarsleff 1967: 195). These antiquaries had published numerous Old English manuscripts; yet, in the eyes of the philologically oriented Anglo-Saxonists, they were merely “editing books which they could not hope to understand” (1967: 196). The debate was eventually resolved in favor of the former, and in 1842, the Philological Society was founded in London. Among its members, the plan for a new dictionary of English was formed; this dictionary, which was eventually to result in the OED, “is unthinkable without the rapid absorption of Continental scholarship by English philologists and their intensive study after 1830 of early English language and literature” (1967: 165). However, the proponents of the new dictionary also renounced the powerful tradition of John Horne Tooke’s Diversions of Purley, the first volume of which had been published in 1789. The Diversions had been based on philological speculation and random etymologizing as well as on the idea that the main end of language study was the knowledge of mind. In the view of the dictionary makers, on the contrary, language study had to proceed by careful observation of facts and “comparison guided by historical sense” (Aarsleff 1967: 165–166), and it con-

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stituted an end of its own. In sum, the foundation of the Philological Society in 1842 may be viewed as the definitive entry of comparative-historical philology into English linguistic thought and writing. Henceforth, neither mere antiquary interest nor speculative etymologizing were to be an accepted part of British linguistic scholarship. By 1842, English philology had “assumed a certain character;” having resolved its controversies, it now proceeded “with a more definite purpose” and under the guidance of a “formal scholarly organization.” The “chief interests, methods, and results of the new philology had gained a respected position in English scholarship” (1967: 212).¹⁰ As already pointed out, what was later to be the OED was conceived among the members of the Philological Society. The 1850s were the decade in which this conception took place, crucially involving Richard Chenevix Trench’s books On the Study of Words (1927a [1851]) and English Past and Present (1927b [1855]) as well as his paper “On some deficiencies in our English dictionaries,” which was submitted to the Philological Society in November 1857. The plan to publish a new dictionary was made public in August 1858, to be followed within a year by two editions of a Proposal, which outlined the nature and scope of the dictionary as well as its theoretical and methodological basis (cf. Aarsleff 1967: 259). Thus, the 1850s saw the crucial change in lexicographic procedure, theory, and results; they may be viewed as the watershed of English lexicography. The dictionary and the co-operative work that it involved “soon came to embrace all of English philology, and it is hardly an exaggeration to say that during the next half-century, English philologists directed their best efforts toward that center” (Aarsleff 1967: 263). The 1850s were important for English philology in another way, and this has to do with a single person: Max Müller.¹¹ Müller’s main linguistic work, his Lectures

10 Beyer (1981: 204) disagrees with Aarsleff (1967) and Marggraf Turley (2001) and de-emphasizes the early reception of Continental philology in Britain. In Beyer’s view, even though German linguistic scholarship had been known in England since the 1830s, there was no substantial change in practice until the early 1860s and the work of Max Müller. As Beyer (1981: 205) himself points out, the discrepancy in opinions may be due to the fact that Aarsleff (1967) focuses on the history of the OED, whereas Beyer’s interest is the entire spectrum of Germaninfluenced linguistic scholarship in nineteenth-century England. For the present argument, this discrepancy is irrelevant; the years around 1850 constitute an important juncture in English linguistics in both cases. 11 Max Müller (1823–1900) was the son of the notable German poet Wilhelm Müller. He had originally been a student of Sanskrit but later turned to comparative language study, which eventually led him to the study of comparative religion. His editing of the most ancient of Hindu sacred hymns, the Rigveda, brought him to London, its publication to the University of Oxford,

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on the Science of Language (1862, 1865), must be considered one of the most influential works of English linguistic scholarship in the nineteenth century (Beyer 1981: 205). Even to Müller’s contemporaries, the Lectures appeared to portend a scientific revolution; in “Max Müller on the science of language,” for example, Cox (1995 [1862]: 247) commented that the “Ptolemæan theory of the universe was not more completely set aside by the system of Copernicus, than all previous conceptions of grammar and speech by the new-born science of language.” This may be surprising in view of the fact that the Lectures did not actually present new material or analyses and cannot therefore be regarded as having furthered empirical progress. What they did, however, was important enough: they defined the nature of linguistics as a science; explained the foundations of comparative-historical linguistics; and popularized the “new philology” by way of providing coherent system in comprehensible form (Beyer 1981: 207). Thus, Müller’s work alleviated a deficit that the concentration on lexicography which had soon come to determine the work of the Philological Society had laid open. So far, only British linguistic thought has been considered. What about the study of language in the U.S.? Can a similar periodization be discerned? As Drake (1977: 1) notes, linguistic thought in America “has long been marked by a concern for ‘correctness’. Americans have sought in their language behavior to enforce a uniformity and conformity to some absolute standard.” Eighteenth-century prescriptivist thought imported from the “mother country” was believed to have lived on happily in the New World, the “story of grammar in 18th and 19th-century America” commonly being described as an uninterrupted “process by which the prescriptive ‘dreary grind’ of Latin grammar was replaced by the equally futile prescriptive grind of English grammar.” In Drake’s view, this is not at all true. Examining American linguistic writing between 1820 and 1970, he concludes that “this virtually universal assumption according to which the roots of the prescriptive doctrine reach back undisturbed to the 18th-century is too simple and inaccurate” (1977: 4). According to Drake (1977: 4), the 1820s to the 1840s saw much resistance to the prescriptive correctness doctrine, but from the 1850s to the 1870s, there was once again a serious “drive for linguistic conformity,” which then exhibited “a curious and remarkable continuity into and throughout the present century.” Whereas the challenge to prescriptivism had grown out of two forms of Romantic thought – a revolt against rote learning, on the one hand and an increase in national consciousness, on the other (cf. Parish 1995) – and brought to the fore not only a number of linguis-

where he was appointed deputy professor of modern languages in 1850 and professor of comparative philology in 1868.

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tic innovations but also a belief in usage as the basis of norms and increased attention to the spoken language and its contemporary forms (Drake 1977: 15), the revival of the correctness doctrine was spurred by a genteel interest in language (1977: 18), which culminated in the “Great Dictionary War” between the New Webster and Worcester’s Dictionary of the 1860s. As Drake (1977: 19) explains, what is important in this context is what the rivalry and litigation was all about: authority – over which dictionary was the final arbiter in matters linguistic. The dictionary by the 60’s had become a big business, due largely to the great waves of immigrants seeking linguistic passport to the society […] and due to many native born Americans using linguistic conformity as a means to mobility.

To sum up, the years around 1850 mark a caesura in American thought and writing about language: all of a sudden, the belief that English was in great danger re-emerged; “linguistic etiquette” and authority again reigned supreme; and prescriptivism once more gained the upper hand. The 1850s are an important decade for American linguistic thought in another respect. As in the case of British linguistics and Max Müller, a very influential figure entered the scene: William Dwight Whitney (1827–94).¹² Interestingly, it was Whitney who emerged as the chief opponent of Max Müller later in the lives of both; with his 1892 volume Max Müller and the Science of Language, Whitney “succeeded in deflating Müller’s extraordinary fame as a philologist” (Dowling 1986: 73). Even though he granted the latter great rhetorical gifts and acknowledged his importance in popularizing the subject matter that was dear to both of them (1986: 74), he vehemently opposed Müller’s philological thought, and particularly his belief in the identity of thought and language which underlay his theory of roots: “This is merest confusion and absurdity, like maintaining the identity of processes of mathematical reasoning with mathematical signs, or of the hands with tools” (1892: 30, quoted in Dowling 1986: 75).

12 A student of Sanskrit language and literature at Yale University, Whitney set out to continue his training in Germany in 1850, where contemporary politics sharpened his sense of national identity and patriotism (Nelson 2005: 362–368). Having returned to the United States in 1853, Whitney was made professor of Sanskrit (1854) and of comparative language studies (1869) at Yale University, where he published a number of works including editions and translations of the Vedas, the ancient Hindu sacred scriptures. His best-known work is The Life and Growth of Language (1875), but Whitney also participated in the project to revise Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language in the early 1860s and served as editor-in-chief of the six-volume Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language in the 1880s (Nelson 2005: 373–376).

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To sum up, in both Britain and the U.S., the early 1850s saw the emergence of a figure dominating linguistic thought in their respective countries in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Certainly, at least in the English-speaking world of linguistics, Müller and Whitney together accounted for a large share of the attention paid to the subject; their publications were influential not only among fellow scholars but also among the larger public. Once again, the years around 1850 emerge as a dividing line; we may thus take it as the initial boundary of the period of interest here. As for the end of the period, World War I again emerges as a convenient turning point, including the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (1916). Saussure (1857–1913) is generally regarded as “the father of modern linguistics,” the Cours having exerted a major influence on the discipline, particularly in Europe. Saussure’s main aim was to define linguistics as a science, which obviously necessitated a definition of its object, language (Crowley 1996: 15). This had, of course, already been done in the nineteenth century, but, as Saussure himself remarks at the beginning of the Cours, “it is the viewpoint adopted which creates the object” (1983: 8). Privileging langue, i.e., the abstract system of elements which could be described exclusively by way of the relations they entertained and thus by their “value” in the system, over parole, i.e., specific utterances which came about as a result of human activity, and the synchronic approach, which regarded langue as a static whole existing at a particular point in time, over the diachronic, which traced the development of individual linguistic features through history, Saussure established language as an “objective,” self-contained, immutable, rule-governed, context-free, abstract entity. Harris (1981: 47–48) describes the consequences of this approach for the discipline as follows: By “internalizing” the object of analysis for linguistics in this way, Saussure achieved a remarkable feat of academic politics. He rescued his subject from the historians by finding a place for it within psychology; but at the same time safeguarded it from the possible encroachments of psychologists. […] He thus simultaneously provided his subject with a new academic location. Anyone who can achieve such a feat has as good a claim as any to be regarded as the founder of a new discipline: and in this instance it was achieved not through the adventitious discovery of a fresh range of facts to be explained [as in the case of Max Müller before], but by an original approach to an already quite familiar range of facts.

Saussure’s theoretical and methodological pronouncements have provided the dominant framework for twentieth-century linguistics; in fact, even linguists who distance themselves from structuralism have adopted Saussurean ideas. Thus, even the generative tradition, which often presents itself as entirely antistructuralist (cf., e.g., Joseph 1990: 71–73), has incorporated Saussurean ideas;

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 57

thus, the basic competence/performance distinction, for example, is presented by Chomsky himself as a reformulation of Saussure’s fundamental insight into the nature of human language (1965: 3–4). However, even though in many regards, the Saussurean approach represents a radical break with previous linguistic thought, in others, there are clear continuations. The notion of the speech community, for example, was heavily influenced by nineteenth-century thought on national languages (cf. Mufwene 1998: 114). For Saussure, language was a social phenomenon; it was bound to a specific social group (preferably a nation), both of which were ideally unified and homogenous (cf. Crowley 1990: 44). Or, as Harris (1981: 48), puts it, [t]he new map which Saussure drew for the future study of language none the less incorporated certain features carried over from the former style of cartography which it immediately superseded. There is a sense in which Saussurean structuralism was still historical grammar, but minus the theory. The concept of la langue, like the more recent concept of linguistic competence, was a palimpsest with traces of an earlier and unsuccessfully obliterated text showing through.

In sum, the publication of Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (1916) may be taken as a convenient turning point and thus a boundary for the present corpus, ending nineteenth-century linguistic thought and ushering in the “modern” period of the discipline.

3.4.2 Constitution of the corpus Having delimited the sociohistorical and linguistic-historical boundaries within which the discourses surrounding the emergence of the English native speaker took place, we may now proceed to a description of the corpus that forms the basis of the following analysis. To begin with, we may note that in the nineteenth century, in both Britain and the U.S., linguistic issues were not discussed by linguists alone but found much attention among scholars from other disciplines as well as among the educated public at large. Particularly in the latter half of the century, there was a strong general interest in language, for which three main motives may be identified (cf. Harris 1995: vii–x). First, the growing demand for universal education and the reforms enacted in this area together with the drastic expansion of the educational system and the spread of literacy as well as the introduction of compulsory English teaching meant that the English language suddenly moved to the fore as an object of study. Not only had methodological issues to be debated, but it was also necessary to clarify what exactly was to be studied. What was “the English language”? Which

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varieties of English were to be taught or held up as models for emulation? What levels of language merited the most interest? The debate about standard English to be outlined in the following chapters was certainly tightly connected to the developments in the educational domain in that it provided answers to many of the questions that had surfaced in connection with the the teaching of English. A second motive for increased interest in language had to do with the “importation” of comparative-historical philology into English-speaking academic circles. As already outlined, up until the 1830s, interest in older forms of the language and its regional variation had been predominantly antiquarian, and in 1839 Thomas De Quincey still complained that his countrymen were “ever ready […] to undervalue the English language” (1995 [1839]: 84) and that no one had yet “chosen to connect his own glory with the investigation and history of his native tongue” (1995 [1839]: 80). At the same time, Continental scholars were mining earlier English manuscripts and placing the English language and literature within its larger Germanic and Indo-European contexts. This defect was recognized in the 1830s, and from 1842 onward, when the Philological Society was founded, and particularly after the 1850s, when work began on a new English dictionary and scholars like Müller and Whitney began to publish, the new approach gained a firm hold in the English-speaking world. The third reason for a general interest in matters linguistic arose from the controversy surrounding the views of Charles Darwin, whose Origin of Species (1859) turned out to be a “book that shook the world” (Mayr 1991: 7). The influence of Darwin cannot be underestimated: “The worldview formed by any thinking person in the Western world after 1859 […] was by necessity quite different from a worldview formed prior to 1859” (Mayr 1991: 1). For linguistics, this meant that the previous standard view of language as a gift from God was suddenly no longer tenable; nevertheless, a number of writers, such as Max Müller, sought to reconcile the theological and biological accounts in maintaining that, despite evolutionary development, the scientific study of language and languages would eventually prove the divine nature of its object of study. In sum, “these three sets of issues – educational, philological and theological – provide the essential background” for much of the discussion concerning language matters from the mid-nineteenth century onward (Harris 1995: x). Another factor adding to the popularity of linguistics at the time was that it “had not yet become the formidably technical subject which it was to be in the century following”: Debates on linguistic issues could still be followed by non-specialists and discussed in terms accessible to the educated public. This public in turn did not hesitate to make up its mind about the questions put before it by linguists. (1995: vii)

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What the popularity of linguistic issues and the non-specialized nature of the discipline meant for the construction of the present corpus is that, apart from properly linguistic texts, contributions from other scholarly disciplines as well as from the educated public at large had to be taken into account. Many of these contributions appeared in learned journals, but a random search of even the most prominent of these journals was obviously unfeasible. I therefore concentrated in this respect on Harris’s Language and Linguistics (1995), a four-volume, 1,700page anthology of nineteenth-century articles on language in general, English in particular, linguistic theory, and language teaching compiled from issues of the leading learned journals of the time. They include, for example, the New Monthly Magazine, the Quarterly Review, Blackwood’s Magazine, the Edinburgh Review, and Macmillan’s Magazine. The popularity and significance of such journals must not be underestimated. Other than scientific journals today, nineteenth-century learned journals “not only provided a platform for many of the major writers and thinkers” but also “had a considerable impact on the practical politics of nineteenth-century Britain” (Kumar 2003: 257–258). While Language and Linguistics covers the period between exactly 1800 and 1900, by far the majority of articles contained in the collection date from 1840 and later and thus fall right into the period focused in this study. Apart from that anthology, I included texts from a number of other collections. Among them were Bolton (1966) and Bolton and Crystal (1969), which offer a number of “classic” texts on English by writers from William Caxton to H. L Mencken; Crowley (1991), which presents and comments on a selection of prominent texts spanning the period between 1690 and the present and concerned with the question of “proper English”; and Görlach (1999), which provides not only an overview of nineteenth-century English, but also an extensive selection of texts on England, the English, and the English language. Of course, the mass of materials constituting my corpus comes from books rather than articles. Prominent topics focused in these books include – lexicology and lexicography: e.g., R. C. Trench, On the Study of Words (1927a [1851]); – the history and contemporary structure of English: e.g., R. C. Trench, English Past and Present (1927b [1855]); G. P. Marsh, Lectures on the English Language (1874); G. L. Craik, A Compendious History of English Literature, and of the English Language (1875); E. Guest, A History of English Rhythms (1882); J. M. D. Meiklejohn, The English Language: Its Grammar, History, and Literature (1899); O. Jespersen, Growth and Structure of the English Language (1982 [1905]); – linguistics as a science and the theories and methods of comparative-historical philology: e.g., M. Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language (1862,

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–

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1865); W.D. Whitney, The Life and Growth of Language (1875); H. Sweet, The History of Language (1900); H. C. Wyld, The Historical Study of the Mother Tongue (1969 [1906]); linguistic criticism: e.g., H. Alford, The Queen’s English (1864); W. Mathews, Words; Their Use and Abuse (1876); B. Matthews, Americanisms and Briticisms (1892); the principles and methods of language teaching: e.g., H. Sweet, The Practical Study of Languages (1964 [1899]); H. C. Wyld, The Place of the Mother Tongue in National Education (1906); and varieties of English: e.g., G. C. Whitworth, Indian English (1982 [1907]).

To sum up, the corpus employed for the following historical discourse analysis investigating the emergence of the English native speaker consists of a comprehensive selection of books and articles written in English between roughly the mid-nineteenth century and World War I and focusing on language and linguistics in general, the history and structure of English, and the teaching of the language. If necessary, I also consulted the standard eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury works in order to trace ideas, arguments, or topics even further back; if appropriate, works published after around World War I were also considered.¹³

3.4.3 A note on quoted material The type style of historical quotes was preserved wherever possible. Thus, all passages in italics, bold print, or capitals were maintained; they are not indicated separately as occurring in the original. As for orthography, spelling, too, was

13 I included, for example, O. Jespersen’s Mankind, Nation and Individual From a Linguistic Point of View (1946), not only for obvious thematic reasons, but also because Jespersen, despite his great popularity in the mid- and even late twentieth century, began to publish squarely in the period examined in this study. It is interesting to note in this context that, in the preface to a new edition of Growth and Structure of the English Language (first published in 1905), Quirk (1982: n.pag.) calls Jespersen a “Victorian” and favorably describes his nineteenth-century view of language: “But the tenor of his outlook is far more Victorian than the cautious scepticism of post-behaviourism which colours (or rather un-colours) the scientific writing on language in this latter part of the twentieth century. Far more than any Whorfian, Jespersen believed in the reciprocal influence of language and the personality of its speakers. […] He had the nineteenthcentury romantic love of those manly and forthright characteristics that were thought to typify the Germanic peoples. English monosyllables and blunt consonant clusters seemed to him emblematic.”

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kept and not marked unless obviously a typographical error. Thus, shewn, for example, as an archaic past participle indicating an originally falling diphthong, would have simply been taken over unmarked, whereas an obvious error such as langauge has been marked by “[sic].” In quotations from the contemporary linguistic literature, emphases were also kept but not marked specifically in each instance.

4 The ideologies of Marsh (1859): A close reading The phrase native speaker is first attested for the year 1859. The OED ascribes it to George P. Marsh (1801–82), a New England philologist, businessman, lawyer, and politician (cf. Davis 1906; Garraty and Carnes 1999: 535–537). Marsh employed the term in an address delivered at Columbia College in New York in November 1858, which was published in 1859 and in which he advocated the implementation of English philology as a subject at American universities. Curiously, even though the address is replete with uses of the attributive adjective native, the native speaker only occurs once and, interestingly, as a native speaker not of English but of German: The German is remarkably homogenous in its character. […] Its grammatical structure is of great regularity […]. At the same time, there is enough of grammatical inflection to familiarize the native speaker with syntactical principles imperfectly exemplified in French and English. (1859: 72–73)

In the following sections, I present a close reading of Marsh (1859), not only because this is the text featuring the first occurrence of the term native speaker, but also because it exemplifies beautifully a number of the discourses surrounding the emergence of the concept. I begin by looking at the introduction of Marsh’s speech, which I take to end with his thesis statement, i.e., the necessity of the study of the native language at American institutions of higher education: It is, doubtless, for this reason, that the study of the English language has usually been almost wholly excluded from the collegial curriculum […], and, therefore, so great a novelty as its abrupt transfer from the nursery to the auditorium of a post-graduate course may seem to demand both explanation and apology. (1859: 61)

My analysis of this part focuses on the various discursive strategies evident in the text. To recall, CDA analyzes referential, predication, argumentation, perspectivation, and intensification or mitigation strategies (cf. Wodak 2001: 73). As for argumentation, I concentrate on the identification of topoi, or “content-related warrants or ‘conclusion rules’ which connect the argument or arguments with the conclusion, the claim” (2001: 74). The analysis is sequential rather than categorial, i.e., it proceeds sentence by sentence rather than by discursive strategies. In interpreting Marsh’s use of the latter, I draw on sociohistorical and linguistichistorical background knowledge and attempt to spell out the various ideologies underlying the statements occurring in the text.

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 The ideologies of Marsh (1859): A close reading

The analysis of the remainder of Marsh’s address revolves around referential strategies. I first examine the various uses of native as an attributive adjective, which occurs ten times altogether. Proceeding from semasiology to onomasiology, I then turn to the the various designations for the English language and finally look at names for speakers of English. This part of the analysis consists of the flow of Marsh’s whole argument and its interpretation, i.e., an explication of the ideologies underlying the use of labels for English and its users. It is important to note, finally, that Marsh’s writings on language were widely read and well received in the second half of the nineteenth century. Mathews (1876: 62), for example, comments on the connection between a language and the “national mind” of its speakers as follows: It makes a vast difference, as Prof. Marsh justly observes, whether words expressive of noble thoughts and mighty truths do not exist in a language, or whether ages of soul-crushing tyranny have compelled their disuse and the employment of the baser part of the national vocabulary.

Baynes (1995 [1874]: 184) mentions Marsh in a row with, for example, Lindley Murray, Noah Webster, and W. D. Whitney, commenting on his work thus: “Of Mr. Marsh’s contributions to English scholarship we need say nothing. They are known and valued wherever the language is critically studied.” Müller (1862: 45), finally, notes that Marsh’s lectures “embody the result of much careful research, and are full of valuable observations,” returning to them in footnotes all through the text (1862: 46, 71, 84). Müller himself was, of course, one of the most popular exponents of the new science of language; his own lectures (1862, 1865) were certainly among the most important publications at the time. What this means is that Marsh, even though he was not, as just indicated, primarily a linguist, was by no means a marginal figure in the discourses that dominated thought about language in general, the English language specifically, and linguistic theory in the second half of the nineteenth century.

4.1 The introduction The severe Roman bestowed upon the language of his native land the appellation of patrius sermo, the paternal speech; but we, deriving from the domesticity of Saxon life a truer and tenderer appreciation of the best and purest source of linguistic instruction, more happily name our home-born English the mother tongue. (Marsh 1859: 59)

Marsh begins his speech by constructing an important us/them distinction through the employment of a referential strategy which contrasts the “severe

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Romans” with a “we” whose precise reference remains unclear at first. Note in this context how the use of a singular noun phrase depicts the “other” as a homogenous, static, monolithic entity, an undifferentiated mass of Romans. In principle, the same holds for the pronoun by which Marsh refers to the “self.” As already pointed out, it does not become obvious immediately what group is denoted by it; what is clear, however, is that it is an inclusive we, referring to speaker and hearers rather than to speaker and one or more third persons. Such pronoun use creates corporate identity, stressing the unity of the group at the expense of the recognition of internal difference or diversity. By resorting to it, Marsh immediately and implicitly includes his hearers in the pursuit of his own cause. In sum, the referential strategies constructing the two important groups of “us” and “them” instantiate a general framework of sameness and difference at the level of collective identity. We find out more about these identities via the predications associated with the respective collective terms, which bring to the fore the languages spoken. Latin is constructed as a manly business via the masculine sermō, which is moreover described as “paternal”; together with the adjective severe referring to the speakers of the language, all of this calls forth connotations of strictness, discipline, and temperance. English, on the other hand, is portrayed as a family affair, nurtured and guarded by the mother; it is associated with “domesticity” and labeled “home-born English” or simply “the mother tongue.” And whereas Latin is the language of a “land,” English is the language of hearth and home. Such a distinction almost naturally involves different kinds of emotional attachment and loyalty, which must be much more intense in the case of English as the language of the smallest but at the same time most giving and demanding social unit, based as it is on sameness of blood rather than on mere territorial, political, or historical association, as in the case of a “land.” These associations fit neatly with the larger educational context. Whereas Marsh’s plea was for the introduction of English philology at the university level, the second half of the nineteenth century saw the replacement of the classics by modern languages in education in general, accompanied by a large-scale discussion of the merits of studying English rather than Latin. The increasing enlargement of the state education system in Britain, which culminated in the Elementary Education Act establishing compulsory primary education in 1870 (cf. Görlach 1999: 6), made the earlier classics-based curriculum unsuitable for the many new student groups included in it. Even before 1870, English had been a subject of great interest at the many church- or philanthropy-affiliated schools that had been founded in Britain but especially in the United States (cf. Bailey 1996: 8). At such schools in particular, but later at public schools as well, the study of the native language was imbued with considerable moral purpose.

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 The ideologies of Marsh (1859): A close reading

The basic premise was that, in the words of Richard Chenevix Trench (1927a [1851]: 9), words contained “boundless stores of moral and historic truth”; the words of the native language then contained important religious, political, and national truths which were to be discovered and enshrined in the students’ hearts and minds through the study of that language. Latin, on the contrary, was increasingly portrayed merely as a strenuous and demanding intellectual endeavor which was not only entirely unnecessary for women and workers, but also secondary to the “man of science.” The following quotes from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries illustrate this position: The phrase “classical education” has no longer any meaning; learning Greek and Latin is neither education nor a preparation for it. The future man of science or scholarship wants modern languages as much as the future merchant. (Sweet 1964 [1899]: 246) Not until the English Language is placed upon a sound and secure footing as a necessary part of the course in the Secondary Schools of this country, beyond the reach of controversy, can it be said that it occupies that position of dignity and importance in National Education which is its right by every educational and patriotic consideration. (Wyld 1906: 34) […] education in English is, for all Englishmen, a matter of the most vital concern […]. It is self-evident that until a child has acquired a certain command of the native language, no other educational development is even possible. […] The English people might learn as a whole to regard their own language, first with respect, and then with a genuine feeling of pride an affection. […] Such a feeling for our own native language would […] beget the right kind of national pride. ([Newbolt] 1921: 22)

Moreover, the contrast between English and Latin and the speech communities employing or “owning” these languages played an important role in the larger political context, which, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was dominated by the ideology of Anglo-Saxonism. That Marsh associates English speakers with the Anglo-Saxons emerges in the participial construction post-modifying the self-referential pronoun occurring in the first sentence of his speech. “We” are linked to “Saxon life,” and speakers of English are described as having inherited from the Anglo-Saxons their intense “appreciation” of the significance of native language acquisition. Anglo-Saxonism will be treated in more detail below; for now, suffice it to note that an important element of this ideology was the belief in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxons compared to the Romans. The English had long seen themselves as firmly tied to Rome via descent from Brutus, grandson of Aeneas, the founder of Rome (cf. Kumar 2003: 204–205). While this mythology granted the English the status of an imperial people, the Reformation and Henry VIII’s quarrels with Rome made this self-portrait problematic. Suddenly, it became desirable to demonstrate that the English Church

The introduction 

 67

had always been independent and purer in its faith than Catholicism. In attempting to justify the break with Rome, English scholars and writers of the early seventeenth century turned to Anglo-Saxon religious sources; thus, from its inception, interest in things Anglo-Saxon and praise for the Anglo-Saxon way of life has always included an anti-Catholic element. Later on, the past of Rome was often viewed as a powerful predictor of the future of English and its speakers; whereas the latter were warned of complacency and inertia (had not the Roman Empire succumbed to its inhabitants’ own vices?), the so-called “Latin analogy” predicted doom lest the language was carefully guarded against signs of dissolution. To sum up, the beginning of Marsh’s speech, and particularly the construction of the English-Roman us/them distinction must be interpreted against the backdrop of Anglo-Saxonism. The connection between the nurturing and caring function of the mother and the first language is carried over to the second sentence of the text but is now extended from English specifically to language generally: what mother’s milk does for an individual’s physical development is achieved by the native language in his or her intellectual and emotional progress: The tones of the native language are the medium through which the affections and the intellect are first addressed, and they are to the heart and the head of infancy what the nutriment drawn from the maternal breast is to the physical frame. (Marsh 1859: 59)

Marsh’s predicational strategy here is to equate the “tones of the native language” with “the nutriment drawn from the maternal breast,” and the noun phrase the heart and head of infancy not only shows alliteration but also metaphorically denotes feeling and thought. The link between the native language, the idea of being “born to a language,” the family with the mother as the indispensable caregiver, and early (and thus crucial) cognitive and affective development could not be made clearer. It is a link which has survived intact up to today, as the following quote attests: The cultural assumptions that underlie the social construction of the “native speaker” include the assumption that English is either only learned from birth or only properly learned from birth in a few nations of the world. In other words, a native speaker is one who learns the language in what is often called its “natural environment.” The socially constructed concept of “native speaker” involves the tacit notion that those who learn the language there have innate qualities that cannot be learned by others. […] This association of the “native speaker” with purportedly natural qualities is certainly one of the ideological pillars of that construct. (Brutt-Griffler and Samimy 2001: 104)

The referential expression tones of the native language appears to indicate that Marsh’s view of language was already characterized by what has been labeled

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 The ideologies of Marsh (1859): A close reading

“phonocentrism” (Pennycook 1994: 135), i.e., the belief that the only real, relevant, and valid form of language is speech – a belief which has been a fundamental assumption of linguistics at least since the discovery of sound laws and the great strides made in phonetics and phonology, both of which occurred in the nineteenth century. In the remainder of his introduction, Marsh also refers to language exclusively in its spoken form: “words” are equated with the “voice,” which, in turn, produces “utterances” consisting of “tone” (1859: 60). It seems that by mentioning spoken language exclusively, Marsh is not only de-emphasizing but entirely denying written language a place both in the development of the individual and in linguistic study, the extension of which is, after all, his central topic. That this is not so and that the written, literary language plays an important role in Marsh’s ideas about language awareness, maintenance, and investigation will become clear in the discussion of the various terms referring to English; for now, suffice it to repeat that, according to Marsh, the spoken form of the native language is the crucial element in any individual’s intellectual and emotional development. Another interesting argument belonging to the discourse about spoken language is put forward later in the introduction. In illustrating his point that “so necessary are words to thought, to reflection” (1859: 60), Marsh claims that deaf-mutes who have been taught verbal language, i.e., lip-reading and vocalization, forget their pre-verbal “mental status” and only then acquire “conceptions” expressed by “general terms,” i.e., abstract thought. The implications of this claim are noteworthy; they basically amount to two common misconceptions about languages using the manual-visual channel. The first is that, in its pantomime-like appearance, sign language is restricted to “hand drawings” of whatever is being referred to. Abstract notions would naturally be excluded, as they cannot be represented by icons of this kind. The second misconception is that sign languages lack the rich and complex grammatical rules shown by “normal” languages and expressing the logical connections between parts of sentences, which, of course, is also false (cf. Crain and Lillo-Martin 1999: 276–277). In terms of its sociohistorical background, Marsh’s claim is also interesting, as it might illustrate the progressive hardening of attitudes toward linguistic diversity that occurred in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century United States. As Pavlenko (2002: 166–174) describes, during the eighteenth century and a large part of the nineteenth, multilingualism with regard to colonial and immigrant languages was not necessarily promoted but at least tolerated. This changed toward the end of the nineteenth century, with the “Great Migration” (2002: 174) of large numbers of non-northern European immigrants, which eventually called forth an Americanization movement linking national identity to English monolingualism.

The introduction 

 69

The decrease in linguistic tolerance also affected American Sign Language, which had only come into being at the beginning of the nineteenth century with the establishment of the first sign language school for the deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, by the Reverend Thomas H. Gallaudet. Sign language schools soon sprang up all over the country, but toward the end of the century, campaigns by hearing educators and parents of deaf children attempted to replace “manualism” by “oralism.” These campaigns received prominent support by, for example, Alexander Graham Bell, who maintained that sign language was essentially a foreign language and in an English-speaking country, English alone should be the means of communication (Pavlenko 2002: 176). We see, thus, that American Sign Language eventually became subject to the very discourses which restricted the use of other languages and promoted the exclusive use of English as a symbol of loyalty to the United States and thus a defining aspect of American national identity. At this point we may turn to the concept of intertextuality and note how, in marshaling support for his position, Marsh appeals to a fellow scholar: “‘Speech,’ in the words of Heyse, ‘is the earliest organic act of free self-consciousness, and the sense of our personality is first developed in the exercise of the faculty of speech’” (1859: 59). In CDA, intertextuality is an important concept, the issue at stake being the choices that have to be made in incorporating a different voice into a text (cf. Blackledge 2005: 10). By varying between direct and indirect quotes, reporting, and commenting, variations in the authority and status assigned to other voices may be indicated. In scholarly writing, direct quotes are, of course, employed to invoke someone else’s authority in lending weight to one’s own position and to avoid plagiarism. By simply introducing Heyse’s statement by means of one of the most neutral verbal quotation markers, in the words of, Marsh accords the full weight of authority to the latter: Heyse is allowed to speak for himself, without questioning, modification, or commentary. But who was Heyse, and what work was Marsh quoting from? The person referred to was Karl Wilhelm Ludwig Heyse (1797–1855), a German philologist, son of the eminent teacher, lexicographer, and grammarian Johann Christian August Heyse (1764–1829), and father of the Nobel prize winning novelist Paul Heyse (1830–1914). Heyse studied Latin and Greek in Berlin with August Böckh, philology with Franz Bopp, and philosophy with Friedrich Hegel; he worked as a private tutor of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s youngest son. In 1829 he became professor at the University of Berlin, where he taught Latin and Greek literature, language philosophy, and general linguistics and edited and revised – sometimes to the point of rewriting – a number of his father’s works. Heyse’s own principal work was entitled System der Sprachwissenschaft; similarly to Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale, it was published

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 The ideologies of Marsh (1859): A close reading

only posthumously (1856) by his student Heymann Steinthal. In the words of August Leskien, himself one of the leading nineteenth-century linguists, Heyse’s System der Sprachwissenschaft is interessant dadurch, daß seine Grundzüge vor dem Erscheinen von Humboldt’s “Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues” festgestellt waren und auf der SchellingHegel’schen Philosophie beruhen. (1875: 381)¹⁴

In this context it may be worth noting that Heyse is also quoted by Max Müller in one of his Lectures on the Science of Language; in asserting the divine origins of the sound-thought link, Müller (1862: 384) maintains that “[t]his view was propounded many years ago by Professor Heyse in the lectures which he gave at Berlin, and which have been very carefully published since his death by one of his pupils, Dr. Steinthal.” Steinthal, in turn, later published his own account of the “Liebe zur Muttersprache” (1880: 97); at least in parts, this account strongly resembles the introduction to Marsh’s Columbia address (1880: 98–103). Whether Steinthal had read Marsh remains unclear to me; it can safely be assumed, however, that Marsh had not only read Heyse but, in view of his “familiarity with twenty languages” (Garraty and Carnes 1999: 536), read him in German. With a single reference, Marsh thus opens up an entire linguistic world to his hearers. This is the world of Hegel, Humboldt, and Bopp – comparative-historical philology with a nationalist, Romantic touch (cf. Robins 1997: 199–204).¹⁵ Another instance of intertextuality introduces the chain of arguments which leads Marsh from the assertion of the native language’s significance for early intellectual and emotional development to the demand for the study of English philology at American universities: “‘Cogito, ergo sum, I think, therefore I am,’ said Descartes” (1859: 59). This chain of arguments consists of a number of topoi. To begin with, “we habitually, if not necessarily, connect words, thought, and self-recognizing existence, as conditions each of both the others” (Marsh 1859: 59). What this means is that, if thinking is equivalent to being, and, as asserted before, language is the prerequisite of thought, then language is also the neces-

14 According to Leskien (1875: 381), Heyse’s System der Sprachwissenschaft was “interesting because its basic features had been established even before the publication of Humboldt’s ‘Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues’ and rested on Schelling’s and Hegel’s philosophy” (my translation). 15 In its original version, Marsh’s quote reads as follows: “Das Sprechen ist der erste organische Act des freien Selbstbewusstseins; der Mensch erhebt sich darin zum Bewusstsein seiner Persönlichkeit” (Heyse 1856: 40) [‘Speaking is the first organic act of free consciousness; in it the human being rises up to the consciousness of his personality.’]

The introduction 

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sary precondition of human existence. Individual self-recognition and thus selfconscious existence, both cognitively and affectively, are immediately dependent upon language, i.e., it is only through language that individuals come to apprehend and appreciate their own thoughts and feelings, which, in turn, is what distinguishes them in their humanity. Or, in other words: it is speech which makes us human (and therefore differentiates us from the world of beasts). But language is not only the precondition of individual intellectual and emotional existence but also “the condition and vehicle of social intercourse” (1859:  60). However, for language to have such interactional and transactional functions (cf. Yule 1996: 6), we must assume what has been labeled the “determinacy fallacy, or ‘fixed code’ fallacy” and is described as follows: Individuals are able to exchange their thoughts by means of words because – and insofar as – they have come to understand and to adhere to a fixed public plan for doing so. The plan is based on recurrent instantiation of invariant items belonging to a set known to all members of the community. […] They are invariant items in two respects: form and meaning. Knowing the forms […] enables those who know the language to express appropriately the thoughts they intend to convey. Knowing the meanings […] enables those who know the language to identify the thoughts thus expressed. (Harris 1981: 10)

The “determinacy fallacy” is a correlate of the “telementational fallacy,” which basically describes what Marsh has asserted before, i.e., that language is the outward sign of an individual’s feelings and thoughts: “According to the telementational fallacy, linguistic knowledge is essentially a matter of knowing which words stand for which ideas”; in other words, words are “symbols devised by man for transferring thoughts from one mind to another” (1981: 9). Both of these assumptions¹⁶ have a long history in linguistics; they can be traced back to Aristotle (Harris 1981: 9) but can also be found in the most prominent twentieth-century approaches to language, such as Saussure’s speech circuit (1916: 14), Chomsky’s “ideal speaker-hearer, in a completely homogenous speech-community” (1965: 3), or the variationist sociolinguistic assumption that “language reflects society,” i.e., that there are a number of pre-linguistic social identies, categories, and structures which may be straightforwardly correlated with patterns of linguistic variation (cf. Cameron 1990: 81). In sum, there seem

16 Harris (1981: 9–10) labels them “fallacies” to indicate his own critical stance toward these assumptions. By showing that they are historical constructs rather than immutable truths inherent in the nature of language, he attempts to “demythologize” linguistics (cf. Cameron 1990: 79), pointing out that by assuming a different view of language, we would automatically ask different research questions and provide different answers to them.

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 The ideologies of Marsh (1859): A close reading

to be a number of taken-for-granted assumptions about the function and mechanism of language which fundamentally underlie linguistics. As Marsh’s speech shows, these assumptions also surface in nineteenth-century thought on language; as topoi, they have a crucial function in substantiating his claim that the study of the native language must be made part of any American college education. Marsh ends his introduction in the same way that he began it: with an appeal to the auditorium. Whereas initially, the inclusive use of the first-person plural pronoun established solidarity, it is now Marsh’s anticipation of his listeners’ questions and doubts that is employed to “pull them over.” Since the native language is so fundamental to both individual and society, it is, of course, acquired and studied in the nursery and primary school; its envisaged “transfer” to higher education certainly demands “explanation and apology,” which he sets out to provide in the remainder of his speech.

4.2 Of native speakers, native languages, and native philology As indicated at the beginning of this chapter, for the analysis of the main body of Marsh’s speech, I concentrate on referential strategies, beginning with the uses of native and moving on to names for the English language and its speakers. The referential expressions employed by Marsh point to a number of discourses which played an important role in late-nineteenth century thought on languages, nations, and races. One of Marsh’s main points is the inferiority of “the study of native philology in commercial London and industrial Manchester” (1859: 63) compared to the work of “Scandinavian and Teutonic scholars, in philological and especially etymological research” (1859: 72). Even though “native English inquirers” (1859: 65) are by no means, in his view, hampered by “a native insensibility to the delicate relations between allied sounds and allied significations” (1859: 72), “Englishmen are [only just] learning, from Continental linguists, to do what native scholarship and industry had hitherto proved unable to accomplish” (1859: 71). The superiority of foreign scholarship to that conducted by British or American philologists, thus, “is a remarkable, but an indisputable fact” (1859: 72). Two other uses of native occur in the phrases “the native language” (1859: 74) and “our native tongue” (1859: 77) and are connected to two other arguments employed by Marsh to lend weight to his demand for the study of English at the university level. The first of these arguments relates back to what has just been discussed. Having denied a “native insensibility” to linguistic matters on the part of English-speaking scholars (1859: 72), Marsh instead blames the language itself

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for the lack of achievement or success among British and American philologists. In his view, “English, having no grammar” (1859: 73), withholds from its native speakers early and natural access to “general linguistic principle” (1859: 74). This argument is based on a number of assumptions. Taking up his introductory claim that the native language is the decisive element in any individual’s early intellectual and emotional development, Marsh proceeds to assert a position which in the twentieth century became known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and basically states that the structure of our language, with its predetermined categories, must have an influence on how we perceive the world. The hypothesis is often illustrated by means of the allegedly large number of expressions that Eskimos have at their disposal to talk about what in English is simply labeled snow. Of course, in its strong form, it has long been falsified; it is clear that while we inherit a language traditionally used to express particular experiences, we also inherit the ability to manipulate that language in order to verbalize new perceptions and views. Thus, while we would expect our language to influence the organization of our thinking in some way, it is also clear that it is the language user who does the thinking, not the language. In any case, even without an explicit label, linguistic determinism already enjoyed great popularity in the nineteenth century, and, just like today, its advocates often scrutinized vocabulary differences in order to show differences in thinking between different peoples, nations, or races. The following excerpt, already given above, in which Sayce (1874: 78) quotes from a report on words for ‘tree’ among “the aborigines of Tasmania,” is typical and expresses what may be called a topos of nineteenth-century linguistic thought: primitive peoples do not possess the capacity to think abstractly, which is reflected in their vocabularies, which lack abstract or generic terms: It has already been implied that the aborigines of Tasmania had acquired very limited powers of abstraction or generalisation. They possessed no words representing abstract ideas; for each variety of gum-tree and wattle-tree, &c., they had a name, but they had not equivalent for the expression “a tree”; neither could they express abstract qualities, such as hard, soft, warm, cold, long, short, round, &c.; for “hard,” they would say “like a stone.”

The following passage from Trench (1927a [1851]: 19) exemplifies the deterministic element in such accounts: the vocabulary of “the savage” is not just the reflection of a primitive mind but also constrains it, and this is seen as the reason why missionary work among “savage” peoples is not only exceedingly difficult but often apparently in vain: And as there is no such witness to the degradation of the savage as the brutal poverty of his language, so is there nothing that so effectually tends to keep him in the depths to which

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 The ideologies of Marsh (1859): A close reading

he has fallen. […] Language is as truly on one side the limit and restraint of thought, as on the other side that which feeds and unfolds it. Thus it is the ever-repeated complaint of the missionary that the very terms are wholly or nearly wholly wanting in the dialect of the savage whereby to impart to him heavenly truths, or indeed even the nobler emotions of the human heart.

In explaining the “general inferiority of English and French to Scandinavian and Teutonic scholars, in philological and especially etymological research,” Marsh extends linguistic determinism to the grammatical element of the respective languages: whereas German shows “great regularity” and “enough of grammatical inflection” (1859: 72) to impart to the native speaker a pre-linguistic understanding of “general linguistic principle” (1859: 74), English, “having no grammar” (1859: 73), and (spoken) French do not do so, which is why the “German boy comes out of the nursery” a born grammarian and etymologist (1859: 73), whereas the English-speaking philologist labors under the eternal disadvantage of “the defect of early grammatical discipline” (1859: 75). The comparison of languages which Marsh provides to illustrate his claim that speakers of English are at a natural disadvantage when it comes to linguistic study builds on another popular assumption: that of the grammarless English language. That English has no grammar can, of course, only be maintained if grammar is taken to refer exclusively to an elaborate system of inflectional endings, which is, in fact, how Marsh employs the term (1859: 72). Both of these assumptions may be described as topoi of nineteenth-century English linguistics; the following quotes illustrate their employment in talk about the impending world dominance of the language: In its easiness of grammatical construction, in its paucity of inflection, in its almost total disregard of the distinctions of gender excepting those of nature, in the simplicity and precision of its terminations and auxiliary verbs […], our mother-tongue seems well adapted by organization to become the language of the world. (“Review of Bradshaw’s Scheme” [q.v.] 1848: 82, quoted in Bailey 1991: 108) Of all modern languages, not one has acquired such great strength and vigour as the English. It has accomplished this by simply freeing itself from the ancient phonetic laws, and casting off almost all inflections […]. Indeed, the English language […] may be called justly a language of the world […]. (S.H. 1853, quoted in Bailey 1991: 109–110)

In comparing English and German, Marsh is at pains to emphasize that German could not possibly have an absolute advantage over English. As the preceding quotes show, this would have been unthinkable in the second half of the nineteenth century, when expansionist rhetoric widely advertised the superiority of

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English and its speakers not just to “savage” languages but also to other European ones: While, therefore, I by no means maintain that German has any superiority over English for the purposes of poetry, of miscellaneous literature, the intercourse of society, or the ordinary cares and duties of life, yet as, in itself, an intellectual, and especially a linguistic discipline, it has great advantages. (1859: 73)

Admitting to the merits of German in a single domain, and especially one which did not represent an inherent advantage of the language, but one in which English speakers could easily catch up with diligence and hard work, provided his demand for the introduction of “native philology” (1859: 63) at American universities was heeded, did not detract from the immense qualities of English and “the English and American people” (1859: 64), and, in fact, Marsh closes his speech with a similar flourish of praise: That the English tongue, and the men who speak it, will yet achieve great victories in the field of mind, great works in the world of sense, we have ample self-conscious assurance […] English is emphatically the language of commerce, of civilization, of social and religious freedom, of progressive intelligence, and of active catholic philanthropy; and, therefore, beyond any tongue ever used by man, it is of right the cosmopolite speech. (1859: 81, 87–88)

As already indicated, one use of native occurs in the phrase “our native tongue” (1859: 77), which, just like “the native language” (1859: 74), occurs in conjunction with an argument for the study of English in tertiary education. One of Marsh’s prime worries is that the language will become “debased and vulgarized by corruptions of form” (1859: 77). This, in his view, is a danger which is particularly pertinent in the American situation, where [e]very man is a dabbler, if not a master, in every knowledge. Every man is a divine, a statesman, a physician, and a lawyer to himself, as well as a counsellor to his neighbors […]. We all read books, magazines, newspapers, all attend learned lectures, and too many of us, indeed, write the one or deliver the other. (1859: 76)

Thus, according to Marsh, American democracy, with its universal participation in public affairs, and the wide spread of literacy, with its mass production of reading materials, constitutes a grave threat to the integrity of English: “But this very fact of the general use of the whole English vocabulary among us is a dangerous case of corruption of speech” (1859: 77). In describing the source of danger, Marsh reverts to the coin metaphor: things which are employed frequently and pass through many – careful as well as careless – hands wear down quickly; for them to maintain their value, they must be

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 The ideologies of Marsh (1859): A close reading

watched carefully and, if necessary, replaced by fresh exemplars: “Things much used inevitably become much worn, and it is one of the most curious phenomena of language, that words are as subject as coin to defacement and abrasion, by brisk circulation” (1859: 77). The coin metaphor is not a particularly ingenious one; it surfaces frequently not only in nineteenth-century writing on English, but also throughout the centuries and with regard to different languages (cf. Stukenbrock 2005: 25). The solution lies in a linguistic “division of labor,” which, according to Marsh, generally exists in the United States “to a more limited extent than [in] any modern civilized nation” (1859: 76). What this means is that, while all should be able to profit from “the freest access to all the rich treasures which English literature embodies,” the care of the language must be entrusted to those who “in any manner occupy the position of teachers or leaders of the American mind, all whose habits, whose tastes, or whose vocations, lead them to speak oftener than to hear” (1859: 77). In other words, while there are “humble” and “unschooled” masses of native speakers who merely employ the language passively, there are also “leaders” or experts who actively shape its form and development. The crucial prerequisite for expert status is, of course, linguistic study. In this way, Marsh is able to claim confidently that “the careful study of our language is an important antidote” to linguistic corruption (1859: 77) and that there are “circumstances which recommend the study of English specially to us Americans” (1859: 76). The fear of linguistic corruption has been identified by Drake (1977: 17–30) as part of a renewed mania for correctness which took hold of American linguistic thought between 1851 and 1875. Whereas the first half of the nineteenth century had seen a fairly strong reaction to prescriptivism, which, as part of a “general intellectual climate of the romantic expansiveness, which marked the period” (1977: 6), had involved both a revolt against rote learning and the growth of national consciousness, the third decade of the nineteenth century saw a return to the “doctrine of correctness” and a “new drive for uniformity and conformity” (1977: 18). Quoting from the Lectures on the English Language (1874), Drake places Marsh squarely within the correctness movement: Marsh is caught on the horns of the dilemma between change and stability in language, and he communicates a genuine sense of urgency. He recognizes that change in language is inevitable, but he feels the strong need to check it […]. Marsh illustrates the basic anxiety that underpins the mania for correctness. “Decay” and “corruption” are recurrent themes throughout his thirty-three lectures. […] Restraint is his key tool. (1977: 24)

To sum up this section, while it is clear that Marsh views English as inherently superior to other languages, the attributive adjective native often occurs in con-

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texts where Marsh voices his fears about English and its speakers: first, the fear that British and American philologists may not be able to catch up with their Continental rivals, and second, the fear that English in the United States may be subject to corruption at the hands of the masses. Both are put forward as important arguments for Marsh’s main demand, i.e., the introduction of English philology at American universities. The following section, which looks at names for the English language and its speakers, features a few more uses of native.

4.3 Names for English and its speakers The first striking fact about Marsh’s (1859) use of referential terms for English is its large variety. As the following list shows, there are at least twenty different expressions; moreover, hardly any one expression occurs more than once in the speech:

Referential term our home-born English the mother tongue the English language English the English speech the English tongue the Anglo-Saxon tongue the speech of England our own tongue our national speech our ancient tongue primitive English Anglo-Saxon the Anglican speech our native tongue genuine English our language the language of England the cosmopolite speech our own speech

Page 59 59 61 63 65 68 69 69 69 70 71 71 71 76 77 77 78 86 88 91

At least two discourses emerge from this list of referential terms. The first pertains to the speech/writing distinction. A look at terms such as “the English speech” (1859: 65), “our national speech” (1859: 70), or “the Anglican speech” (1859: 76)

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 The ideologies of Marsh (1859): A close reading

appears to suggest that Marsh equates language exclusively with its spoken form, as has frequently been the case since at least the mid-nineteenth century. The discovery of sound laws and the great strides in phonetics and phonology have led to what has been labeled “phonocentrism” (Pennycook 1994: 135), i.e., the belief in the priority of spoken language. This belief emerges not only in the appeal to the “ideal speaker-listener” (Chomsky 1965: 3) as both the locus of language and the object of linguistics, but also in statements such as the following: speech is primary and writing secondary to language. Human beings have been writing […] for at least 5000 years; but they have been talking for much longer […]. When writing did develop, it was derived from and represented speech, albeit imperfectly. (Pyles and Algeo 1993: 3)

In fact, Marsh initially appears to be concerned with spoken English exclusively. As already outlined above, he looks at its various uses by children, in connection with cognition, for the expression of feelings, and in the constitution and maintenance of society (1859: 59–60). In doing so, he compares the “tones of the native language” to “the nutriment drawn from the maternal breast” (1859: 59) and describes emotions or sensations which, on account of their magnitude, initially find “no articulate voice for utterance” but later “leave traces deep indeed in tone” (1859: 60) However, speech, as employed by Marsh, does not necessarily refer to spoken language but functions as a synonym of language, as the following quote shows. Note the reference to “speech known in literature” in this context: I will draw your attention to the multifarious etymology of our Babylonish vocabulary, and the composite structure of our syntax, as peculiarities of the English tongue not shared in an equal degree by any other European speech known in literature, and which require an amount of systematic study not in other cases usually necessary. (1859: 68)

That Marsh is not proposing the study of spoken English but attempting to preserve the language as evidenced in its great literary monuments becomes very clear in the following excerpt: [I]f words which enter into the phraseology of Spenser, and Shakspeare [sic], and Milton, though important “to the antiquary, are useless to the great mass of readers;” and, above all, if the dialect of the authoritative standard of the Christian faith […] is obsolete, unintelligible, forgotten, then, indeed, the English language is decayed, extinct, fossilized. (1859: 62)

This alarmist call contains a verbatim exposition of the “high Victorian ideal of civilization, an ideal earlier identified by [Samuel Taylor] Coleridge with written

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language in general and with the English of Shakespeare and Milton and the King James Bible in particular” (Dowling 1986: xii). In Marsh’s account, this ideal is threatened by, among others, hordes of “humble” and “unschooled” speakers of American English (1859: 77; cf. above), and only the study of the native language as embodied in “the English of the most vigorous period of our literature,” which is “the dialect of the reign of Edward III” (1859: 84) will ensure the continued success of “the Anglo-Saxon race” (1859: 79) when […] these volumes cease to be authorities in language, standards of moral truth and æsthetical beauty, and inspiriters of thought and of action, we shall have lost the springs of national greatness, which it most concerned us to preserve. (1859: 81)

As for the relations between speech and writing, in Marsh’s view, the written language clearly takes priority over the spoken. Other than many nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars, Marsh does not describe writing as an imperfect rendition of speech but, as in the following excerpt, portrays the spoken language as a distorted reduction of the written. Whereas the latter clearly indicates grammatical categories such as person, number, gender, and tense, these are almost “nonexistent” in the former so that the spoken language basically has “no grammar.” It is true that the passage refers to French rather than to English, but throughout his speech, Marsh describes the two languages in very similar terms; it may thus safely be assumed that, had he written about English, it would have strongly resembled the following passage: When I speak of the poverty of French inflections, I am aware I contradict the accidence, which shows a very full system of varied terminations, but the native language is learned by the ear, and the spoken tongue of France reduces its multitude of written endings to a very small list of articulated ones. The signs of number and of person, and often of tense and gender, to which the inflections are restricted, though well marked in written French, disappear almost wholly in pronunciation, and for those who only speak, they are non-existent. While, therefore, for speaking French by rote, as natives do all tongues, no grammar is needed, yet few written dialects require grammatical aid more imperiously […]. (1859: 74)

In sum, even though he equates language with speech in his wording, it is clear that, in Marsh’s view, spoken English is a form of the language which may constitute its basis in terms of order and manner of acquisition, but the written language is what matters and what must be protected from corruption. Marsh is concerned entirely with literary achievements, whose preservation he sees as a prerequisite for “national greatness” (1859: 81) and for the continued dominance of Anglo-Saxon culture and civilization in the world; his view of language is built on vocabulary, morphology, and syntax, and he sees the written medium as prior to the spoken.

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In the referential strategies employed by Marsh to refer to language in general and to English specifically, we thus encounter the same complex of values and attitudes characterizing Victorian thought on language and literature as exemplified by Coleridge: national or racial greatness has somehow already been achieved but must be preserved and may be increased through the study of language and literature. In the language of great literature is embodied everything that is ideal about a civilization; language and civilization are radically identified by means of the works of great writers. This powerful complex was founded upon a view of language which maintained the belief in the superiority and priority of the written medium as shaped by individual masters of language. Yet, while authors such as Marsh were propounding this vision, an opposing view of language as founded upon speech only and focused upon the dialects of peasants and “savages” was relentlessly popularizing its vision of “scientific” theory and methodology. As Marsh’s speech shows, in the nineteenth century, the native speaker populated both camps. If in terms of mode the written, literary language is what really matters to Marsh, in terms of time, it is earlier stages of English. This becomes clear when we look at another set of referential terms for the language or varieties of it: “the Anglo-Saxon tongue” (1859: 69), “primitive English” (1859: 71), and “AngloSaxon” (1859: 76). In his appeal for the study of English at American universities, Marsh (1859: 70–71) highlights a very specific field, which is primarily literature in Old English. The study of “those Old English writers” is advocated not only because it will provide English speakers with excellent models of language use (“the most forcible forms of expression”) or for scientific reasons (“we advocate […] the scientific notion of philology”), but mainly for political ones: studying Old English texts will offer insight into the mental or spiritual basis of the nation (“the mighty thoughts, out of which has grown the action that has made England […] the envy of the world”). In his emphasis on the earliest period of English language and literature, Marsh was not alone; in fact, a fascination with things Anglo-Saxon was typical of the time. It had begun with Ingram’s (1807) pronouncement on the utility of Anglo-Saxon literature but had soon come to dominate nineteenth-century thought on language, literature, and politics. For reasons to be outlined in the main body of this study, it abated around World War I. In 1918, for example, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch denied the relevance of Anglo-Saxon to contemporary English literature, tracing English poetry and prose back to “the democratic Greeks, not the Teutonic barbarians” (Crowley 1996: 152). As Milroy (1996: 183) points out, at least in part, there were pragmatic reasons why the Anglo-Saxon heritage of English was so prominently stressed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In England, Anglo-Saxon professor-

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ships were created long before there were professors of English literature, and Anglo-Saxon studies not only formed a large part of English literature curricula but were also mandatory for undergraduates in English at Oxford and Cambridge and at all universities modeled on them. Marsh, however, already held a professorship in English literature at Columbia University, and he, in fact, puts forward primarily political reasons why the study of the native language must focus on Old English literature. In his view, the main reason why English speakers ought to study the early stages of their own language at an advanced level is nationalism or, as he himself calls it, “intellectual patriotism” (1859: 67). But how did the relation between nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon studies, on the one hand, and the phenomenon of nationalism, on the other, come about, in other words, where is the link between a fascination with Anglo-Saxon language and literature and a historical theory and political ideology? As will be shown in detail in Chapter 6, during the second half of the nineteenth century, Anglo-Saxonism represented a powerful conceptual framework encompassing the British Empire and the U.S. in a logic of racial exceptionalism based on both descent and culture. In that framework, language played a crucial role, as the traits of the English-speaking people – an expansionist drive, a youthful and manly character, and an emphasis on political liberties – were seen to be traveling along lines of Anglo-Saxon blood. Much of Anglo-Saxonism agreed well with American republicanism and destinarian nationalism, as, just like the Anglo-Saxons of early times, Americans were seen to have a special mission in the world, which consisted in transforming and redeeming other nations by “exporting” their republican institutions. On the other hand, Anglo-Saxonism did not enjoy unlimited popularity in the mid- and late-nineteenth century United States, especially if it was interpreted as “the sentiment of being ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or English ethnologically” (Frantzen and Niles 1997: 2). And yet, if we return to the referential strategies employed by Marsh in talking about his native language, they betray precisely such an orientation: the language is labeled not simply “English” (1859: 63) or “the English language” (1859: 61), but it is called “the speech of England” (1859: 69) or “the language of England” (1859: 86). Apparently Marsh thus views English as ultimately belonging to the English; its speakers, accordingly, are “the descendants of those who first employed it” (1859: 87) or “England and her children” (1859: 71). As I have indicated, not everyone agreed that Britons and Americans were essentially one race, nation, or people and therefore had identical interests. Particularly in the U.S., there was resistance to the idea of worldwide Anglo-Saxon unity. John Fleming (quoted in Kramer 2002: 10), for example, noted in 1891 that the appeal to Anglo-Saxonism could also be interpreted as the self-serving

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attempt by Great Britain to maintain a hold on an imagined “cousin” of international significance: In proportion as the North American Republic grows powerful and overshadowing […] grows the anxiety of Englishmen to have it understood that this potent factor in the world’s affairs is what they term Anglo-Saxon […] in race, feeling, and literature.

This position resonates well with a new linguistic self-confidence. In 1900, Brander Matthews (quoted in Bailey 1991: 156–157), incidentally also of Columbia University, provocatively asked: What then will happen to the English language in England when England awakens to the fact that the centre of the English-speaking race is no longer within the borders of that little island? […] Even now, at the end of the nineteenth century, more than half of those who have English as their mother-tongue are Americans; and at the end of the twentieth century the numerical superiority of the Americans will be as overwhelming as was the numerical superiority of the British at the beginning of the nineteenth. Will the British frankly accept the inevitable? Will they face the facts as they are? Will they follow the lead of the Americans when we shall have the leadership of the language, as the Americans followed their lead when they had it? Or will they insist on an arbitrary independence, which can have only one result – the splitting off of the British branch of our speech from the main stem of the language? (1900: 239–240)

Thus, Anglo-Saxonism and American nationalism must be clearly distinguished. For writers like Fleming or Matthews, the two ideologies were not historical or political extensions but antitheses. Nevertheless, those who stressed the uniqueness of the “American race” rather than the continuities with an Anglo-Saxon past were not necessarily in the main line of thought. The tensions between the two positions were clearly present, but until World War I, Anglo-Saxonism as a transatlantic ideology of racial exceptionalism maintained a stronghold in Britain as well as in the U.S. If we now turn to Marsh’s strategies for labeling English speakers, his AngloSaxonist orientation emerges even more clearly. According to Marsh, “our language” is spoken by both “the Englishman and the American” (1859: 78); two synonymous expressions for “the men who speak” English (1859: 81) are “the Anglo-Saxon race” (1859: 79) and “the Anglican people” (1859: 80). All of these labels occur immediately before or within a passage in which Marsh, in a flourish of expansionist rhetoric, predicts a great future for English and its speakers, provided the literary language is closely monitored and protected from corruption: I said, in the outset, that there were circumstances in the position and the external relations of the English language which recommended its earnest study and cultivation. I refer, of

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course, to the commanding political influence, the widespread territory, and the commercial importance of the two great mother-countries whose vernacular it is. […] The language of England is spoken by greater numbers than any other Christian speech, and it is the vehicle of a wider, purer, more beneficient moral action than any other existing tongue […]; and it is remarkable that, while some younger languages and younger races are decaying and gradually disappearing from their natal soil, the English speech and the descendants of those who first employed it, are making hourly conquests of new territory, and have already established their posts within hailing distance throughout the circuit of the habitable globe. (1859: 86–87)

What Marsh is describing here is the process of competition which, in the second half of the nineteenth century, was deemed inevitable and in which “superior” peoples, races, or nations and their languages were inevitably seen as bound to replace “inferior” ones. In fact, the status of universal language was to be the preserve of the nation which eventually acquired geographical supremacy worldwide. In other words, the universal language was to be the language of the major imperialist nation (cf. Crowley 1991: 124). But the competition between nations and languages which characterized the imperial struggle involved not only hierarchical relations with the languages and cultures of subject nations but also competition between the imperialist nations themselves. Even though Marsh did not envisage the complete replacement of all other languages by English, as an Anglo-Saxonist, he had no doubt that the preeminent language in the world eventually was to be English. If the Anglo-Saxons were to rule the world, as seemed clear by the mid-nineteenth century, their language was, too: That it [i.e., the English language] will ever become, as some dream, literally universal in its empire, I am, indeed, far from believing; nor do I suppose that the period will ever arrive, when our many-sided humanity will content itself with a single tongue. […] But yet, though English will not supersede, still less extirpate, the thousand languages now spoken, it is not unreasonable to expect for it a wider diffusion, a more commanding influence, a more universally-acknowledged beneficient action, than has yet been reached, or can hereafter be acquired, by any ancient or now-existent tongue. (1859: 88–90)

Such rhetoric was typical of the time and crucially built on the close link or even identification between nations and languages most famously asserted by Herder (cf. Leerssen 2006: 99). That Marsh actually views languages and their speakers as equivalent emerges in the following passage, which names the expansionist drive putatively characterizing both the Anglo-Saxon community and its language: “The Anglo-Saxon tongue has a craving appetite, and is as rapacious of words, and as tolerant of forms, as are its children of territory and of religions” (1859: 69). Even though this expansionist drive is clearly viewed in positive terms

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(after all, it has led to the immensely rich vocabulary which, just like its lack of grammar, has been viewed as a hallmark of English since the nineteenth century), in Marsh’s view there are also grave dangers involved in that the importation of so many foreign elements has alientated the language from its speakers, thus threatening unity of the two. “But, in spite of its power of assimilation, there is much of the speech of England which has never become connatural to the Anglican people” (1859: 69). The only solution to the problem is the arduous study of the native language, and particularly of its “earlier literature” (1859: 78), which includes not only Old English writers but also Chaucer, “Shakspeare [sic],” Milton, Keats, and Spenser (1859: 85). According to Marsh, it was with these authors that the English language reached a climax, “and few are sanguine enough to believe that future changes in its structure, or in its vocabulary […] will be changes for the better” (1859: 78). But the study of earlier literature is crucial not only in linguistic terms, but also if “the Anglo-Saxon race” is to succeed in its worldwide mission. This is because “a permanent literature” provides not only “authoritative standards of expression” (1859: 78) as well as “standards of moral truth and aesthetical beauty” and inspires great “thought and action” (1859: 81), but also functions as “the strongest bond of union in a homogenous people” (1859: 79). In other words, Marsh is afraid that, if English is not cultivated and corruption opposed, it will break up into different languages and thus diminish the significance of the people using it. In another one of his lectures, Marsh is more explicit in this respect. He sees primarily pronunciation differences and not so much vocabulary and grammar as differentiating British and American English (which, incidentally, is still the standard analysis; cf., e.g., Leisi and Mair 1999: 186): So far as any tendency to diverge between the two countries exists, it manifests itself at present rather in the spoken than in the written dialect, in pronunciation rather than in vocabulary and grammatical structure. (1874: 473)

Nevertheless, he warns of an impending separation and the ensuing negative causes for both the language and its speakers: The integrity and future harmonious development of our common English speech in England and America is threatened by a multitude of disturbing influences. Language, being a living organic thing, is, by the very condition of its vital existence, by the law of life itself, necessarily always in a progressive, or at least a fluctuating state. […] But, at the same time, something can and should be done to check its propensity to wandering growth, and especially the too rapid divergence of what may ultimately become the two great dialects of the English tongue. […] Let me, therefore, express my entire dissent from the views of those who would embitter the rivalries of commerce by the jealousies of a discordant dialect – who would hasten the process of separation between the stock and the offshoot, and cut

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off the sons of the Pilgrim and the Cavalier from their common inheritance in Chaucer and Spenser, and Bacon and Shakespeare, and Milton and Fuller, by Americanizing, and consequently denaturalizing, the language in which our forefathers have spoken, and prayed, and sung, for a thousand years. (1874: 478–479)

The idea that British and American English would eventually split up into separate languages appears to have been voiced first by Noah Webster in his Dissertations on the English Language (1951 [1789]). Whereas wishful thinking may have animated Webster’s analysis at least in part, by the mid-nineteenth century, the prediction of a linguistic schism between Britain and the U.S. had assumed the status of a topos. An anonymous reviewer of Marsh’s Lectures (quoted in Bailey 1991: 114) describes the situation thus: It has for some time been the fashion, among a certain class of semi-political critics, to favor the impression that the language of the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon family is gradually diverging into two appreciably distinct dialects.

What underlay this view was, of course, the so-called “Latin analogy” (cf. McArthur 1987: 9), which was based on observed parallels between the past fate of the Roman Empire and its language and thoughts on the future development of English and the two countries in which it was spoken as a mother tongue. The Roman Empire was gone, and even though it had generated the Romance languages and had continued to function as a quasi-universal, pan-European language of literati, scholars, and the clergy for hundreds of years, Latin was, to all intents and purposes, a dead language. Signs as to the linguistic divergence between the varieties of English spoken in Britain and in the U.S. were conspicuous. Would the language therefore undergo the same linguistic dissolution? Marsh, but numerous other authors as well, clearly feared that it would. In sum, another important argument for Marsh’s insistence on the introduction of English philology at American universities consisted in the “Latin analogy.” Marsh admonished his fellow countrymen to awaken to the special importance of studying their own language, so that the language of the “Anglican people” or “Anglo-Saxon race,” and thus their culture and civilization, could be preserved. The disintegration of the uniform language threatened the integration of the transatlantic community; saving the language from degradation and decay meant safeguarding “the springs of national greatness” and thus enabling “the English tongue and the men who speak it” to achieve further “great victories in the field of mind” (1859: 81). There is a final interesting referential expression in Marsh’s speech which also denotes, among others, speakers of English. In maintaining that, unlike in previous cases, it is by no means the impending decay or death of English which

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is prompting the novel and intense interest in its study, Marsh states the following: In reasoning from the past to the present, we are apt to forget that Protestant Christianity and the invention of printing have entirely changed the outward condition of at least Gothic, not to say civilized, humanity, and so distinguished this new phase of Indo-European life from that old world which lies behind us, that, though all which was true of individual man, in the days of Plato, and of Seneca, and of Abelard, is true now, yet most which was conceived to be true of man as a created and dependent, or as a social being, is at this day recognized as either false or abnormal. (1859: 62)

What is of interest here is the label Gothic. Even though the surrounding text on its own does not make it entirely clear what Marsh is referring to, this label is positively valued. It occurs in a context in which the Greco-Roman approach to things – and more specifically, the study of language, which, according to Marsh, began only after Latin and Greek had commenced their path of decline – is devalued, and the English way of looking at language is exalted. The “Gothic” is linked to “Protestant Christianity” and thus to northern European life; it is contrasted with “that old world […] of Plato, and of Seneca, and of Abelard” and thereby clearly distinguished from Greco-Roman civilization and culture. In fact, the referential expression Gothic refers to the Germanic peoples and their descendants, which becomes obvious through a look at Marsh’s other works. In 1843, he had published The Goths in New England, reviving the term to describe the Germanic branch of the “Caucasian race.” He wrote (quoted in Horsman 1981: 181): The Goths, the common ancestors of the inhabitants of North Western Europe, are the noblest branch of the Caucasian race. We are their children. It was the spirit of the Goth, that guided the May-Flower across the trackless ocean; the blood of the Goth that flowed at Bunker’s Hill.

An emphasis on the common Germanic roots of both Anglo-Saxons and Germans was a popular topos in the mid-nineteenth century. It had been very clearly articulated in 1841 by Thomas Arnold in his inaugural lecture at Oxford. In this lecture, Arnold maintained that while the English had been greatly influenced by Rome and Greece historically, they were entirely different racially (cf. Horsman 1981: 65–66): Our English race is the German race: for though our Norman forefathers had learnt to speak a stranger’s language, yet in blood, as we know, they were the Saxons’ brethren: both alike belong to the Teutonic or German stock. (Arnold 1860: 26)

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The key to medieval and modern history was the impact of the Germanic peoples on the Roman Empire. Even though fourth-century Romans already knew Christianity and were drawing upon an advanced intellectual and political heritage, what was lacking “was simply the German race, and the peculiar qualities which characterize it” (Arnold 1860: 27). The most important of those qualities was the love of liberty, which the Anglo-Saxons had transformed into their system of free government. In The Goths in New England, Marsh drew upon this Germanic-Roman contrast. Attributing the Anglo-Saxons’ positive qualities exclusively to their Germanic heritage, he blamed Rome for what was less admirable. In this way, a racial explanation accounted for what Marsh viewed as contradictions in English and American attitudes and policy: England is Gothic by birth, Roman by adoption. Whatever she has of true moral grandeur, of higher intellectual power, she owes to her Gothic mother; while her grasping ambition, her material energies, her spirit of exclusive selfishness, are due to the Roman nurse (quoted in Horsman 1981: 181).

For Marsh, as well as for numerous others, it was the love of liberty which characterized the Germanic peoples generally, and the ability to preserve liberty in free institutions which was a quality of the Anglo-Saxons specifically. The Americans had inherited these positive qualities directly from the Gothic race, “that great race from which, with little intermixture, we are lineally descended” (quoted in Horsman 1981: 182). As Horsman points out in this context (1981: 181), Marsh was an expert on “the whole subject of Scandinavian antiquity […] the most prominent of the American Scandinavian scholars.” What all this goes to show is that elements of the Anglo-Saxon myth as it had developed in the early nineteenth century and before are very present in Marsh’s address and thus in the text which features the first attested use of the term native speaker; or conversely, that elements of that text which appear uninterpretable or difficult to place in context at first sight, can, for the most part, be traced back to this myth. George Perkins Marsh was not only an American scholar of English; he was an Anglo-Saxonist fascinated with and knowledgeable about the northern heritage of the language and bound by the categories of thought and labels he had inherited from his scholarly forebears. To sum up, the referential expression Gothic, which Marsh uses to contrast the Anglo-Saxon way of looking at language with that of Greco-Roman civilization, opens up another ideological complex. This complex represents a further facet of Anglo-Saxonism and contrasts Teutonic greatness with the historical legacy of Greece and Rome only to decide in favor of the former.

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4.4 Summary This chapter has presented an in-depth analysis of Marsh’s 1858 address at Columbia University in New York, which is the text in which the phrase native speaker is first attested. Focusing first on the speech’s introductory section, I looked at various referential, predication, argumentation, and perspectivation strategies employed by Marsh in promoting the introduction of English philology at American universities. I then turned to the uses of the attributive adjective native, which occurs ten times altogether, and finally analyzed referential expressions for English and its speakers. Various ideological complexes are opened up by those discourse strategies and the arguments built on them. There is, first, the speech/writing distinction, with “phonocentrism” being pitted against the emphasis on the written literature as the only real, reliable, and valid representation of a language. Then, there is Anglo-Saxonism, which was one of the most powerful historical-political ideologies of the second half of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries. Various of its components surface in Marsh’s speech: the anti-Roman, anti-Catholic element, an emphasis on the Germanic libertarian heritage, and the stress on racial exceptionalism, which made collaboration between Britons and Americans imperative in matters political but particularly linguistic, lest the bond uniting them with each other but also with the literature of their past, which was portrayed as the “springs of national greatness,” be broken. Finally, there are a number of linguistic topoi pervading Marsh’s speech: the assumption that the only rightful way of acquiring the native language is the home; the assumption that the function and mechanism of language consist in “telementation,” which is made possible by the fact that linguistic form/meaning correlations are unambiguously determined; the assumption that English, while lacking in grammatical structure, possesses the largest and most varied vocabulary in the world, which enables speakers of English to perform superior intellectual feats; and the assumption that English and its speakers, while already the greatest in the world, are still bound for an even greater future. This is the intellectual environment in which the English native speaker emerged and in which, at least in part, it still participates. The following chapters turn to a number of the discourses just identified, subjecting them to closer scrutiny.

Part II: “Good” English and the “best” speakers: The native speaker and standards of language, speech, and writing

5 Defining and delimiting “English” and “standard English” The emergence of the image of standard English […] is particularly consequential in establishing the terms of present-day debate about English and its varieties. (Bailey 1991: 2) […] some of the basic ideas that drive linguistic science are themselves offshoots of, or are related to, the standard ideology. (Milroy 1999: 24) […] the notion of “nativity” involves the compulsions of standardisation at some level. (Sayeed 2007: 99)

At first sight, there does not seem to be a necessary connection between the notion of the native speaker and standard English. After all, one might define native speakerhood entirely in terms of individual linguistic competence, be it standard or non-standard. This has, in fact, been done, for example by Chomsky: So then what is a language and who is a native speaker? Answer, a language is a system L-s, it is the steady state attained by the language organ. And everyone is a speaker of the particular L-s that that person has “grown” in his/her mind/brain. In the real world, that is all there is to say (quoted in Paikeday 1985: 58).

Thus, according to Chomsky, with regard to native speakerhood, one need only consider the “steady state” reached by an individual language faculty around puberty (quoted in Paikeday 1985: 55). This faculty or “organ” is identical across the species and simply responds to whatever input it is presented with, which means that everyone is a native speaker of his or her own “I-language” (cf. Chomsky 1986), be it a standard variety or a regionally and/or socially determined one. This assumption has been heavily criticized. Davies (2003: 27–28), for example, in describing the “Idiolectal Native Speaker,” says the following: The trouble with this argument is that it is self-defeating; it cannot be refuted because it is self-evident. Such an approach is probably a pseudo-procedure, that is a proposal never realisable in practice; it is also formidably non-theoretical since it provides no explanation of what human beings do or have since it is quite ungeneralisable.

And Kandiah (1998: 86–92), even though he applauds Chomsky for his “valuable insight” into individual linguistic competence, maintains that “the mainstream discourse on the native user, whether critical of the concept or not, can be seen to be a strongly normative discourse that is heavily invested ideologically against

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considerable numbers of people on our globe” and neglects or even denies important issues while focusing on secondary or even irrelevant ones (1998: 92). Writing from a New Englishes perspective, Kandiah (1998: 90–91) points out that native speakerhood crucially involves human subjects, for whom being classed as native or non-native speakers has immediate political, cultural, and economic consequences. At the societal level, it implies questions of norms and proprietorship over the language, which, as part of the post-colonial struggle, must be subjected to critical re-evaluation. In his view, there is “a whole range of issues that the concept of the native user as such involves” (1998: 106). One of these issues is precisely the use of the standard language, and numerous authors, in fact, point to it. Afendras et al. (1995: 300), for example, say that “[t]here would seem to be a link between standards, use of labels and even the native/non-native dichotomy. […] ‘nativeness’ (certainly in the sense of means of acquisition) is subordinate to notions of standards.” In this context, they point to a “process of synecdoche” by which the language is equated with its standard form: “This […] happens frequently, e.g. English dictionary = British English dictionary = Standard British English dictionary = Standard southern English English dictionary. Implicit in our labelling is the notion of a standard variety” (1995: 300). An example of such labeling is Quirk et al.’s (1985) voluminous English grammar, which, despite its restriction in subject matter to standard English morphology and syntax, is simply entitled A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. As McArthur (1999: 165) describes it, this equation of the language as a whole with its standard form is not a new phenomenon but has a long history: There has been since at least the eighteenth century a tendency to regard the usage of upper- and middle-class life, education, publishing, law, administration, and government as more proper, polite, legitimate, and ultimately real than anything used by other Englishspeakers. This validating minority has included writers about English, whose books – especially grammars – have tended to discuss only the standard (and often people’s failure to achieve or sustain it), usually without making it clear that they have limited their range in this way or indicating that the standard language is used comfortably only by the minority to which the writer belongs and the reader may or may not belong. By the mid-twentieth century, the concept of Standard English had become a central part of social life and education, with the result that in recent years well-founded, liberal works covering only the standard language have tended to sustain the viewpoint of the anonymous 1836 writer that only the standard is really English.

Implicit in such an approach is, of course, the assumption that only standard speakers can be “real” native speakers in that, if it is assumed that only the standard form really represents the language, only speakers of this form of speech may or must be regarded as “proper” speakers of the language.

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Annamalai (1998: 149) also points to the equation of the standard with the language as a whole, linking this equation not only to the notion of the native speaker, but also to issues such as defining a language and the ownership question: The social existence of a language comes about through its social construction by the community of its speakers. This social construct may be concerned with the boundary of the language; that is, about which variants of speech are included in a language; it may be about the norm of the language, what is considered as the standard speech, which is equated with language. It may concern the propriety over language; that is, who owns it […] and has legitimacy over it. The social constructs of a language as a native language or as a foreign language are examples of this.

As will become clear in this chapter, the question of setting boundaries to languages was one of the most pressing problems for nineteenth-century linguists. As a new discipline, the science of language was struggling to establish its position within the academic world; if it was to be a “proper” science, its object of study would have to be clearly delimited. The idea of the standard, with its implications of uniformity and homogeneity, came in very handy in this respect, and so standard English assumed tremendous significance in the second half of the nineteenth century in that it satisfied theoretical and methodological necessities as they had occurred not just with regard to abstract questions but also with regard to such practical ones as what to include in a dictionary of the “English language.” In that respect, the question of whose language best represented the standard was, of course, exceedingly important. Here, too, the solution has remained the same: “Setting native speaker standards usually involves using educated native speakers as models” (Escudero and Sharwood-Smith 2001: 279–280). This is exemplified by the Survey of English Usage, about which Quirk (1972: 124) says “the Survey of English Usage at University College London […] is a study of the native user’s proficiency.” But how is the “native user” defined? Whose proficiency is the Survey concerned with? According to Quirk, “[t]he Survey […] has as its field of inquiry the wide-ranging repertoire, in speech and writing, of the educated native English speaker today” (1972: viii). In sum, according to many researchers, the English language is best represented by its standard form, and the prototypical native user is an educated speaker.

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5.1 The native speaker and the standard language in the World Englishes context The topic with regard to which the link between the native speaker and standard English has been most vigorously debated is the global spread of the language. The following excerpts illustrate: English used as a global language is often equated with Standard British/American English with the assumption that native-speakers of English are the model to be used. (Foley 2007: 7) Is a native speaker only someone who learnt Received Pronunciation at her mother’s knee? Or General American? What about those at whose mother’s knee Indian English was spoken, or Gordie, or Ebonics? Only few people are exposed to the standard language in early childhood. (Piller 2001: 111) Some languages, English in particular, have become important goods in an international network of language trade, in addition to being media for transacting other kinds of world trade (or because of this). As other goods in world trade, English, and the entire range of related products, are subject to “quality” requirements and assessments. They are offered in response to needs, real or created, and to demand also affected by prestige. […] Is it too cynical to perceive a kind of commodity obsolescence which makes having the ‘brand’ variety a must? Is the range of recent professional papers which address the local language custodians’ inadequacy a datum irrelevant to a discussion of the locus of the standard? Who has the de facto authority to pronounce the products pleonastic, archaic or plain nonstandard? (Afendras et al. 1995: 296–297) We should also note the movements insisting on standardizing English in order to understand the idealization of native speaker teachers. […] It is feared that Periphery variants of English will spoil the purity of English and affect mutual intelligibility among speakers of the language. Native speaker teachers, on the other hand, will serve a useful function in containing the development of indigenized variants of English and restricting the further diversification of the language. (Canagarajah 1999a: 82) […] in many Outer Circle countries, bilingual speakers of English are using the language on a daily basis alongside one or more others and frequently their use of English is influenced by these other languages. Hence, they are developing new lexical items, new grammatical standards, and their pronunciation is also being influenced by their other languages. These changes lead some people to worry that English will vary to such an extent that it will no longer serve the main purpose of an international language, namely to provide a link across cultures and languages. […] With the spread of English and the resulting variation in the language, some people believe that the need to uphold common standards has increased in importance. It is puzzling that whereas differences in the use of English between Inner Circle countries are generally accepted, with no one suggesting that this will lead to incomprehensibility, language variation outside Inner Circle countries is often seen as a threat. (McKay 2002: 49–50)

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[…] the issues of some variety being a native variety should be distinguished from the issue of that variety being a standard variety. […] Implicit in this argument is the idea that new varieties are those which have less social prestige, and are socially disadvantaged. If so, New York Black English and Cockney English are also new varieties of English. (Singh et al. 1998: 51)

What emerges in these excerpts is, on the one hand, a largely monolithic view according to which there is only one English, which unites all those who use it. This English shows variation, of course; as far as the variation between native and non-native forms of the language is concerned, however, a clear distinction is made. This distinction is significant because only native varieties are taken to constitute legitimate models for both English language teaching and description, and only the native speaker is taken to serve as an authority in disputes concerning correctness and appropriateness. This is because only natively spoken varieties of English are assumed to be standardized enough to function as norm providers. Moreover, it is feared that the changes introduced into the language in the contact situations in which non-native varieties are spoken threaten the unity of the language in that they will lead to a loss of intelligibility among varieties, which may not only endanger the status of English as an international language but also, if worst comes to worst, its status as a language as such – a scenario sometimes labeled the “Latin analogy” (McArthur 1987: 9) or “Babelization” (McArthur 1994: 233). This view is contested by what has variously been termed the “W[orld] E[nglishes] view” (Davies et al. 2003: 572), the “pragmatist” school (Wee 2002: 282), or the “Continuum Model” (Nayar 1994: 1). This approach recognizes that there are “core” varieties of English (i.e., Inner-Circle, “old,” or “native” Englishes) but at the same time points out that these varieties draw their status largely from ethno-political factors. Furthermore, it is claimed that all varieties of English have been influenced by extensive language contact, and all except maybe forms of British English are seen as having been indigenized or localized according to the self-identification needs of their speakers. The question of standards then becomes one of endocentric vs. exocentric ones; the native speaker problem also vanishes, as everyone is considered a native speaker of his or her particular variety of English and a non-native speaker of all others. It is emphasized that without attention to local norms, all international and/or institutional uses of English are necessarily biased in favor of those for whom standard British or American English etc. are native varieties. The question of standards in the World Englishes context stood at the center of the well-known exchange between Sir Randolph Quirk and Braj B. Kachru

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about “liberation linguistics” (Quirk 1990; Kachru 1991). Kachru’s approach to World Englishes, prominently launched in Kachru (1982), stresses the importance of inclusivity and pluricentricity; apart from the linguistic description of varieties of English worldwide, its concerns extend far into related fields, such as creative writing, language pedagogy, and critical linguistics. According to Kachru (1988: 208–215, 1992: 4–5), the spread of English worldwide has necessitated a critical re-appraisal of such “sacred cows” of theoretical and applied linguistics as interference, interlanguage, error, speech community, the native speaker, and, finally, the “models, norms and standards for English in the Outer Circle” (1992: 5). As outlined in Chapter 2, Kachru (1992: 5) distinguishes between, first, the “normproviding” varieties of the Inner Circle, among which “American and British Englishes […] are considered more appropriate than the varieties used in Australia and New Zealand”; second, the “norm-developing” varieties of the Outer Circle, whose speakers may follow a localized norm with “a well-established linguistic and cultural identity”; and third, the “norm-dependent” varieties of the Expanding Circle, which generally follow the exocentric norms of British or American English. The idea of the development of endocentric norms was not welcomed by everyone in the linguistic community. In an oft-quoted paper, Quirk drew attention to what he saw as the “half-baked quackery” (1990: 9) of English teachers propagating “the linguistic ethos that is simplified into the tenet that any English is as good as any other.” According to Quirk, foreign students acquiring English would have to “feel cheated by such a tolerant pluralism” when they came to realize that emphasis on variety in English “mattered little to native speakers of English” and to “those with authority to employ or promote them” and that “the best grammars and dictionaries similarly related to a Standard English” (1990: 10). In Quirk’s view, “the mass of ordinary native-English speakers have never lost their respect for Standard English, and it needs to be understood abroad too […] that Standard English is alive and well, its existence and its value alike clearly recognized” (1990: 10). Crucial to Quirk’s paper is the distinction between “institutionalised” varieties, which are “fully described and with defined standards observed by the institutions of state,” and “non-institutionalised” ones, which do not possess these characteristics (1990: 6). He views only two varieties, American and British English, as being fully institutionalized, with Australian English on the way there. Quirk then links the institutionalization of a variety to the native/non-native dichotomy and acknowledges (1990: 8) that “many Indians speak English […]; [and] India is a free and independent country as Britain is or as America is,” but nevertheless denies that there is an “Indian English on precisely the same equal footing” as British or American English. What speaks against institutionalized

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Outer-Circle varieties is, according to Quirk (1990: 8), resistance from precisely the Outer Circle itself: “Most of those with authority in education and the media in these countries tend to protest that the so-called national variety of English is an attempt to justify inability to acquire what they persist in seeing as ‘real’ English.” The consequences, according to Quirk (1990: 7), are clear: there is a need in foreign-language teaching for “native-teacher support and […] for non-native teachers to be in constant touch with the native language.” This is because “in such countries as India and Nigeria, […] the English of teachers themselves inevitably bears the stamp of locally acquired deviation from the standard language (‘You are knowing my father, isn’t it?’)” (1990: 8). Thus, in Quirk’s opinion, native speakers from Inner-Circle countries are best suited to teaching English internationally, even if he also warns against the “young men and women teaching English with only minimal teacher training, indeed with little specialised education” who are “employed because, through accident of birth in Leeds or Los Angeles, they are native speakers of English” (1990: 9). His concern here is not, however, that such teachers might be unqualified because of their lack of training in foreign language pedagogy; his concern is rather that “their own English [may] be far from standard,” and that “they may have little respect for it” and instead subscribe to the all-Englishes-are-equal ethos (1990: 9). However, according to Quirk, it is not only the practitioners of ESL or EFL who should predominantly be members of Inner-Circle speech communities; he also emphasizes the importance of the Inner Circle in matters theoretical (1990: 8): We must not forget that many Japanese teachers, Malaysian teachers, Indian teachers have done postgraduate training in Britain and the United States, eager to absorb what they felt were the latest ideas in English teaching. Where better, after all, to get the latest ideas on this than in the leading English-speaking countries?

To sum up Quirk’s position: only native English can be standard English, and only standard English is fit to function as a means of international communication and to be taught to speakers of other languages. In his answer to Quirk, Kachru takes up the question of a mono-centered approach to English as opposed to “the recognition of [the] pluricentricity and multi-identities” of the language (1991: 4). He links Quirk’s approach with the “deficit” view of non-standard (Inner-Circle) varieties of English (e.g., Bernstein 1964) and, in analogy to Labov (1972), who rebuked the “deficit” theory for not taking into account the sociolinguistic realities of speakers of African American Vernacular English, takes him to task for denying the sociolinguistic realities extant in Outer-Circle countries. According to Kachru, Quirk’s “concern,” i.e., the

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rejection of endocentric norms for second-language varieties of English and consequently of the institutionalization of such varieties, emanates from a monolingual perspective and from “uncomplicated language policy contexts” (1991: 6). He explicitly denies any connection with “the fashion of undermining belief in standard English” and with anti-elitism (Quirk 1985: 6), emphasizing instead that the questions of norms and standards are always intricately linked with language attitudes and linguistic identity (Kachru 1991: 9). Of course, the issues raised in the Quirk-Kachru debate, i.e., the worldwide spread of English, norms and standards in its description and teaching, and the roles of native speakers in those fields, were not new at the time. In fact, the arguments of “liberation linguists” like Kachru against those advocating an “Imperial Model” (Kachru 1991: 9) are predated by more than twenty years by the controversy between Peter Strevens and Clifford Prator. In 1964, Halliday et al., attempting to transfer insights gained in newly-developing subdisciplines of linguistics such as sociolinguistics to applied linguistics, i.e., to language teaching and language learning, came to the conclusion that “during the period of colonial rule it seemed totally obvious and immutable that the form of English used by professional people in England was the only conceivable model for use in education overseas” (1964: 292). In the 1960s, they argued, things had changed so that now there was a choice of models: English is no longer the possession of the British, or even the British and the Americans, but an international language which increasing numbers of people adopt for at least some of their purposes. […] In West Africa, in the West Indies, and in Pakistan and India […] it is no longer accepted by the majority that the English of England, with RP as its accent, are the only possible models of English to be set before the young. (1964: 293)

Statements such as these were branded “The British heresy in TESL” by Prator. According to Prator (1968: 459), “in a country where English is not spoken natively but is widely used as the medium of instruction, to set up the local variety of English as the ultimate model to be imitated by those learning the language” is “unjustifiable intellectually and not conducive to the best possible results.” The similarity between Quirk’s “concerns” and this position is readily apparent. The “fallacies” that Prator associates with “the British heresy” also foreshadow the Quirk “concerns” as identified by Kachru (1991: 4–5); they include, among others, the idea that second-language varieties can be equated with native varieties; that second-language varieties are internally stable enough to be recognized and described as linguistic entities in their own right; that the institutionalization of second-language varieties is possible; and that students studying in second-language contexts will strive for local norms once they have been established rather than emulate those of native speakers.

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An interesting position, finally, is taken by Davies (2003: 68), who explicitly asks “in what sense we can speak of a speaker of Singaporean or Indian English as being a native speaker of English.” According to Davies, the answer to this question hinges on the answer to another question, i.e., whether Singaporean or Indian English constitute linguistic systems in their own right. This question, in turn, has to do with drawing linguistic boundaries, which is essentially one of language standards: “Where does one language end and another one begin? The answer to this, in my view, is largely sociolinguistic; and has to do with concepts such as those of language standardization” (2003: 45). With regard to varieties of English, Davies (2003: 144) denies the existence of separate, endocentric standards, the crucial argument being intelligibility: In the case of putative standards, say Scottish English and English English, the solution sometimes taken is precisely to claim an alternative Standard, for example Scottish English, and insist that this has its own set of discrete norms. […] But in the case of Scottish and English English or British and American English the reality is that that the norms shared are so all embracing and those not shared so few that there is really no danger of loss of intelligibility in either spoken or written English […]. Which probably means that there is a composite English Standard which combines with a flexible enough degree of tolerance all the Englishes reckoned to be old Standards: British, including Scottish, Irish, American, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand […].

But what about the “new” Englishes? Are they part of this “old” standard,¹⁷ or do they have endocentric norms and thus native speakers? According to Davies (2003: 69–70), intelligibility is not a problem between, for example, Singaporean English and other varieties, and he therefore denies that the former must be regarded as a variety in its own right. What this means for the native speaker question is that, in principle, “speakers of Singaporean English may properly consider themselves as members of the community who speak standard (British or other metropolitan) English,” but at the same time Davies admits that “it is debatable if this is what Singaporean English speakers would wish to claim for themselves” (2003: 69). In the end, according to Davies, everything boils down to the standard question: if a variety possesses endogenous standards, it will also possess native speakers, but if this is not the case, then there will be no native speakers:

17 It is interesting to note that what Davies (2003: 144) labels “composite English Standard” comprises only the forms of the language spoken in Britain and in what were formerly white settlement colonies. For more on the racial implications of the native speaker concept in English, cf. Chapters 8, 9, and 10.

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Of course there is the additional intervention of the standardisation process, such that when Singaporean English is described […], the very fact of its existence will cause speakers of Singaporean English to identify with it, to claim that they are native speakers of it. (2003: 70)

In other words, according to Davies, a standard creates native speakers, not the other way round. To summarize, the question of native vs. non-native norms and standards is deeply entrenched in the discussion of the status of World Englishes, and there is a close link between the notion of the native speaker and the “standard ideology” (Milroy 2001: 533). This link involves not only the equation of the standard form of the language with the language as a whole, i.e., only standard English is really English, but also the equation of the native speaker with speakers of standard English. In what follows, it will be shown that the link between the native speaker and standard English is an old one and has been present ever since the phrase native speaker emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. Before investigating this connection, however, the term standard and its implications must be clarified. In English, the word appears to have had an exclusively military usage initially. As the OED indicates, in his account of a battle between the English and the Scots in Yorkshire in 1138, Richard of Hexham labeled a cluster of flags mounted on a ship’s mast in the middle of “a machine which was brought into the field” standard, because “it was there that valour took its stand to conquer or die,” and, in fact, the particular battle later became known as the Battle of the Standard (cf. McArthur 1998: 102). By the fifteenth century, standard had been extended beyond its military domain to denote the intrinsic value of coins or the prescribed degree of fineness for gold or silver. Still later, the word was applied to the authorized exemplar of a unit of measure or weight, such as the standard foot, which the OED dates to 1669. It is clear that all of these senses of standard are closely related, but there is also a shift in meaning. As a military ensign, the standard acted as a marker of authority acknowledged by all those subject to this authority. Even though its commercial sense derives from the military one in that authority is involved in both, there is a crucial difference. Whereas the term standard in the military sense simply marked an authority external to it, in its commercial sense, it assumes this authority itself (cf. Crowley 2003: 77–78). This, in turn, occasions a shift in associations away from commonality and uniformity on to comparison and evaluation and, in turn, hierarchization. According to the OED, the original standard, was “the standard of which the others are copies, and to which the ultimate appeal must be made.” Thus, one unit of measure or weight functioned as the yardstick

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for all others; this endowed it with a particular value and created a hierarchy of measures or weights, one of which was employed to obtain commonality and uniformity among the others. Derived from this sense, in turn, is the figurative use of standard as “an authoritative or recognized exemplar of correctness, perfection, or some definite degree of any quality,” which, according to the OED, occurred as early as the fifteenth century but with increasing frequency in the seventeenth, as in “[m]en will be asham’d to be unlike those, whose Customs and Deportments pass for the Standards, by which those of other Men are to be measur’d” (Boyle 1665). In sum, even in its non-linguistic uses, the term standard involves at least two senses and a host of implications, among which authority ranks first. We must distinguish, however, between uniformity on the one hand and evaluation on the other. By the early eighteenth century, standard had become associated with language and literature. Thus, according to Felton (1709), “[a]mong the Romans, Horace is the Standard of Lyric, and Virgil of Epic Poetry,” and Swift (1712) suggested that the English Tongue is not arrived to such a Degree of Perfection, as to make us apprehend any Thoughts of its Decay; and if it were once refined to a certain Standard, perhaps there might be Ways found out to fix it for ever; or at least till we are invaded and made a Conquest by some other State.

As the above quotes already show, in its linguistic use, standard appears to have assumed an evaluative sense immediately. This is also evidenced by Shaftesbury’s comment that “they [the Greeks] brought their beautiful and comprehensive Language to a just Standard” (1711), which is listed by the OED under the definition of “definite level of excellence, attainment, wealth, or the like, or a definite degree of any quality, viewed as a prescribed object of endeavour or as the measure of what is adequate for some purpose.” According to the OED, the phrase standard English became popular in the first half of the nineteenth century. Its first citation is dated to 1836, and it describes the geographical location of an early standard of spoken English: “Southern or standard English […] in the fourteenth century was perhaps best spoken in Kent and Surrey by the body of the inhabitants” (Garnett 1995 [1836]: 47). The same publication, Garnett’s review of English dialects, also gives a description of the contemporary state of affairs: “Within the English pale the matter is sufficiently clear; all agree in calling our standard form of speech the English language, and all provincial deviations from it – at least all that assume a distinct specific character – dialects” (1995 [1836]: 46). Even though Garnett does not actually feature

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the first attested use of standard English ever,¹⁸ the excerpt clearly points to the issue to be discussed in this chapter: the equation of standard English with the language as a whole (cf. Bailey 1991: 4) and its association with the “best” speakers, an issue which still plays a prominent role in the debate about native-speaker norms of English and the question of the ownership of the language. As I will argue, this issue, even though present before the nineteenth century, assumed prominence around 1850 and after and can be linked with the emergence of the notion of the native speaker. The difficulties that arise in the employment of the term standard with regard to language, and particularly with regard to spoken language, are nicely illustrated in the following excerpt, in which James (1969 [1926]) comments on the establishment of what was later labeled “B.B.C. English.” He explicitly compares linguistic standards to those obtaining in other spheres, noting that “rigid measurement” and therefore uniformity or homogeneity are impossible to achieve with regard to the former. And even though he presents the problem of linguistic standards as a descriptive one, varieties of English are, in his view, separated not only by geography or social class but also by “moral difference[s]” between those employing them. In conjunction, these two problems lead him to conclude that acceptability is the only criterion by which standards in language may be established, and he appeals to educated speakers to determine what is acceptable in spoken British English: The listener who writes to the B.B.C. asking why the London announcer pronounces “daance” for “dance” is, in reality, protesting against having an alien fashion of speech thrust upon him. […] In all these queries and criticisms there is implied the idea of a standard pronunciation. We have a standard yard, a standard pound weight, a standard sovereign, and a standard pint. […] Unfortunately speech is not capable of rigid measurement, and there is no standard of pronunciation. Pronunciation varies from district to district, from class to class, from character to character, in proportion to the local, social, or moral difference that separates them. […] it is quite evident that we are not entitled to conclude that there is one standard pronunciation, one and only one right way of speaking English. […] The B.B.C. has no desire to accept or to dictate any standard of pronunciation other than the current usage of educated speakers. (James 1969 [1926]: 103–104)

18 According to Volker Mohr (quoted in McArthur 1999: 164), there is an even earlier attestation of the term in William Perry’s The Royal Standard English Dictionary, which was published in Edinburgh in 1775. Even though the title phrase may have been meant to indicate a royal standard dictionary of English instead of a dictionary of the royal standard of English (cf. McArthur 1999: 164), it clearly indicates that standard English is older than is usually assumed.

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To sum up, with regard to linguistic standards, we must carefully distinguish between the implications of the term standard. Whereas uniformity may be a property of linguistic systems but in practice is rarely if ever fully achieved (and this holds particularly for the spoken language), the term is often used in an evaluative sense, without this being openly acknowledged. In this sense, social values come into play, and particular groups of speakers rather than linguistic features are appealed to and held up as authorities to be emulated.

5.2 Defining a language: Stability and staticity as theoretical and methodological necessities of nineteenth- and twentieth-century linguistics English-speaking transformationalists have been misled by their use of themselves as native speakers into overlooking the diversity of usage that exists among the speakers of an unstandardized language. English is the fruit of centuries of conscious and deliberate prescription. Such prescription may often have been misguided and certainly has not succeeded in eliminating all inconsistencies. But it has made the task of the formal linguist much easier. It has made possible a basic reliance on The Native Speaker, and thereby has greatly reduced that central scientific concern – the acquiring of empirical data. (Gray 1981: 207) […] the ideal speaker-hearer is the linguist’s projective concept of the perfect state of the linguistic system […]. Linguistics is interested in the system as such, and possibly how this system is actualized within one person or another. This person’s idiolect can serve as a kind of illustration of how systems may function. [...] In sum, linguistics is not a behavioral science, but it is concerned with problems of systems. Its subjects are not human beings but linguistic units like utterances and speech acts. (van der Geest 1981: 318, 329)

It is a commonplace assumption that Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale (1916) revolutionized the discipline of linguistics. Saussure is said to have achieved this by way of a number of striking dichotomies, the two most important of which distinguish langue from parole and synchrony from diachrony. Moving on in the twentieth century, Chomsky’s competence/performance distinction is often seen as a reformulation of Saussure’s langue/parole dichotomy, and, in fact, Chomsky himself postulates a similar simplification or restriction of the object of linguistics and the way of studying it. Here are his remarks on the “ideal speaker-listener” and their theoretical and methodological implications for the discipline:

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Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogenous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance. This seems to me to have been the position of the founders of modern general linguistics, and no cogent reason for modifying it has been offered. (Chomsky 1965: 3–4)

What this description amounts to is a “reification” of language (Crowley 1990: 31) in that, as the object of linguistic theory, language “has become a thing, its role as the practical constitutive factor of human social being […] banished in favour of objectivity, autonomy and rationality” (Crowley 1996: 19). But why does language have to be thus “reified” and separated from all its human associations? Why does it have to be regarded as a “thing” rather than as a factor constitutive of social relations? Referring back to Saussure, Chomsky (1965: 4) is explicit in this matter. In his view, if linguistics is to be “a serious discipline,” idealization, abstraction, and restriction are as necessary as they are in the “empirical investigation of other complex phenomena”: To study actual linguistic performance, we must consider the interaction of a variety of factors, of which the underlying competence of the speaker-hearer is only one. In this respect, study of language is no different from empirical investigation of other complex phenomena. We thus make a fundamental distinction between competence (the speakerhearer’s knowledge of his language) and performance (the actual use of language in concrete situations). Only under the idealization set forth in the preceding paragraph is performance a direct reflection of competence. In actual fact, it obviously could not directly reflect competence. […] Observed use of language or hypothesized dispositions to respond, habits, and so on, may provide evidence as to the nature of this mental reality, but surely cannot constitute the actual subject matter of linguistics, if this is to be a serious discipline. The distinction I am noting here is related to the langue/parole distinction of Saussure.

Thus, for both Chomsky and Saussure, if linguistics is to be a “proper” science, language as its object of study has to be defined and delimited, because stability and staticity rather than constant variability and flux are prerequisites for theory building. In Saussurean terms, this necessarily and logically implies the primacy of langue over parole, since, obviously, an object itself is primary to the uses to which it can be put. It also implies that the synchronic study of language has to be privileged over the diachronic approach, because language change acts as a distorting force which prevents the stability necessary for the application of scientific methods. The synchronic study of language logically demands staticity, or, in Saussure’s words (1983: 100), “[a]n absolute state is defined by lack of change.” However, a characteristic feature of language is that it permanently changes:

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since languages are always changing, however minimally, studying a linguistic state amounts in practice to ignoring unimportant changes. Mathematicians do likewise when they ignore very small fractions for certain purposes, such as logarithmic calculations.

What we find here is the same appeal to general principles of science as in Chomsky’s definition of the ideal speaker-listener’s competence as the focus of linguistic theory. Whereas for Chomsky, “memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors” (1965: 3) constitute the main distracting factors, Saussure focuses on history: “History, though markedly acknowledged as central, ‘since languages are always changing’, has to be forcibly excluded, ‘ignored’, in order that the mathematical precision required of a science be gained.” Saussure (1983: 100), like Chomsky, realizes that this approach to language is a limited one: “The notion of a linguistic state can only be an approximation. In static linguistics, as in most sciences, no demonstration is possible without a conventional simplification of the data.” Just like Chomsky, Saussure does not deny linguistic variability and change but merely relegates them to secondary position. The continuous flux of history and the social and individual factors affecting language use are ignored so that static systems or an idealized “mental reality” (Chomsky 1965: 4) may be studied. In sum, a crucial theoretical and methodological basis of twentieth-century linguistics, as founded upon the writings of Saussure and Chomsky, is that its object of study, language, must be regarded as static and stable and thus uniform and homogenous. This is achieved via abstracting away from both synchronic variability, as caused by the different uses to which language may be put, and diachronic change, which nevertheless remains one of its central characteristics. If language is thus stripped of all of its erratic, volatile components, it may properly be regarded as a static system, abstraction being one of the fundamental properties of scientific work.

5.2.1 Nineteenth-century attempts at solving the problem of linguistic heterogeneity The restriction of the object of linguistics to an invariant state or system was not an “invention” of twentieth-century linguists. As will be shown in this section, one of the most vexing problems for the newly-established science of language in the second half of the nineteenth century was that of linguistic heterogeneity. Variation and change were all around, so how was one to define, delimit, and describe languages as objects of linguistic analysis? This was a methodological problem which was insolubly linked to another, theoretical one: what is a

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language anyway? Thus, nineteenth-century linguists were seriously pondering the question of “what exactly it was that they were supposed to study” (Crowley 2003: 81). In other words, they were searching for the object of their discipline. The notion of the standard language and the native speaker provided convenient solutions to that problem. Most nineteenth-century linguists seem to have been keenly aware of the difficulties in drawing linguistic boundaries. One of them was W. D. Whitney, who cautioned that languages were far from homogenous, because every speaker’s individuality was reflected in his or her language use: We must be careful not to overrate the uniformity of existing languages; it is far enough from being absolute. In a true and defensible sense, every individual speaks a language different from every other. The capacities and the opportunities of each have been such that he has acquired a command of a part of English speech not precisely identical with any one else’s: the peculiarity may be slight, but it is certainly there. Then, what is yet even more obvious and yet more important, the form of each one’s conceptions, represented by his use of words, is different from any other person’s; all his individuality of character, of knowledge, education, feeling, enters into this difference. (Whitney 1875: 154)

This is the modern notion of the idiolect, of course, but it is not all the variation there is in language. Whitney (1875: 154–156) continues with a list of social factors which might be taken straight from a twentieth-century sociolinguistics textbook: [F]ew if any escape the taint of local and personal peculiarities of pronunciation and phraseology, peculiarities which, because more conspicuous than the others, are more often noticed by us and called dialectic. This last shades off into the more wide-spread and deeper differences of district and class; every separate part of a great country of one speech has its local form, more or less strongly marked […]. Every class, however constituted, has its dialectic differences: so, especially, the classes determined by occupation; each trade, calling, profession, department of study, has its technical vocabulary, its words and phrases unintelligible to outsiders […]. Then there are the differences in grade of education; the highly cultivated have a diction which is not in all its parts at the command of the vulgar […]. Finally, there are the differences of age: the nursery, in particular, has its dialect, offensive to the ears of old bachelors; and older children have their language at least characterized by limited vocabulary. Every one of all these differences is essentially dialectic: that is to say, they differ not at all in kind, but only in degree, from those which hold apart acknowledged dialects.

Yet, despite all this heterogeneity, there must be forces fostering homogeneity in language; and despite idiolectal and sociodemographically determined patterns of variation, every speaker shares in the “one speech” that is characteristic of “a great country” (1875: 155). Thus, each individual speaker speaks not only an

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individual form of a distinct class-based or geographically determined dialect but also a form of a national language. But what is that language? Whitney himself points to the elusiveness of the concept when he says that “[n]o one can define, in the proper sense of that term, a language; for it is a great concrete institution, a body of usages prevailing in a certain community, and it can only be shown and described” (1875: 157). Thus, in spite of the principal impossibility of defining a language, Whitney maintains that one can “show” what it is and “describe” it by listing the “body of usages” extant in a speech community. The problem remains, however, of defining what to count as a part of that “body of usages.” Is it every usage? Or the usage of particular speakers only? According to Whitney, the matter is not hopeless; in his view, there is a way of showing and describing a language: “You have it in its dictionary, you have it in its grammar” (1875: 157). This statement entails an element of circularity, for, in order to write a dictionary or grammar of a language, one has to define that language. But apart from that problem, matters are not as easy as they appear, either, for a language is found not only in its great codices but also “in the material and usages which never get into either dictionary or grammar” (1875: 157). So then, again, what is a language? According to Whitney, a language must eventually be delimited according to its geography, both externally and internally: “you can trace the geographical limits within which it is used, in all its varieties” (1875: 157). This brings us back to the language/dialect distinction, which, as Garnett’s review of English dialects (1955 [1836]; cf. above) shows, was often invoked in the nineteenth century. In the following excerpt, Craik (1995 [1857–58]: 200–202) comments on Trench’s “Some deficiencies in our English dictionaries,” the article which eventually led to the publication of the OED. The question that Craik attempts to answer is thus the same as that which the OED makers were facing and which Whitney was grappling with. “But of what does the English language really consist?” Craik opposes the “standard form of a cultivated language” to its “various local dialects, mostly unwritten”; later, when he describes the process of vocabulary transfer, he simply equates “the standard form of the national speech” with “our literary English”: But of what does the English language really consist? […] The standard form of a cultivated language is, for very nearly its entire mass, sufficiently distinguishable from the various local dialects, mostly unwritten, in the midst of which it rises, like an oak from among its underwood […]. The tendency of words belonging to the purely English provincial dialects to intrude into the standard form of the national speech must be much greater. All our literary English, accordingly, down to the latter part of the seventeenth century, abounds with

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words which the writers appear to have found, not in books, but each only in the rustic speech of his native district.

Thus, for Craik (as well as for, for example, Marsh 1859; cf. Chapter 4), “the English language” as a whole is equivalent to its “standard form”; this standard form, in turn, consists of the written, literary variety. The terms standard and literary are thus used synonymously and are contrasted with “various local dialects” along two dimensions. First, the dialects are “mostly unwritten”; second, they are “local” or “purely […] provincial” as compared to the “national” character of the “standard form” of a “cultivated language” like English. To sum up, one of the main problems faced by linguists in the second half of the nineteenth century was heterogeneity in terms of synchronic variation and diachronic change. How could languages as objects of study be defined if the linguistic reality was characterized by instability and flux? If work on the English language was to be a serious scientific endeavor, its scope had to be delimited. This happened negatively, i.e., the language was defined as that which was not spoken, not local. This was the language of the great writers, which was then posited as the standard, which, in turn, was equated to the language as a whole.

5.2.2 The “imagination” of standard English through the OED As indicated in the preceding section, one of the basic problems faced by nineteenth-century linguists was the definition of their object of study. What was language? How were languages to be demarcated or delimited? These questions troubled not only theoretical linguists but also grammarians and dictionary makers, such as the creators of what was later to become the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Their solution was identical to that arrived at by, for example, Craik: English is equivalent to standard English, which, in turn, must be defined as the written, literary language. This, in fact, is not a new idea. Numerous observers have pointed out that the conception of and work on the OED, which began in the second half of the nineteenth century, crucially contributed to an interest in linguistic standards: By the 1840s […], we begin to hear of something called “standard English”. Where this Victorian expression comes from is something of a mystery […]. What is beyond dispute is that the phrase was taken up by those responsible for the compilation of the New English Dictionary [later renamed Oxford English Dictionary], and by its first editor, James Murray. The result was that the norm supplied by Murray’s dictionary itself became one of the criteria for defining this somewhat elusive brand of English. Be that as it may, the Victorian public came to believe in the existence of a “standard English”. And with this belief (however dubious its

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credentials) came a depreciation of those less favoured varieties of English which could be stigmatized as “non-standard” or “dialectal.” (Harris 1995: viii)

Crowley (2003: 90) even goes so far as to call the OED the “theoretical source” of written standard English. In what follows, I will, based on Crowley (1996, 2003), outline in what way the OED furthered both standardization, i.e., the creation of uniformity in written English, and the standard ideology, i.e., the strong belief in a “correct” form of language to be emulated by the entire speech community.¹⁹ Both had existed before (cf. Watts 2011: 157–234); however, in the nineteenth century, they assumed an entirely new urgency and immediacy (cf. Bailey 1996: 12–13). In tracing these two strands in the development of standard English, I will pay particular attention to the equation of the standard form with the language as a whole – an equation which, by implication, denies non-standard speakers an identity as fully proficient or competent speakers of the language. Originally, what was to become the OED had been conceived as a supplement to Johnson’s great Dictionary of the English Language (1755). By the 1850s, the Dictionary was a hundred years old, and even though it was still frequently used and greatly admired, it had become clear that it was no longer entirely adequate (Aarsleff 1967: 247). This was in part because an immense number of new words had entered the language, in part because linguistic thought, and more specifically thought on the development of words and their meanings, had evolved.²⁰

19 This dichotomy is owed to James Milroy, who distinguishes between standardization as a process and the standard ideology as one of the results of that process (2001: 533). The former may be described as “the imposition of uniformity upon a class of objects” (2001: 530) such as languages. Uniformity is imposed because it is not a given; in the nature of things, languages are variable and heterogeneous. However, in practice, uniformity in language is never totally achieved. This holds particularly at the level of pronunciation and is recognized in statements to the effect that “there is no necessary connection between standard English and any particular accent or accents […]. Standard English can be spoken with any regional accent” (Trudgill 1983: 19). Thus, uniformity may be seen as the linguistic goal of the standardization process but strictly speaking is not usually one of its outcomes. What is an outcome, though, is what Milroy (2001: 533) labels “the standard ideology,” i.e., the belief in and veneration of “correct” language. Epithets such as correct and incorrect or right and wrong, however, have nothing to do with linguistic facts but introduce an evaluative dimension into the discussion. The standard thus becomes a measure of achievement, the yardstick to which other forms of language are to be compared (cf. above). 20 Apart from general principles of comparative-historical linguistics, particularly the work of Franz Passow, who wrote Über Zweck, Anlage und Ergänzung Griechischer Wörterbücher (1812) and published a Handwörterbuch der Griechischen Sprache (1819–23) himself but also figured

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Before work on the dictionary could begin, however, a serious problem had to be solved. The problem consisted in what was actually to be recorded. The simple answer was, of course, “the English language,” but then, what was the English language? It is in their attempt at answering that question that the makers of the OED crucially contributed to the standardization of English as well as to the establishment of the standard ideology in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The first problem for the lexicographers consisted in delimiting their object of study, “the English language,” in terms of time, medium, and variety. When did the English language begin? How far into the present was the dictionary to be extended? The second issue was the speech/writing distinction. How could spoken words be included if so many of them had disappeared, often without leaving a trace? If only written English was to be considered, what kinds of writing were to be included? Finally, there was the language/dialect relationship. This proved to be complex even though, apparently, the matter had been settled early in the century (Garnett 1955 [1836]: 46) for “the English pale” in that all agreed “in calling our standard form of speech the English language, and all provincial deviations from it – at least all that assume a distinct specific character – dialects.” What made the issue complex was that one term, “the English language,” was equated to “our standard form of speech” – but then what was that standard form of speech? Part of the answer is given in the Proposal for the Publication of a New English Dictionary put forward by the Philological Society in 1858. It defined the Dictionary as a “national project” and specified five points which were to guide the selection of materials. With regard to point two, i.e., time, the dictionary makers decided to exclude Anglo-Saxon words from consideration and date the beginning of “English” to the mid-thirteenth century, or “about the end of the reign of Henry III” (Proposal 1858: 4, quoted in Crowley 1996: 159).²¹ But where was that English to be found? The Proposal (1858: 2) stated very clearly that “according

as the model of Liddell and Scott’s Greek–English Lexicon Based on the German Work of Francis Passow (1843), appears to have been influential. Passow had demanded that words never be included in a dictionary without at the same time citing a source and that the citation of these sources should proceed not in anecdotal or random fashion but in strictly chronological order (cf. Aarsleff 1967: 254). 21 As Milroy (1996: 171) points out, whereas up to around 1860 it was usual to separate Old from Middle English and date the beginning of the language to roughly the mid-thirteenth century, it later became common to depict the history of English as a relatively unbroken, continuous process which had begun in 449 AD but extended, via the Germanic and ultimately Indo-European connection, way into prehistory. English could thus be portrayed as a language with an ancient and venerable pedigree (cf. also Watts 2011: 30–34), clearly a fact which would

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to our view, the first requirement of every lexicon is that it should contain every word occurring in the literature of the language it professes to illustrate” (quoted in Crowley 1996: 159). Thus, for the makers of the OED, “English” was equal to the language of English literature from around 1250 to the present day. Even though it sounded straightforward enough, this definition, too, presented problems, for there was as yet no clear consensus on what constituted “the literature” of English. Was the term literature meant in a narrower or in a wider sense, i.e., as poetical expression or as all writing? The quotes given by Crowley (1996: 159–160) indicate that “completeness” and exhaustiveness were envisaged and that therefore quotes were to be extracted from “all the great English writers of all ages” as well as from “all the writers on special subjects.” Nevertheless, even in this wider application, it was not clear at the time what exactly was to be “English literature.” A canon thus had to be defined, and this task was assigned to the many text societies which were founded from the 1860s onward. There was the English Text Society (1864), the New Shakespeare Society (1873), the Wyclif Society (1881), and many others; they were engaged in producing accessible editions of known and previously unknown, rare, or obscure works so that an exhaustive corpus of English literature could be put at the disposal of the lexicographers. Thus, the fact that the makers of the OED were in need of a corpus for their lexicographical work contributed crucially to the sharpening of the notion of what constituted the English language; this notion built on the literature of past ages, or, more specifically, literature from Middle English onward. But how was “English” narrowed down to standard English through the dictionary project? The Proposal (1858: 3) very simply stated that “[a]s soon as a standard language has been formed, which in England was the case after the Reformation, the lexicographer is bound to deal with that alone” (quoted in Crowley 1996: 160). In other words, for the dictionary makers, English equaled standard English, which, in turn, equaled literary English. To sum up, even though there had been interest in standard English before the 1850s, the creators of the OED contributed crucially to the still current sense of the term as an authorized, delimited, and uniform variety of the language based on literary usage. They did so out of theoretical and methodological necessity: the concept of a standard literary language allowed the lexicographers to delimit their project in that it provided them with boundaries both temporal and in terms of the material they had to cover. In terms of the distinction mentioned earlier, the written, literary standard denoted first and foremost communality and uniform-

have contributed to its special status. For more on the historicization of the language in connection with Anglo-Saxonism, cf. Chapters 8 and 9.

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ity. It provided linguists with a convenient solution to the problem of linguistic heterogeneity: the language as a whole was restricted to one of its forms, which was the language of the great writers, which, in turn, was labeled the “standard.”

6 The question of standard spoken English and the dialects 6.1 From written to spoken standards for English As the previous chapter has outlined, the term standard English had obtained one very clearly defined use in the second half of the nineteenth century: it indicated the common and uniform literary language which served as the theoretical and methodological basis of the work of linguists and lexicographers, who focused upon it because they needed it to define and delimit their object of investigation and description, the English language. There was another use of the term standard English, however, which referred back to an older idea: that of a spoken standard. Uniformity and commonality were immediately recognized as being impossible goals with regard to speech, and so the definition of this form of the language proceeded primarily by means of the definition of the social characteristics of its speakers. With regard to spoken English, the term standard thus assumed an evaluative sense immediately (cf. Crowley 1996: 162). The following excerpts illustrate the concern with pronunciation in the nineteenth-century debate about standard English. Note in the first of these excerpts that, even though Wyld adduces linguistic criteria to describe spoken standard English (“the actual sounds employed and the proper distribution of those sounds”), in the end, it is the conventional association of particular pronunciations “with a cultivated mind, liberal education, refined taste, and good breeding generally” which defines the standard or “superior form of English.” Non-standard speakers, by definition, lack the above attributes: The most noteworthy criterion of Good English, or Standard English, is pronunciation. In this respect there are two main points to be observed – the actual sounds employed and the proper distribution of those sounds; that is, the use of them in the right words. The fact that a certain group of sounds, and those sounds only (subject to the slight divergences already mentioned), and, further, a certain distribution of those sounds, is accepted in the polite usage is the result of convention. The fundamental reason of that convention is that certain pronunciations are associated by long habit with a cultivated mind, liberal education, refined taste, and good breeding generally; other pronunciations are associated with the reverse qualities of mind and manners. (Wyld 1969 [1906]: 355)

Another interesting quote comes from Cobbett (1866), who added a chapter on pronunciation to the new edition of his father’s English grammar. Cobbett Sr. had intended his Grammar of the English Language as a manual aiding every speaker of the language in the practical business of “how to make use of words,”

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by which he meant primarily writing (1983 [1818]: 31). His zeal for clarity and vigor in written English had political motives: he believed that it was his duty as a patriot to instill a knowledge of their native language in the entire population of English speakers so that they would be able to expose and thus prevent tricks and abuse masked behind the political language of their superiors. Cobbett Jr. (1866: 241–242) sounds very different. Rather than on universal skills in written English, from which was to spring political empowerment, his remarks focus on “faults of speech” committed not only by “persons in the humblest ranks of life” but by “great numbers of persons.” What all these speakers of the language are afraid of is “mortifying ridicule,” the charge of “vulgarity,” and the assumption of ill breeding “on account of a mode of speech which is settled to be objectionable”: The purpose of this additional Chapter […] is, not to dictate any system, nor to set down any general rules, for the right pronouncing of our whole language, but to note such faults in speech as are of the most ordinary occurrence. These faults are committed by great numbers of persons, and not merely by persons in the humblest ranks of life; they are the most striking perceptible; and they are the most offensive, because they happen to be those which so frequently cause, with the hearer, a presumption of “vulgarity” in the pronouncer. […]. Nobody can like to be supposed ill-bred on account of a mode of speech which is settled to be objectionable. Yet a good many of us, though presumed to be generally well taught, are for such reason, and nothing more, exposed to a mortifying ridicule. We see it pretty often with public speakers and members of Parliament, occasionally with lawyers at the bar, and sometimes even with preachers in the pulpit. (Cobbett 1866: 241–242)

What the preceding excerpts show is, first, that in the nineteenth century a tremendous fixation on and anxiety about “correct” pronunciation existed, and second, that basically the entire community of native speakers of English, with the exception of a small elite associated with “a cultivated mind, liberal education, refined taste, and good breeding generally” (Wyld 1969 [1906]: 455; cf. above) was corrupting the language. As Bailey (1996: 12–13) puts it, [d]enunciation of this or that “low” expression had long been a staple of comments on English, but nineteenth-century observers organized long lists of “incorrect” usages and found the means to enforce the use of the choices they endorsed. […] persons to be improved were not bumpkins or rustic squires, but multitudes of people whose usage threatened the integrity of English, who were likely by their ignorance or inadvertence to corrupt or destroy its purity. […] As the century progressed, English seemed more and more important, and standard English – defined negatively by its absence of solecisms – as a requisite for civilized behavior. […] In the course of the nineteenth century, an easy tolerance for linguistic diversity gave way to harsh punishments for those who did not mimic successfully “the best usage.”

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As already indicated, thought about and work on a standard of speech in Britain was not a new development. By the late eighteenth century, the process of defining one form of speech as the standard and imposing it upon the speech community had gained considerable momentum, as attested by the large number of books that were published for the purposes of elocution training. John Walker, for example, one such elocution master, noted in 1774 that “our shops swarm with books whose titles announce a standard for pronunciation” (quoted in Crowley 2003: 107). Nineteenth-century linguists themselves noted that interest in the concept of a standard spoken English had begun earlier. The following excerpt presents A. J. Ellis’s (1869–89) view on the matter. Even though Ellis did not himself believe that a standard of spoken English actually existed “where English is spoken as a native tongue,” he eventually ended up as one of the main popularizers of such a standard, which he labeled “received pronunciation”: For at least a century, since Buchanan published his “Essay towards establishing a standard for an elegant and uniform pronunciation of the English language throughout the British dominions as practiced by the most learned and polite speakers,” in 1766, and probably for many years previously, there prevailed, and apparently there still prevails, a belief that it is possible to erect a standard of pronunciation which should be acknowledged and followed throughout the countries where English is spoken as a native tongue, and that in fact that standard already exists, and is the norm unconsciously followed by persons who, by rank or education, have most right to establish the custom of speech. (Ellis 1869–89, II: 624)

For Ellis, the main obstacle in the way of homogeneity in speech lay in the unreliable English orthography, which was far from reflecting at least approximately the sounds of the language. He strongly advocated the setting up of a phonetic alphabet, which, in his view, would then permit the institutionalization of a standard of spoken English: At present there is no standard of pronunciation. There are many ways of pronouncing English correctly, that is, according to the usage of large numbers of persons of either sex in different parts of the country, who have received a superior education. All attempts to found a standard of pronunciation on our approximate standard of orthography are futile. The only chance of attaining to a standard of pronunciation is by the introduction of phonetic spelling. (Ellis 1869–89, II: 630)

Two points of interest may be noted in this context. First, Ellis apparently took the term standard to refer to commonality and uniformity, which, obviously, did not prevail in spoken English. In that respect, the pronunciation of English differed entirely from its orthography, which had already been standardized. And second, since homogeneity was an unrealistic goal with regard to speech, a standard of

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spoken English had to be defined otherwise, which is where the idea of “pronouncing English correctly” comes in. Ellis, like many other nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, defined this by way of the “usage of […] persons […] in different parts of the country, who have received a superior education.” Thus, for Ellis, spoken standard English was not and could not be common or uniform, which is why it had to be defined not according to linguistic criteria, but by way of the social characteristics of its speakers, the educated throughout the country. Even though they explicitly referred back to them, nineteenth-century linguists presented themselves as ardent descriptivists who had nothing in common with their eighteenth-century prescriptivist predecessors. According to Wyld, for example, there are neither “definite rules” of pronunciation nor “absolute standard[s] of Right and Wrong in language”: The most usual way of dealing with this question [i.e., the question of the criteria of “good” pronunciation] is to lay down certain definite rules as to how English “ought” to be pronounced. This is the worst possible method, because it implies the existence of an absolute standard of Right and Wrong in language. The only test of what the conventional standard of any age really is, is simply the custom of good speakers. “A man of fashion,” says Lord Chesterfield – and we may give the remark a wider application – “a man of fashion takes great care to speak very correctly and grammatically, and to pronounce properly – that is, according to the usage of the best companies.” That is the right definition of speaking “correctly,” and it can hardly be improved upon. (Wyld 1969 [1906]: 361–362)

The only way of ascertaining the pronunciation of a certain word is to have heard it from the “best” speakers; both spelling and etymology, two favored haunts of the old-school grammarians against whom Wyld polemicizes, are, in his view, unreliable guides to pronunciation: [T]o say that the word “ought” to be pronounced thus or thus, is to court disaster. These theoretical pronunciations, so far from being “refined” or showing culture, are merely laughable. For if a speaker has not heard a word pronounced, what means can he possibly have for knowing what the sound of it “ought” to be? There are, indeed, two ways by which he might arrive at a conclusion. The first, and the worst, and yet that usually employed by those who theorize about pronunciation, is the spelling; the other is the early history of the word in question, and of other words originally containing the same sound. To start with, let us say at once that neither of these tests will enable us to determine how the word “ought” to have developed, since neither the schoolmaster nor the elocutionist can prescribe the path along which language shall change, any more than they can “bind the Unicorn, or draw out Leviathan with a hook.” […] The most unreliable of all guides to the pronunciation of an English word is its spelling. (Wyld 1969 [1906]: 362–363)

In sum, even though it is generally assumed that nineteenth-century linguistics replaced prescriptivism by more “scientific” concerns and methods, this is often

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not entirely true. What is true is that its practitioners clearly distanced themselves from their prescriptivist predecessors, but the project of defining standards for spoken English remained fraught with socially and culturally loaded undertones. In this context, it is important to repeat that the focus of interest on spoken standard English implies a different meaning of the term standard: whereas with regard to written English, commonality and uniformity were seen as desirable and achievable goals, with regard to spoken English, standard always denotes a level of excellence and thus features an evaluative sense, which is, in fact, what links the nineteenth-century discussion of spoken standard English with the elocution movement of the late eighteenth century.

6.1.1 Standard spoken English: Where is it to be found? If, as outlined by Wyld, “absolute” standards did not exist with regard to the pronunciation of English, and neither spelling nor the history of words provided reliable clues, where was the spoken standard to be found? As already outlined, among the majority of writers, there appears to have been little doubt that the “best” English was the non-local dialect of the educated. An interesting early example of this position is to be found in Smart (1836), which, as the title indicates (Walker Remodelled), actually constitutes a revised version of Walker’s (1774) Pronouncing Dictionary. Setting down some “principles of remedy for Defects of Utterance,” Smart asserts that “the common standard dialect is that in which all marks of a particular place of birth and residence are lost and nothing appears to indicate any other habits of intercourse than with the well-bred and well-informed.” Smart’s position is interesting because, on the one hand, the “standard dialect” is one which conceals the birthplace and habitation of the speaker who uses it, and Smart labels it “the common standard dialect.” On the other hand, this form of speech cannot be a common, unifying force, as it bears the mark of a specific social group or class, i.e., that of the “well-bred and well-informed,” or educated, members of the speech community. What this means is that, despite Smart’s assertion to the contrary, the term standard evidently does not imply commonality or uniformity but rather a level of excellence which is reached by some but is out of reach for others. What is important about this level of excellence is that it is not defined linguistically (except that it is essentially non-localizable, which is a description which recurs again and again throughout nineteenth- and twentieth-century descriptions of standard spoken English). Rather, it is associated with the social characteristics of particular speakers. The spoken standard is the English of the “well-bred and well-informed”; it is the educated speakers

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who set the norms which then have to be emulated by the rest of the speech community. This sense of standard as a form of speech from which others deviate and according to which all others can be evaluated is also the sense which underlies the contemporary occurrence of the notion of standard English in connection with the native speaker. The following sections provide a number of quotes from the second half of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century illustrating the attachment of standard English to the usage of educated speakers. They also show, once more, how one form of English was privileged over all others in that it was equated with the language as a whole.

6.1.2 English = standard English The process by which the standard form of spoken English was equated with the spoken language itself and by which it displaced other varieties so that it appeared as the only valid and valuable form of speech took place via metonymy, i.e., a particular form of the language came to stand for the entire language in an instance of the rhetorical figure of pars pro toto. In his New English Grammar, Henry Sweet, for example, defined “Present English” as “the English of the present time as spoken, written, and understood by educated people” (1892: 212). In his guide to The Practical Study of Languages, a similar statement may be found. In a section on varieties of pronunciation and phonetic notation, “English as it actually exists” is equated with “the educated spoken English of the present day” without much ado (1964 [1899]: 37). Henry Cecil Wyld also put forward numerous descriptions of spoken standard English. In his Elementary Lessons in English Grammar, for example, he made it clear that, for him, only standard English, which was educated English, could be English: Our business is only with one main form of English, that form that is generally called “Educated English,” that is a sort of general average English which has a wide circulation among educated people, and is what is generally referred to by the rather vague name “correct English,” or better, Standard English. Unless it is otherwise stated, therefore, “English” in this book means only this particular type of English. (Wyld 1909: 2)

It is true that Wyld here restricts the equation of the standard with the language as a whole to “‘English’ in this book”; however, this was only one of the many books in which he did so, as the following excerpt from The Growth of English shows: “[W]e speak of Good English, or Standard English, or Pure English, as distinct from what is known as Provincial English, or Vulgar English” (Wyld 1907: 49).

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A most telling quote comes from Sampson, who describes working-class children as basically destitute of articulate utterance: “what they lack most of all is language” (1926 [1922]: 23). This does not mean, however, that such children lack language in the physiological sense; what they lack is simply standard English. As the following excerpt shows, such children produce lots of “noises,” but what they do not have a command of is the language of the school, i.e., the standard form. Most interestingly in the present context, that form of speech is simply labeled the “native language”: Come into a London elementary school and see what it is that the children need most. You will notice, first of all, that in a human sense, our boys and girls are almost inarticulate. They can make noises, but they cannot speak. Linger in the playground and listen to the talk and shouts of the boys; listen to the girls screaming at their play – listen especially to them as they “play at schools”; you can barely recognise your native language. (Sampson 1926 [1922]: 21)

6.1.3 Standard English = educated English The emphasis on educated speakers permeated definitions of spoken standard English throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth century. Here is a classic rendition of the theme: [A]ll over England there exists a form of language, which is common to the more educated classes in all districts. This is a kind of English which is tinged neither with the Northern, nor Midland, nor Southern peculiarities of speech, which gives no indication, in fact, of where the speaker comes from – the form of English which is generally known simply as good English. It is the ambition of all educated persons in this country to acquire this manner of speaking, and this is the form of our language which foreigners wish to learn. If we can truthfully say of a man that he has a Scotch accent, or a Liverpool accent […], then he does not speak “good English” with perfect purity. Since this form of English is not now confined to any one province, but is spoken by people of corresponding education and cultivation all over the country, we say that it is no longer a Regional Dialect, but the dialect of a Class, using the word in a very wide sense. (Wyld 1907: 47–48)

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the association of standard English with educated speakers was elevated to the status of a theoretical principle in the development of languages. Hermann Paul, for example, whose Principles of the History of Language first appeared in English in 1890, stated that in the formation of a “common-language,” the speech of the educated has to serve as the model for the speech community as a whole. What underlies that principle is a historical pattern (“in every case to be found”); thus, quantitative evidence is

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taken as proof that the pattern is inevitable and that educated speech is the only possible choice if the standardization of a language is to be achieved (cf. Crowley 2003: 124): In all modem civilised countries we find side by side with manifold dialectic ramifications a widely-diffused and generally recognised common-language. […] The common-language is naturally an abstraction, and one of the first order. It is not a complex of real facts, real forces, but merely an ideal norm prescribing rules for speech. […] the common-language is not actually codified. Generally speaking, it remains true that usage determines the norm. This, however, cannot be the usage of the entire community. For this very community is very far from being homogeneous. […] Both for the creation of a unity, and for the maintenance of one already created, something is needed which shall be independent of the linguistic activity of the whole community, and stand in objective isolation from it. This something is in every case to be found in the usage of a definite narrow circle. […] We find, however, as far as our observation goes, that the norm is settled in two different ways, viz. – (1) by spoken language; (2) by written authorities. If a norm, which can in any degree be called settled, is to result from the first, the individuals who are regarded as authorities must stand with respect to each other in oral communication with each other, either continuous or, at least, interrupted only by short pauses, the mutual intercourse of these individuals being of the utmost frequency, and in the most various combinations. As a rule we find the language of some special district or town looked on as the model. But considering that in every case in which a real common-language has developed, in however narrow an area, appreciable differences exist between the different classes of the population, the capacity to serve as model must be restricted to the language of the educated classes of the district in question. (Paul 1891: 475–477)

6.1.4 Educated speakers are the “best” speakers Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, educated speakers were often described as the “best” speakers; they spoke “good” English. It remains unclear, of course, who was to make such evaluations, and what criteria they were to be based on. What is clear is that one form of the language and its speakers were set up as superior; all other forms and speakers, consequently, had to be inferior. Even though it appears to have assumed immense prominence in the second half of the nineteenth century, the discussion concerning the “best” English is actually an old one. As Bailey (1991: 37) points out, [b]y 1600, English writers had begun the conversation that continues to this day concerning the virtues and faults that enhance or sully English. With the emergence of a consensus about the respectability of the language, there ensued disputes about just what the best English was.

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The link between the spoken standard and the “best” speakers seems to derive from the eighteenth century. It occurs, for example, in Buchanan’s “Essay,” which attempted to popularize “a proper Pronunciation general and uniform” which was based on words as they “actually came from the mouths of the best speakers” and which would be equally suitable for foreigners and native speakers attempting to avoid any “provincial dialect, so unbecoming to gentlemen” (1991 [1764]: 76, 78). At the same time, Buchanan also intended his elocution manual to foster political, social, and cultural unity in a country which, even though it had been formally unified for sixty years, still suffered from internal separation. He suggested that Northerners take up the pronunciation of the “best” speakers from the South, which would do nothing less than remove “national prejudice” and join everyone “into one social family” connected “by much more benevolent and generous ties than that of political union” (1991 [1764]: 79). This aim, of course, runs counter to his first aim: providing a class of gentlemen with the means of setting themselves apart from the rest of their compatriots engenders not commonality and uniformity but separation, albeit at a different level. In any case, even in the eighteenth century, the envisioned standard of spoken English was clearly endowed with evaluative connotations and linked to the group of “best” speakers, wherever they were to be found. In the nineteenth century, the link between the standard form of the language and the “best” speakers assumed the status of a topos. The following excerpt features not only the “best” speakers but also the native speaker: [W]e may note in passing that no small number of what the English stigmatize as Americanisms are cases of survival from former good usage, and that, on the other hand, much of what we regard as the peculiarities of Irish pronunciation is also old English, more faithfully preserved by the Irish than by the more native speakers. Of course, it is as wrong to be lagging in the rear of the great moving body of the usages of a language as to be rushing on in advance, or flying off to one side. When the speech of the best speakers changes, those who do not conform have to be ranked in a lower class. (Whitney 1875: 156)

What we see here is one of the rare pre-1900 occurrences of the phrase native speaker; in terms of the present argument, however, it is one of the most important ones. In illustrating the notion of “retentions of a former standard,” Whitney contrasts Irish and American usages, which he describes as survivals “from former good usage,” with the speech of “the more native speakers” or “the best speakers.” From the context, these two terms can be inferred to be synonymous; they denote the class of “highly cultivated,” educated speakers in England referred to in the following excerpt:

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Then there are differences in grade of education; the highly cultivated have a diction which is not in all its parts at the command of the vulgar; they have hosts of names for objects and ideas of educated knowledge, which (like dahlia, petroleum, telegraph […]) may perhaps some time work their way down into the lower rank, becoming universal […] instead of class-words only; and, yet more especially, the uncultivated have current in their dialect a host of inaccuracies, offenses against the correctness of speech – as ungrammatical forms, mispronunciations, blunders of application, slang words, vulgarities […]. (Whitney 1875: 155)

Thus, at least according to Whitney, “the English” are “the more native speakers”; they object to usages, such as Americanisms or Irish English pronunciations, which do not conform to their own usage. It is the “best speakers,” i.e., the educated in England, who set the norms that everyone else has to follow lest they fall into “a lower class.” The same idea underlies the following excerpt, which describes a model of language strongly resembling Saussure’s speech circuit (1967: 14) and uses Englishman and native speaker synonymously. Every Englishman at the present day, however, attaches practically the same meaning to the word; whenever he hears it he takes it for granted that the speaker refers to the same thing as that with which the sounds are associated in his own mind, and he knows that when he uses the word it will call up in the minds of his hearers the same picture which exists in his own. To learn a language, therefore, means to learn a particular set of sounds, and groups of sounds, and to learn also what are the ideas, thoughts, and feelings for which they stand, of which they are the symbols, in the minds of the native speakers of the language. (Wyld 1907: 5)

The model of the speech community underlying Whitney’s and Wyld’s views on the “more native speakers” is, of course, one in which an elite class determines standards of language, with standard here referring exclusively to a desirable level of usage which all others should strive to emulate. It does not seem farfetched to claim that this model of the speech community foreshadows modern sociolinguistic notions such as that of hypercorrection (e.g., Labov 1966): in both cases, we have “highly cultivated” norm setters, with other, “lower” classes busily imitating them. Even though the term does not occur, the model of languages and speakers building on “good” forms of the former and “best” exemplars of the latter crucially involves another idea which has gained prominence through its employment in modern sociolinguistics: prestige. While vernacular forms are sometimes assigned “covert” prestige and are associated with toughness, masculinity, or working-class culture (cf. Trudgill 1983: 89–90), only standard speech carries prestige throughout the speech community. This prestige is “overt” and associ-

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ated with mainstream societal values and institutions such as education, administration, or the media. Prestige, however, is not something that is necessarily associated with or even definitive of standards, which becomes clear when we look outside linguistics: as Milroy (2001: 532) notes, “it is not sensible to apply the notion of prestige to sets of electric plugs, for example, although they are plainly standardized, and many things that are unstandardized, such as hand-made suits, may actually be the ones that acquire the highest prestige.” It follows from this that linguistic prestige is not something that forms of language carry themselves; rather, it derives from the social values attributed to particular varieties, which, in turn, derive from the prestige attributed to the social groups customarily associated with these varieties. The prestige attributed to forms of language is thus indexical of the social status of their speakers. In other words, prestige is not a feature of language, but a socially evaluative category. At the end of the nineteenth century, the range of “best” speakers was widened to include not only English speakers but, in accordance with the “worldwide mission” of the language (cf. Chapter 9), “the best English speakers everywhere”: Still, the influence of the metropolis is very great, and there is much fear lest thereby the English of these islands may be led into an insular course of development which would be fatal to its world-wide mission. It is now necessary that the standard of good English shall be neither metropolitan nor even national, but cosmopolitan: it must seek the suffrages of the best English speakers everywhere. An English which is not just as intelligible in New York or Toronto or Melbourne as it is in London, is, for every highest purpose, bad English, and ought to be put down. There is no room for home rule or for State rights, or for any kind of particularism, in the domain of our sovereign tongue. Her subjects have but one right, that of being made pleasantly intelligible, each to all, and but one duty, that of making themselves so. It fortunately happens that there is perhaps a greater earnestness in the pursuit of good English among large and widespread masses of Anglian people than there has ever been before. Rightly guided, this feeling is strong enough to insure for all time the unity and predominance of our common tongue, but if guided into the allowance and pursuit of local standards, however imposing, it will only hasten a particularist and necessarily divergent development, leading ultimately to the dissolution of that which it seeks to honour and preserve. (Lloyd 1995 [1897]: 375–376)

Again, however, there is a restriction; the “best” speakers are members of the “Anglian people” only. Note also that intelligibility is the key feature that will “insure for all time the unity and predominance of our common tongue.” As was shown in Chapter 2, the maintenance of mutual intelligibility between varieties of English is still a commonly adduced argument for native-speaker standards for the language (cf., e.g., Quirk 1985: 3).

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6.1.5 Can we not define the standard linguistically? Henry Cecil Wyld, who has been described as possibly the most important theoretician of standard English (e.g., Milroy 1999: 31), takes the definition of standard English one step further, proceeding from the assertion of the link with the “best” speakers to a demonstration of its intrinsic superiority. Despite his assertions of descriptive neutrality and objectivity, which emerge in statements of the kind that “[n]o form of language is, in itself, better than any other form,” that any dialect “gains whatever place of superiority it enjoys solely from the estimation in which it is commonly held,” i.e., from the prestige associated with its speakers (1907: 49), and that all “other dialects are in reality, and apart from fashion and custom, quite as good as Standard English, considered simply as forms of language” (1907: 50), he claims that, since standard English “is used in the conversation of the refined, the brilliant, and the learned, it has become a better instrument for the expression of ideas than any other dialect now spoken” (1907: 49). While this argument still builds on the association between a form of language and the social status of its speakers, there is another important assumption behind it. This is the assumption of functional superiority, which basically implies that the wider and more sophisticated the uses to which a language or dialect is put, the more developed its expressive powers. In order to demonstrate the purely linguistic superiority of standard spoken English, Wyld (1991 [1934]: 212) also resorts to apparently scientific methods, adducing phonetic/phonological criteria to support his argument. In his view, the problem of determining the most valuable variety of any language involves answering a simple question: “What are the qualities that tend to make a form of speech clear and distinct from the point of view of the hearer?” In Wyld’s view, these are “chiefly a sonorous quality in the vowels, and a marked differentiation of one vowel from another” (1991 [1934]: 212). To illustrate this claim, he adduces standard English “ah [ā], as heard in path, chaff, task, hard, &c.,” comparing it to the short realization of the same vowel found in other dialects; in his view, this short realization “lacks the solidity and dignity” of its standard English equivalent. In still other dialects, the vowel is realized as “an intermediate sound between that in path and that in pad” and in this way “loses both sonority and beauty” (1991 [1934]: 213). The clarity and distinctness of the standard English vowels, which, in Wyld’s view, constitute the foundation of that variety’s perfect intelligibility (note the familiar argument!), are “unapproached by any of the provincial and vulgar forms of English” (for more on that distinction, cf. below). This clarity derives from the fact that “all those vowels in the former, which are not diphthongs, are definite, individual, and perfect types of their several kinds” (1991 [1934]: 214).

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The problem with Wyld’s analysis is, of course, that scientific facts, such as the observation that where one dialect uses a long a sound another one employs a short one, are mixed up with blatantly evaluative characterizations involving “dignity,” “beauty,” and perfection. Such categories are not phonetic/phonological categories but belong entirely to the realm of taste and opinion; they cannot therefore be employed to argue for the intrinsic superiority of one variety over others. In the end, the matter boils down to the association between spoken standard English and particular speaker groups anyway: It is characteristic of R.S. that it is easy, unstudied, and natural. The “best” speakers do not need to take thought for their utterance; they have no theories as to how their native tongue should be pronounced, nor do they reflect upon the sounds they utter. They have perfect confidence in themselves, in their speech, as in their manners. For both bearing and utterance spring from a firm and gracious tradition. “Their fathers have told them” – that suffices. Nowhere does the best that is in English culture find a fairer expression than in R.S. speech. (Wyld 1991 [1934]: 215)

Again, it is the “best” speakers who are mentioned. What Wyld asserts in this excerpt will be treated in more detail below: the idea that one either is a speaker of standard English or is not, i.e., that membership in the group of “best” speakers is limited to those born to that “firm and gracious tradition” supporting that form of speech. In other words, it is not the school which makes speakers of standard English, it is the home. Another important idea found in the above excerpt is that of the naturalness of spoken standard English. It will be treated in more detail below, too; for now suffice it to point out that this idea gained immense importance around the turn of the twentieth century, after the literary language, upon which all that was “best […] in English culture” had been founded, had been discredited as artificial and decayed and folk speech had been exalted as the source of all life in the language. Finally, note once more the equation between standard English, here labeled “R.S.,” i.e., “Received Standard,” and the “native tongue,” i.e., English. To summarize, throughout the nineteenth century, there is a polar opposition between various speaker groups. At the one end of the scale, there are “the English,” the “more native speakers,” the “best speakers,” and the “highly cultivated” or educated, who use standard English. At the other end, we find American and Irish speakers, less native or non-native ones, and uncultivated or “vulgar” language users, who find all kinds of ways to corrupt the standard language, which is equated with the language as such. Even though it is expressed in terms which, of course, would be out of the question today, the equation does not look all that different from what Quirk (1990), for example, describes in his account

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of the significance of native-speaker standards in the World Englishes context, as discussed in Chapter 2.

6.1.6 “Educated” = public-school educated But what did “educated” mean? By the early twentieth century at the latest, most writers appear to have agreed that the kind of education which was the defining characteristic of a speaker of standard English was to be had at the great English public schools only. Here is Daniel Jones’s view on the matter: Many suitable standards of English pronunciation might be suggested, e.g. educated Northern English, educated Southern English, the pronunciation used on the stage, etc. It is convenient for present purposes to choose as the standard of English pronunciation the form which appears to be most generally used by Southern English persons who have been educated at the great English public boarding-schools. (Jones 1972 [1919]: 4)

Pennycook (1994: 116) comments on the restriction of spoken standard English to that form of the language used at the great public schools as follows: The commonly accepted norm for the spoken form of the language was that spoken by men who had been educated in the public schools of the South. Le Page (1985) points out that the emergence of this “Received Pronunciation” (RP) was due to a number of connected developments: the shift from entry into the Civil Service by patronage to entry by examination, the reforms at Oxford and Cambridge Universities so that they became training grounds for these civil servants, the public school reforms so that they in turn became avenues of entry to the universities, and the recruitment of public school teachers only from these two universities. “A new self-perpetuating élite was established, to which admission was through similarity of education proclaimed by similarity of linguistic behaviour” (Le Page, 1985, p. 32).

Honey (1989: 12–37) also documents the link between the emergence of a spoken standard of English in Britain and the development of the public school system. He reports that among public figures who had received a public school education before 1870 no standard accent could be detected. Prime Minister Gladstone, for example, who attended Eton in the 1820s, is said to have retained a Liverpool accent throughout his career. From 1870 onwards, however, the English public school system, i.e., the network of high-prestige, fee-paying, private schools expanded massively. Such a public-school education “supplied valuable credentials”; apparently “regardless of intellectual attainment,” it “opened for pupils the doors to those ancient guardians of the standard language, the Universities of Oxford and Cam-

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bridge, and to careers such as the Anglican clergy, and Army commission, colonial administration, and teaching” (Milroy 1999: 186). The most important requisite for success at such public schools was accent: Not only was the accent explicitly taught, but boys entering a school such as Eton or Harrow with regional accents were shamed into conformity. By the end of the nineteenth century […], an RP accent proclaimed either that its user was a public school man, or that he had gone to some trouble to acquire an accent which signalled his adherence to the values of the elite for whom it constituted important social capital. (Milroy 1999: 186)

For some writers, the public-school criterion was not yet specific enough (cf. Crowley 1996: 165). Thus, Wyld (1991 [1934]: 215) restricted “the ‘best’ English” to that spoken by “officers of the British Regular Army,” and Sampson (1926 [1922]: 41), rather than attempting to define it, simply quoted the Prince of Wales as one of the “simple unaffected young Englishmen” among whom it could be heard.

6.1.7 Of “natural” educated speakers “to the language born” The elevation of educated usage to the standard form of the language did not necessarily imply that this form of English could or should be acquired in a formal setting. In the view of numerous writers, despite the meaning of the attribute educated, standard English was simply imbibed with the mother’s milk: Take the case of an English child, brought up in an educated family. At an early age such a child would speak good English though he had never learnt grammar, perhaps had never even heard of the subject. On the other hand, a child brought up in an ignorant household would speak bad English, would make mistakes in pronunciation or use wrong forms of expression. Without any grammatical training in either case, these children would speak correctly or incorrectly, would pick up good English or bad English, through the influence of the people with whom they came in contact. (West 1894: 30)

Nevertheless, the school still had a role to play in its spread or popularization, as the following excerpt shows. This role was that of reproducing the conditions found in a standard-speaking home, which, of course, could only be a rough approximation. Note, once again, how “the mother-tongue” is equated with “good English,” i.e., the standard form: There is only one method by which power over the mother-tongue can be acquired: by practice. Those have the best command of English, who from birth have lived in an environment where accurate language, a copious vocabulary, a pure pronunciation, and the habit of reading are characteristic. All that can be done in a school, therefore, is to reproduce

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these conditions, so far as is possible. The pupils should be enabled to read good English, to hear good English, and should be practised with a view to their speaking and writing good English. ([Newbolt] 1921: 137)

In a chapter on “The spoken language” (which, incidentally, only deals with spoken standard English, i.e., once more, the standard is equated with the language as a whole), Wyld (1969 [1906]: 346–348) illustrates in more detail in what way the English used by the “best” speakers is not learnable. This has to do with its “adaptability.” Clearly, for Wyld, standard spoken English is anything but uniform; it is “not fixed and rigid […], it is not invariable.” Rather, every good speaker adapts the “actual sounds employed, the speed of utterance, the intonation, the sentence structure, the choice of vocabulary” to the demands of the situation. This adaptation happens “instinctively […], without any apparent effort or deliberation.” If this is so, however, using spoken standard English properly is practically impossible if one is not born into the group of “best” speakers, because the only unconscious, natural form of language learning is first-language acquisition (Marsh 1859: 59–60; cf. Chapter 4). Speakers who have to choose their words “self-conscious[ly] and deliberate[ly]” are in permanent danger of producing lifeless forms of language, forms in which “all naturalness of speech is at an end” (Wyld 1969 [1906]: 348). The following excerpt presents another passage which shows that, by the turn of the century, only “naturally good speakers,” i.e., the members of the “best companies,” were seen to be proper speakers of standard English. It foreshadows the mid- to late-twentieth century insistence on native-speaker teachers: the model in teaching standard English pronunciation must be that of “good speakers,” and the teacher must himself be one “naturally,” i.e., must have been exposed to “good” speech “from the time he learned to speak.” Thus, for Wyld as well as for later commentators, what one wants to have in language teaching is standard-speaking native speakers who come from the educated higher classes in Britain (or, possibly, in post-World War II times, from the U.S.): It is impossible to say a priori how a doubtful word may or may not be pronounced. All that a teacher of pronunciation is justified in saying is, “This word is pronounced in such and such a way by good speakers.” But if he has not heard good speakers pronounce the word; if he himself is not naturally one (that is, from the time he learned to speak) […], then he simply does not know, and cannot teach the pronunciation of it. (Wyld 1969 [1906]: 362)

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6.1.8 Educated English = a level of excellence which need not be homogenous in reality If standard English is no longer defined linguistically but by the group of speakers that uses it habitually, no efforts are necessary to demonstrate its linguistic boundaries or internal homogeneity. In fact, as will be illustrated below, to posit uniformity for the spoken standard would have been detrimental to its theorists in that they were eager to project this variety as entirely natural – as natural as the dialects. The literary language had been shown to be artificial and decayed in that its growth had been arrested by standardization, which had involved the imposition of uniformity and homogeneity. This, in the view of nineteenth-century theorists of language, was an undesirable outcome in that the most important property of language was seen to be change. Change, however, presupposed the presence of variation; if variation no longer existed, a language had lost its capacity for change, which then made it an artificial language. That the standard of spoken English, unlike its written equivalent, has less to do with uniformity and commonality than with evaluation and levels of excellence is already acknowledged by the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers. The following excerpt presents Sweet’s view of the matter. Thus, according to Sweet, standard spoken English is characterized by variation according to age, geographical background, and “social standing” – a statement which sounds surprisingly modern: Another difficulty about setting up a standard of spoken English is that it changes from generation to generation, and is not absolutely uniform even among speakers of the same generation, living in the same place, and having the same social standing. Here, again, all I can do is to describe that form of the London dialect with which I am sufficiently familiar […]. The only real familiarity we can have is with the language we speak ourselves. (Sweet 1911: vii)

One of the most influential theorists of spoken standard English was A. J. Ellis. In his four-volume work On Early English Pronunciation (1869–89), he expounded on the idea of a standard pronunciation for literary English. According to Ellis, there was not only a national, uniform, common literary English, i.e., a standard form of the written language, but also a “received pronunciation,” or “RP,” of that written standard. As this excerpt already shows, in Ellis’s view, spoken standard English in Britain could not be entirely uniform; rather, even though it was “received […] all over the country,” it differed, albeit “not widely,” and was characterized by “a certain degree of variety”:

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In the present day we may […] recognize a received pronunciation all over the country, not widely differing in any particular locality, and admitting a certain degree of variety. It may be especially considered as the educated pronunciation of the metropolis, of the court, the pulpit, and the bar. (Ellis 1869, quoted in Görlach 1999: 188)

The question is what “received […] all over the country” means. As the above quotation shows, Ellis could not have intended it to denote geographical and social homogeneity, i.e., it was certainly not the case that all speakers of English in Britain constantly heard or even spoke this form of English. But this does not seem to be what he intended, either. Rather, as indicated by the OED, received, just like standard elsewhere, meant (and still means) “[g]enerally adopted, accepted, approved as true or good. Chiefly of opinions, customs, etc.,” as in a received idea. In fact, as the above passage shows, Ellis himself made it abundantly clear that the spoken standard English he envisaged was not a uniform, common form of the language, but rather one that represented the usage of a particular group of speakers (“the educated”) usually found in a particular location (“the metropolis”) and in particular occupations (“the court, the pulpit, and the bar”). The following excerpt even more clearly demonstrates that Ellis in no way intended his “received pronunciation” to denote an actual variety of spoken English characterized by a common, uniform set of features. Once more, RP is defined as the speech of a particular speaker group (“the more thoughtful or more respected persons of mature age”); what is interesting to note about this extract, however, is that it is not the real, concrete, authentic patterns of usage employed by those speakers that Ellis envisages. Rather, RP here emerges as a theoretical construct, a “kind of mean” or “average,” around which all other sounds of the language “seem to hover.” RP is not meant to impose uniformity on spoken English but unites selected, representative features in a model set up “for the purposes of science.” This model may then be “assumed to represent all” speakers and thus “the language” as a whole. This move posits a particular, restricted form of the language as the language itself; by definition, then, all other forms of the language are no longer part of the language, at least for descriptive purposes: There will not be any approach to uniformity of speech sounds at any one time, but there will be a kind of mean, the general utterance of the more thoughtful or more respected persons of mature age, round which the other sounds seem to hover, and which, like the averages of the mathematician, not agreeing precisely with any, may for the purposes of science be assumed to represent all and be called the language of the district at the epoch assigned. (Ellis 1869–89, I: 18, quoted in Crowley 2003: 115)

Two more points deserve to be mentioned in this context. First, what we obtain in Ellis’s quote is another attempt at solving the problem of linguistic heterogeneity.

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Just as literary English had enabled the OED lexicographers and others working on the language to answer the question of what the English language actually was at the written level, so RP as the speech of educated Britons permitted a definition, description, and delimitation of English at the spoken level. Second, this focus has remained until the present day. It is often pointed out that standard English at the spoken level is variable (cf., e.g., Trudgill 1983: 19) and that RP is actually used by only a small minority of speakers even within Britain (cf., e.g., Milroy and Milroy 1999: 151). Nevertheless, the focus on this form of speech as the descriptive model has remained; it underlies all major attempts at defining spoken standard English (e.g., Greenbaum 1996: 6). In following excerpt, Wyld also explicitly discusses the homogeneity issue. He responds to possible criticism of the idea that spoken standard English cannot be entirely uniform. What is interesting is that Wyld, on the one hand, speaks of the spread of standard English in geographical and social terms, i.e., “over so wide a geographical area and among such divers classes,” and on the other, opposes standard English to “Vulgarism” and to “provincial […] dialects.” What this comparison shows is that, if the latter indicate the geographical spread of the language, the former must be the language of “divers [social] classes.” What all of this implies is, of course, that if standard English is equated with the language as a whole, then speakers of either regional or class dialects are not speakers of the language (cf. below): It has been said […] that it is possible to over-estimate the degree of uniformity with which Standard English is spoken throughout the country, and it should be remembered that a form of language which is disseminated over so wide a geographical area and among such divers classes must inevitably undergo a certain degree of differentiation. […] It is perhaps said, “You admit a considerable amount of differentiation in your so-called Standard English, and yet you adhere to the conception of a Standard. How is this logical?” The reply to this objection is, that the distinctions between the different forms of Standard English are very slight, almost imperceptible, indeed, to any but the most alert and practised observer, and that they shrink to a negligible quantity compared with the differences between outand-out “Vulgarism” on the one hand, or provincial – that is, regional – dialects on the other. In Standard English, as with all other forms of speech, a certain degree of divergence is possible, without such divergence being felt as constituting a different dialect. Of a dozen speakers of Standard English, each may possess slight differences of utterance, or phraseology, and yet none feel that the speech of any of the others, even where it differs from his own, verges towards Vulgarism or “Dialect” in the special sense. (Wyld 1969 [1906]: 354–355)

To sum up, with regard to the spoken form of standard English, variation was not only recognized but at the same time officially endorsed, as it satisfied the theoretical demand that language be living and changing rather than artificial and

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dead, an idea to be discussed in more detail below. Thus, unlike the written, literary standard, the spoken standard could not be described as uniform linguistically; it therefore had to be described by means to the group of speakers to which it “belonged,” i.e., the class of (public-school) educated Britons. These speakers and their linguistic behavior were then described by means of epithets such as “good” and “best,” which obviously introduced a strongly evaluative dimension into the debate about spoken standard English.

6.1.9 Colloquial English and the naturalness problem It has already been indicated that the end of the nineteenth century saw a number of serious and influential attempts at differentiating between varieties of spoken English and salvaging the spoken standard from the criticism of lifelessness or artificiality, which had so powerfully affected the status of the written language. As will be shown below, with the introduction of the new comparative-historical approach, literary English had been thoroughly disparaged and the spoken forms of language, be they “savage” foreign languages or “provincial” English dialects, had been lifted to an indiscriminate level of superiority. This endeavor resulted in the fixation on educated colloquial English, which has characterized the descriptive approach to spoken standard English qua English up to today. The following excerpt comes from Sweet’s Practical Study of Languages, which was first published in 1899 but had been drafted twenty-two years earlier (Burnley 1992: 338–339). It names what had by then become an “axiom of living philology” but had originated with Max Müller: that “the real life of language” was “better seen in dialects and colloquial forms of speech than in highly developed literary languages”: The second main axiom of living philology is that all study of language, whether theoretical or practical, ought to be based on the spoken language. […] In European languages, […] most grammarians tacitly assume that the spoken is a mere corruption of the literary language. But the exact contrary is the case: it is the spoken which is the real source of the literary language. […] Accordingly, it is now an axiom not only of Romance philology, but of philology generally, that the real life of language is better seen in dialects and colloquial forms of speech than in highly developed literary languages, such as Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. (Sweet 1964 [1899]: 49–50)

In the same publication, Sweet adduces linguistic criteria to explain why speech must take priority over writing. The spoken language is not only more alive but also more concise, verbosity being a mark of literary language use. The conciseness characterizing the spoken language can be seen in its lack of unnecessary

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synonymy (in both vocabulary and grammar) as well as in contextual precision and in the absence of unnecessary qualification. This more in “clearness and definiteness” makes it imperative that foreign-language learning must follow the “natural order” of native-language acquisition, i.e., from spoken to written – a tenet which still functions as something like a canonical truth in second-language teaching and research. Wyld also expounded on “The relation of written and spoken English”: The first “vulgar error” which it is necessary to dispel is the belief that good speakers, in ordinary conversation, merely reproduce the language of books, and that the Spoken is based on the Literary language. The language of conversation has an independent life, quite apart from the written forms of speech. […] The source of Spoken English is, mainly and primarily, direct tradition of utterance, passed on from one generation to another. The sources of the language of literature are twofold: first, literary tradition, and secondly, though equally important, the spoken language of the period. […] There is what the present writer believes to be an unfortunate habit among some authorities on linguistic subjects, of bracketing Literary and Standard Spoken English together, under the single name Literary English, thereby confusing two distinct phenomena, and suggesting the very fallacy which it is so important to avoid, namely, that this form of the spoken language is derived from, or a reproduction of, the language of literature. The idea that those speakers of English who do not speak what is technically known as a Dialect, in the special sense of the term, are reproducing, or attempting to reproduce, in their speech the language of books is fundamentally erroneous. […] To speak of the sounds of Literary English is an absurdity, since what is written has no sounds until it is uttered, and then it naturally is pronounced according to the speech habits of the particular reader. (1969 [1906]: 340–342)

Again, we see that the spoken language is prior to the written; what is new in this excerpt, however, is that Wyld carefully distinguishes between different types of spoken and written English. What he is interested in is the language of “good speakers, in ordinary conversation” – a focus which, as indicated above, has determined the descriptive approach to spoken English up to today. Wyld’s writings may be read as an attempt at reappropriating the language to the higher classes of society and to the educated, to whom it had been temporarily lost through the new philology’s interest in the speech of peasants and “savages” (cf. below). The following excerpt expands on the notion of a “Standard Spoken English,” which is equated with “Polite English” or “simply Good English”: What we have called Standard English, but what may also be called Polite English, or, with certain qualifications, simply Good English, is as much a reality as the dialect of West Somerset or of Windhill; it has had a normal and natural growth from a particular form of fifteenth-century English […]. (1969 [1906]: 342–343)

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Wyld here appears eager to dispel any notion of artificiality possibly attached to that form of the language on account of its link with the literary standard, which, as must have been common linguistic lore by then, was regarded variously as artificial, abnormal, or decayed. A spoken standard, in Wyld’s view, is entirely different in that respect in that “it has had a normal and natural growth” from a particular form of English. What makes spoken standard English as “real,” “normal,” and “natural” as any other dialect of the language is that it cannot be fixed; the spoken standard, unlike the literary language, has not lost its capacity for change and thus retains its powers of growth: What, then, is the relation of this form of Spoken English to the language of Literature? Both, as has been said, are sprung originally from the same source; they have developed differently […]. One great and obvious external difference between Written and Spoken English is that, whereas the spelling of the former is fixed, […] the spoken form is for ever undergoing changes in pronunciation, with the passage of time and the spread of this dialect among all sections of the population. The spelling of Literary English, then, no longer expresses, even approximately, the facts of actual utterance, as they exist in Standard Spoken English, in its different varieties. […] The language of literature […] is always slightly more archaic than the uttered speech of the same period […]. (Wyld 1969 [1906]: 343–344)

Most importantly, however, it is “the best spoken form of English” which infuses literary English with “vitality” and “the breath of life.” Even though the diction of the following excerpt initially recalls Müller’s views (a “literary tradition alone […] is a lifeless thing”; cf. below), Wyld insists that it is not provincial or even “vulgar” English which feeds great literature, but only “the best […] conversational style of the period,” which is clearly not produced by peasants or savages but among the higher classes of society and the educated. Thus, even though the focus of linguistics was definitely on the spoken language at the end of the period focused on here, all forms of speech were not held in equally high esteem. Wyld was one of the most influential early advocates of “good” spoken English, but the focus in terms of standards of teaching and description on the “conversational” or colloquial style produced by the educated has remained: A literary tradition alone, deprived of the living spirit which informs the great works that created the tradition, is a lifeless thing. The breath of life comes into literary form from the living spoken language, as it comes into literature itself from touch with life. Thus, while great prose owes much to tradition, it owes still more to the racy speech of the age in which it is produced. The best prose is never entirely remote in form from the best corresponding conversational style of the period. […] The impression made by fine prose of any age, and not infrequently also by verse, of the less artificial and elaborate kind, is that the author writes very much as he would speak […]. It is this quality of vitality, which springs from a mastery of the best spoken form of English of his age, that compels our admiration […]. (Wyld 1969 [1906]: 344–345)

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But why is the “conversational” or colloquial form of spoken standard English so important? The following passage, which once more focuses on the naturalness issue, explains this. According to Wyld, there are two forms of spoken standard English: a natural one and an artificial one. The former consists in the colloquial speech of the educated higher classes of Britain, the latter in “the artificial declamatory utterance usual on the stage, or in high-flown public oratory”; the former is spoken by “well-spoken, well-bred person[s],” the latter by “coxcomb[s] and […] pedant[s]”: It is almost inevitable that a professional elocutionist […] should seek his models of pronunciation and delivery, not in the best colloquial forms of English, but in the artificial declamatory utterance usual on the stage, or in high-flown public oratory. […] In this form of English we generally find all the distressing symptoms discussed above – over-carefulness, bogus refinement, impossible pronunciations, based, not on the fact of what is, but on a theory of what “ought” to be. Undesirable as this kind of pronunciation is, even in public speaking, it is intolerable in private conversation; and he who practices it can hardly hope to escape the reproach of being a coxcomb and a pedant; he will certainly not pass for a well-spoken, well-bred person. […] Before a man can speak well in public, he must first learn to speak well in private. The latter mode of speech must, above all things, be natural, and must not be based primarily upon models derived from public oratory, neither in pronunciation, nor in choice of diction. Good colloquial English, in a word, is not a modification of the English of the platform. On the other hand, it might with greater propriety be held that the best public speaking is a modified and adapted form of the best colloquial speech – of that which follows “the usage of the best companies.” (Wyld 1969 [1906]: 371–372)

What is interesting to note is how Wyld keeps setting up all kinds of “musts.” Thus, even though, as outlined above, late nineteenth-century linguists presented themselves as ardent desciptivists and vehemently distanced themselves from the concerns of the late eighteenth-century elocutionists, what we really have here is prescriptivism in the guise of descriptivism; instead of “absolute” linguistic criteria for “good” English, we now have shifting ones, which, however, remain constant in that they are always set by the well-educated, well-bred higher classes of society. To sum up, “good colloquial English” is the basis of everything: of spoken standard English, of the English of public speaking, and of the literary language, and since “good colloquial English” is “that which follows ‘the usage of the best companies,’” and since the only “natural” mode of acquiring a form of speech is from infancy, it follows that the “real” speakers of the “real” language are the members of a certain segment of society.

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6.2 The standard and the dialects An important corollary of the massive concentration on standard English in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth was a sudden increase in interest in English dialects. The fields were clearly related, which can be seen for one in the temporal coincidence obtaining between their two major projects: the OED was planned from the late 1850s onward and published between 1888 and 1933, the English Dialect Dictionary (EDD) was published between 1898 and 1905. There was, however, more than a temporal relationship here; in fact, both theoretically and methodologically, there was a close connection. As has been outlined, the standard literary language was defined as the central form and equated with the language as a whole, whereas the dialects were seen as peripheral but crucially important in that they contributed to the historicization and thus legitimization of the standard form. The relationship was thus one of center vs. periphery or dominance vs. subordination.

6.2.1 Whence the new interest in the dialects? The English Dialect society was set up in 1873, which was only a few years after work on the OED had begun seriously. Its aim was basically to collect and make available everything that had been excluded from the collection of words which was to define the standard (cf. Crowley 2003: 89). Just like the OED, however, the EDD’s importance was voiced in terms of service to the nation; it was advertised as “a work of the highest interest to many of our fellow countrymen in all parts of the Empire” and “a work such as no other nation is ever likely to produce, and one which cannot fail to reflect very great credit upon the nation which it most concerns” (Anonymous 1999 [1895]: 213). But why did the dialects move into such sharp focus in connection with the efforts expended on defining, describing, and delimiting the standard language? For one, it was clearly feared that they would soon be lost. The industrial revolution and new capitalist ways of production demanded a huge and mobile workforce, which was moving from the countryside into the large urban areas; in addition, advances in transportation and communication technology led to unprecedented mobility and contact among formerly isolated population groups. The forces favoring the standardization of language were thus at the same time wiping out the dialects. Ellis (1871: vi), for example, said that “the present facilities of communication are rapidly destroying all traces of our older dialectic English,” and Elworthy (1875–86: 3) complained that “railways, telegraphs, machinery, and steam will soon sweep clean out of the land the last trace of Briton, Saxon, and

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Dane.” As parts of traditional culture and society, of “old England,” the dialects were seen to be massively threatened by such developments; if they could not be saved from extinction, they should at least be recorded for posterity. There were other, more linguistic reasons as well, though. An exhaustive knowledge of the dialects was considered necessary if the picture of the English language was to be complete. Thus, Ellis (1871: xii) argued that “a complete account of our existing English language should occupy the attention of an ENGLISH DIALECT SOCIETY.” Even more importantly, the dialects also had theoretical relevance to the study of the language. This had to do with the relationships between languages and dialects and spoken and written English.

6.2.2 The status of the dialects vis-à-vis the standard language So what were those relationships? An interesting quote in this respect comes from James Murray, editor of the OED, who, in a lecture held in 1900 (quoted in Crowley 2003: 89), argued that “the relation of Latin to, say, the Romanic of Provence was like that of literary English to Lancashire or Somerset dialect.” What Murray is in fact saying here is that the written standard of English, or “literary English,” is prior to the spoken dialects not only in terms of synchronic relevance to the speech community but also chronologically. Such an argument obviously supports the view that literary English and the English language as a whole are identical. And whereas English was being equated with its standard written form, i.e., literary English, a sharp line was being drawn between that form and others. But there were dissenting voices, and they became more numerous and audible as the discussion wore on. These were voices which were propounding the new, comparative-historical science of language, which argued that language must be treated as a totality of sounds entirely distinct and independent from the written symbols used to transcribe them. Language was identical with living speech. The practitioners of the new approach stressed the primacy of the spoken dialects precisely at the expense of the written literary language, arguing that “[w]hat we are accustomed to call languages, the literary idioms of Greece, and Rome, and India, of Italy, France, and Spain, must be considered as artificial, rather than as natural forms of speech” (Müller 1862: 58).²²

22 It is generally Max Müller who is credited with first having applied the notion of artificiality to literary languages (cf. Joseph 1989: 252). Even though artificial and related terms had been employed in discussions about standard languages for centuries, in earlier times, they were

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What this meant, according to Müller, was that the dialects were not to be seen as “corruptions of the literary language,” as had often been alleged (e.g., Wright 1913: xix), nor were they merely the “channels of a literary language”; rather, they constituted its “feeders” or at least “parallel streams which existed long before” (Müller 1862: 60). This, of course, amounted to a reversal of the position argued by Murray (cf. above), who had employed the Latin-Romance analogy to maintain that the standard or literary language was prior to the dialects not only synchronically but also diachronically. But Müller went even further and, in thoroughly Romantic Volkssprache spirit (cf. below), argued that while the “literary idioms, such as Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Gothic,” constituted “the royal heads in the history of language,” for the science of language they had the same significance as royal dynasties for political history: “As political history ought to be more than a chronicle of royal dynasties, so the historian of language ought never to lose sight of those lower and popular strata of speech from which these dynasties originally sprang, and by which alone they are supported” (1862: 60–61). Thus, in Müller’s view, the dialects constituted the basis of any language and thus ought to occupy the center of the linguist’s attention, whereas literary languages were interesting in their own right but represented merely an overlaid stratum.

6.2.3 The dialects’ contribution to the historicization of the standard language: “Primitive” forms and “Anglo-Saxon” words But what were the theoretical and/or methodological reasons for nineteenthcentury linguists to hold the dialects in such high esteem? Müller spells them out explicitly, too: “Even in England, the local patois have many forms which are more primitive than the language of Shakespeare, and the richness of their vocabulary surpasses, on many points, that of the classical writers of any period”

positively valued in the sense of “made in accordance with the rule of art” or “made according to the rules of the ars grammatical” (Simonelli 1972: 395, quoted in Joseph 1989: 252). The standard/dialect and artificial/natural dichotomies survived in the twentieth century; as Joseph (1989: 253) notes, Saussure contrasts the “langue littéraire,” which denotes “tout espèce de langue cultivé, officielle ou non, au service de la communauté tout entire” (Saussure 1972 [1916]: 474, quoted in Joseph 1989: 253), with the “idiome naturel,” the former being classed as artificial not only because of its mixed character (including forms from various dialects) but also because it exists in the written mode. The sociolinguistic axiom of the systematicity of the vernacular is discussed in this chapter; for more on nineteenth-century views on standard English and the criterion of naturalness, cf. above.

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(1862: 60). As this quote shows, the reasons may be found in the dialect/standard link outlined above, which led to the combined interest in both traditional, rural dialects and standard English and eventually to the coincidental publication of the OED, representing interest in and concern with the standard, and the EDD, representing the fascination with folk speech. Müller compares “the language of Shakespeare” and “that of the classical writers of any period,” which were precisely the subject matter of the OED, to the “local patois” of England, the topic of the EDD, noting that the latter often preserved “more primitive” forms and a richer vocabulary than the former. What this means is that the dialects allowed the new science of language the production not only of a more complete description of the English language but also of one that extended further back in time. In other words, the dialects were of invaluable help in reconstructing the history of the English language (as instantiated in standard English) and extending its pedigree backwards, which, in turn, was an important prerequisite for its legitimization, as, of course, the longer a language’s history, the more important the language and, by implication, its speakers. The nineteenth-century interest in English dialects must therefore be seen as part of the drive to legitimize modern standard English in that it helped to establish a long and continuous history for the language. Rather than for their own sake, the dialects were studied for what they could contribute to the history of standard English; their status in linguistics was thus subordinate to that of the latter. The following excerpt illustrates this assumption of dialectal antiquity: From a writer who offers to the public a volume on a Provincial Dialect, and ventures to announce his intention of confirming, by authority and etymology, the strange words and phrases he is about to produce, some introductory explanation of his design may reasonably be required. […] Provincial Language were of little concern to general readers, of still less to persons of refined education, and much below the notice of philologists. However justly this censure may be pronounced on a fabricated farrago of cant, slang, or what has more recently been denominated flash language, spoken by vagabonds, mendicants, and outcasts; by sharpers, swindlers, and felons; for the better concealment of their illegal practices, and for their more effectual separation from the “good men and true” of regular and decent society; it certainly is by no means applicable to any form whatsoever of a National Language, constituting the vernacular tongue of any province of that nation. Such forms, be they as many and as various as they may, are all, to substance, remnants and derivatives of the language of past ages, which were, at some time or other, to common use, though in long process of time they have become only locally used and understood. Such is the general character of Provincial Language, and to prove it on behalf of a very considerable district of this country is the object of the present undertaking. (Forby 1999 [1830]: 203)

What this excerpt argues is not only that “Provincial Language” is, in fact, a form of the “National Language,” or that it is interesting only because in it may be

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found “substance, remnants and derivatives of the language of past ages,” but also that it must be clearly distinguished from “cant, slang, or […] flash language” as spoken by people separated “from the ‘good men and true’ of regular and decent society.” Clearly, not all varieties of contemporary English were of equal interest to nineteenth-century philologists; the only legitimate non-standard forms of the language were the traditional, rural dialects.

6.2.4 Preservation of the dialects: “Antique curiosities” or actual means of communication? That the dialects needed to be studied did not mean that they should be preserved as actual, living means of communication: This subordinate position of the provincial dialects is the inevitable result of the rise of one immensely predominant form of language, as that of the official classes, and of the most cultivated portion of the community. When one dialect obtains the dignity of becoming the channel of all that is worthiest in the national literature and the national civilization, the other less favoured dialects shrink into obscurity and insignificance. The latter preserve, however, this advantage, considered as types of linguistic development, that the primitive conditions under which language exists, and changes, are far more faithfully represented in them than in the cultivated dialect. (Wyld 1969 [1906]: 357–358)

In Wyld’s view, for example, dialects had the virtue of the “primitive,” and their contribution to the history which had resulted in the development of a “channel of all that is worthiest in the national literature and the national civilization,” i.e., the standard language, was acknowledged. Nevertheless, as Wyld also clearly points out, the “subordinate position” that the “provincial dialects” held in comparison with the former was to be clearly seen; thus, whereas the dialects had to be preserved out of antiquarian or scientific interest, this did not mean that they should be preserved as actual means of communication. Ellis was also very clear on the matter. Although he defended the study of the dialects, he also argued that their eradication was a positive development: “Of course it would be absurd for those possessing the higher instrument to descend to this lower one, and for the advance of our people, dialects must be extinguished – as Carthage for the advance of Rome” (Ellis 1874: 1248). The replacement of the dialects was to be achieved by the introduction of a system of phonetic spelling realizing a standard pronunciation (1870: 630). Ellis’s argument here is built on what has been labeled the “determinacy fallacy, or ‘fixed code’ fallacy” (Harris 1981: 10; cf. Chapter 4). It assumes that language is basically a system for the exchange of ideas which is constructed on a fixed or determined

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correlation between those ideas and a set of verbal symbols expressing them. If, however, there is variation in the form side of those symbols, then the functioning of the, as Ellis puts it, “intercourse between man and man” by means of those symbols is jeopardized. Dialects, in other words, are socially divisive in that they threaten the unity of the speech community. The force of this argument must not be underestimated; it surfaced not only among other nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers, such as Galsworthy (1924: 8, quoted in Crowley 2003: 122), who said that “there is perhaps no greater divide of society than the difference in viva-voce expresssion,” but has also survived into the present, where intelligibility and the “Latin analogy” are often put forward as arguments for the maintenance of native-speaker standards of pronunciation (cf. Chapter 2). Jespersen, as an author straddling the boundary between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries as well as that between Victorian and modern writing on language, uses arguments very similar to those advanced by Ellis: In the above mentioned definition of a Standard Language as the language of those speakers by whose pronunciation one cannot hear from what district they come, there is really nothing said of the value of such a language. The definition merely shows us how to recognize it. But if we carry the implied thought further and say: the language which has freed itself from everything in the speech of a single district which hinders one or makes it difficult for one to be understood by people from another district, we get at once an indication of value. (Jespersen 1946: 69)

In his view, the “value” of a standard language lies precisely in the fact that it unites the entire speech community in that it is intelligible to every single member of it. He eventually comes to the same conclusion: a common-sense (“[i]f we think out logically”) exhortation that the dialects must be eradicated. In Jespersen’s view, it is the “duty” of all “brave” members of the speech community to work for the “diffusion of the common language at the cost of local dialects.” In this, they are aided by the direction of “natural evolution.” Of course, “no contempt” for dialects or their speakers is involved in this exhortation; what the dialects are valuable for is linguistic investigation, i.e., the value of dialects lies in their relevance for linguistics: dialects are simpler and thus linguistic laws are more easily detected (cf. 1946: 72). Finally, here is a passage from the Newbolt Report (1921), which first asserted the position that the teaching of English language and literature should constitute the foundation of the education of all English children: We do not advocate the teaching of standard English on any grounds of social “superiority”, but because it is manifestly desirable that all English people should be capable of speaking so as to be fully intelligible to each other and because inability to speak standard English

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is in practice a serious handicap in many ways. […] We do not, however, suggest that the suppression of dialect should be aimed at, but that children who speak a dialect, should, as often happens, become bi-lingual […]. In many cases, indeed, it will deserve to persist, on account of its historic interest. […] The position of the English language in the world affords another argument for all English children being taught English as distinct from a dialect of English. ([Newbolt] 1921: 66)

While the report advocated bidialectalism, the exclusive command of dialectal speech was seen as a “serious handicap in many ways,” and the significance of the dialects was described as deriving merely from their “historic interest.” In the end, once again, standard English is equated with English as a whole in the phrase “English as distinct from a dialect of English,” and it is only standard English which guarantees that “all English people should be […] fully intelligible to each other.” From a linguistic point of view, too, the dialects were not necessarily seen as worthy of preservation. Thus, Nicol (1995 [1872]: 121), for example, advocated a program of study for British linguistics which sounds remarkably modern; it combines a focus on contemporary spoken language with an investigation of the forms of English, with particular attention to “the language now spoken by welleducated Englishmen” – a program which was finally carried out by the Survey of English Usage (cf. Quirk 1972). What we see in that excerpt is, once more, the focus on the educated native speaker, whose form of speech is equated with the language as a whole: We do not even know at all accurately the language now spoken by well-educated Englishmen; our traditional orthography, the hitherto very imperfect state of phonetics, and the influence of old-fashioned Latin grammars, have combined to make us content with a few rough approximations. That we should be worse off as to our dialects is hardly to be wondered at; the confusion between literature and philology has here helped other obstacles by depriving most of us of the wish for knowledge. Because the works written in one dialect are few, and their contents of little artistic or scientific value, the impression is common that the dialect is of little philological importance in comparison with the one which from political accidents has become the literary language of the country. The only difference of consequence to the linguistic inquirer is that in the latter case the earlier stages of the dialect have probably been written down, thus giving us some materials for their study, while in the other case we have little more than the language of to-day. (Nicol 1995 [1872]: 121)

Sweet strongly advocated the study of standard English at the expense of that of the dialects: Most of the present English dialects are so isolated in their development and so given over to disintegrating influences as to be, on the whole, less conservative than and generally inferior to the standard dialect. They throw little light on the development of English, which

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is profitably dealt with by a combined study of the literary documents and the educated colloquial speech of each period in so far as it is accessible to us. (Sweet 1971, quoted in Milroy 1999: 30)

To tease out the assumptions underlying this excerpt, there is, first, the view that standard English represents a more conservative form of speech than the dialects. While this resembles the classic distinction between the stable and unchanging but therefore also artificial or dead literary language and the natural, living dialects as propounded by, e.g., Müller (1862, 1865), the conclusion that Sweet draws from this distinction is diametrically opposed to that drawn by comparative-historical linguists. While the latter had asserted that the speech of peasants and savages was worth as much to linguistics as the language of the great classical writers (cf. below), Sweet maintains that it is the dialects which, on account of their instability and susceptibility to outside influences, constitute “inferior” forms of speech and therefore are of much less interest to linguistic study than the standard. What lies behind this position is, of course, the notion of “purity” or, in modern terms, uniformity or homogeneity which, as has been shown above, played such a large role in the establishment of the “standard ideology” (Milroy 2001: 533) in the second half of the nineteenth century. The ideological stance that follows from this position is, as pointed out by Milroy (1999: 30), that “the history of English is a history of ‘educated speech.’ It is as if the millions of people who spoke non-standard varieties over the centuries have no part in the history of English.” Milroy also notes that the same bias toward the study of literary language and of “educated colloquial speech” may still be found in present-day accounts of the development and/or structure of English; the work of Quirk and his associates (e.g., 1972, 1985) constitutes a good example.

6.2.5 “Genuine” dialect and “authentic” speakers: The emergence of the NORM Another idea which has crucially influenced modern thought on the native speaker is what Foster and Foster describe in the following excerpt as “the peasantry” which have “been for ages devoted to husbandry,” with “few facilities for intercourse with strangers, and […] few inducements to change their locality.” Among such speakers, “there are to be found remnants of the Anglo-Saxon tongue in its least altered condition”: It is from a recognition of this truth [i.e., the fact that the dialects are the most conservative forms of speech] that for several years past there has been among our most eminent philolo-

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gists an earnest relenting towards the provincial dialects of England. It is agreed that they embody old rather than bad English; that they have not in the main corrupted the language so much as they have preserved its ancient remains. It is believed that in districts where the peasantry have been for ages devoted to husbandry, where they have enjoyed few facilities for intercourse with strangers, and have been tempted with few inducements to change their locality, there are to be found remnants of the Anglo-Saxon tongue in its least altered condition. Among those who most highly prize our literary English, there is a misgiving that our present polished phrase and fashionable pronunciation are in many cases false and corrupt innovations; and that the peasantry who disdain our refinements, and cleave with tenacious affection to their strong and expressive dialects, have been the true conservators of the purity of the ancient language. Philologists are now turning to these vulgar tongues as the storehouses in which are laid up many of the treasures which the literary English has cast away; and though there may be no serious desire of restoring them to their former functions, there is an anxiety to preserve them as antique curiosities, not only interesting in themselves, but serving to illustrate and explain much that is otherwise difficult in the matter and history of our literary English. (Foster and Foster 1995 [1860]: 321)

Later labeled “NORMs” (cf. Chambers and Trudgill 1998: 29), i.e., non-mobile, older, rural males, such dialect speakers have played an immense role as typical informants in dialect geography. However, the idea behind the NORM concept, i.e., that elderly rural speakers best represent a particular dialect, has been influential in numerous other branches of linguistics, such as, for example, creole studies (cf. Patrick 1999: 5). The focus on NORM informants in dialectology has been identified as part of an anti-industrialist, anti-urbanist impulse which took hold of English artists and intellectuals in the second half of the nineteenth century (cf. Crowley 1996: 167; Kumar 2003: 209–213). English writers, poets, and folklorists discovered the “south country” – what had earlier been the center of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and now consisted of small towns and cathedral cities amidst rolling hills and meandering streams. This “south country” was celebrated as a stronghold against a new industrial and urban England. It evoked the “spirit of England,” which completely ignored the industrial towns of the Midlands and the North with their large working-class communities, but even London, as the epitome of the modern city, had no place in it. Traditional rural England was, of course, populated by people entirely unaffected by the forces of modernization, industrialization, and urbanization. It was the home of, in the words of Ellis, “the illiterate peasant, speaking a language entirely imitative, unfixed by any theoretic orthography, untramelled by any pedant’s fancies” (1874: 317). As Crowley notes in this context, just like other intellectuals, the early dialectologists “turned to the fictive figure of the peasant as a consoling force […]. In the midst of all the enormous social changes […], the

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dialect-speaking peasant stood for continuity, purity and an important link to the rural past” (1996: 167).²³ But interest in NORM speakers derived from other, more strictly linguistic reasons as well, and these reasons are directly related to what Milroy (2001: 533) has labeled the “standard ideology.” As described above, the standard ideology presupposes the belief in the existence of a standard, classical, or canonical form of any language, i.e., the belief that any language exists in a single “true” or “correct” form. What this, in turn, implies is the idea of uniformity or homogeneity, which, as also noted above, is a goal of standardization as a process but not usually one of its outcomes. All languages, standard or non-standard, are variable within themselves, and they are also in a continuous process of change. Nevertheless, the idea that languages exist in static, invariant forms is, as already indicated, an important theoretical and methodological foundation of major twentieth-century approaches to language but actually, as shown above, also played an important role in the nineteenth century, in which linguists, in defining their object of study, resorted to the standard as the central form and equated it with the language as a whole. But a crucial element of the standard ideology, i.e., the belief that every language must exist in some authoritative, invariant form, may also have underlain the emergent interest in NORM speakers in early dialectology. As Milroy (1999: 17–18) has put it, this emphasis on unique invariant forms can be shown to be wholly or partly a consequence of standardisation – specifically a consequence of the fact that the languages most studied have been standard languages, and of the fact that when non-standard varieties have been studied they too have often been studied as though they had invariant canonical forms. English dialectology, for example, has often concentrated on eliciting what are regarded as the “genuine” dialect forms, and intrusions from outside have sometimes been treated as “contaminations” of the “genuine” dialect. Indeed, it is the “standard” language that usually takes the blame for these intrusions.

23 Of course, an interest in the countryside and its lore and language, songs and dances, and customs and stories had been part of Romanticism all over Europe, and the idea of the inarticulate peasant, inspired by Rousseau’s celebration of life untainted by civility, was also an eighteenth-century idea. Whereas, however, in the eighteenth century, the fascination with folk or even “savage” life was restricted to “flickers of occasional interest in a prevailing pattern of indifference” toward regional varieties of English (Bailey 1996: 273), in the nineteenth century interest in local speechways and peasant life took on a new and increased significance in conjunction with the comprehensive rejection of the industrial-urban way of life that appears to have been so deeply felt by many English artists and intellectuals at the time and is expressed pithily in a contemporary saying: “God made the country, and man made the town” (Kumar 2003: 212).

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We have seen above that the locus of the speech of “old England” was the “illiterate peasant.” But he was not only the locus of “pure” dialectal speech in the sense of ‘oldest, least altered’ but also of “genuine” dialect speech in the sense of ‘most authentic, authoritative.’ In other words, NORMs were seen as the only valid and valuable representatives of their form of speech – the “true” and “uncontaminated” dialect. Thus, the focus on uniform, homogenous states of language and “typical,” i.e., monolingual, non-mobile speakers as the most trustworthy source of information characterizes both the study of standard languages and that of dialects. It is, however, clearly an offshoot of the standard ideology as it developed in the second half of the nineteenth century. As Mufwene (1998: 113–114) puts it, [t]he tradition has […] been to select the native speaker (especially one who is monolingual and has not moved from his geographical and social environment […] in which his variety has been spoken) as the ultimate and reliable source of information on the norm of that language. […] Less reliable are those native speakers who have been mobile and are likely to have to have been “contaminated” by influences untypical of their language varieties […]. While some idealization is unavoidable even in the most realistic analyses, descriptions of language varieties spoken in native communities with significant proportions of “contaminated” native speakers would be more accurate if they also reflected the state or extent of their “contamination,” i.e., of its heterogeneity.

While modern sociolinguistics, especially of the variationist tradition, has put much effort into demonstrating that languages and dialects are not homogeneous and uniform in reality but evidence systematic patterning both diachronically and synchronically, some of the traditional assumptions just sketched have remained. There is, still, the focus on “natural” or “authentic” styles, and the “quest for the vernacular” can be described as the holy grail of sociolinguistic methodology. Even though the vernacular is assumed to be inherently variable, this variability is seen as more systematic than that extant in the standard-influenced styles acquired later in life. The vernacular is thus the speech style that is considered most representative of a speaker’s or a speech community’s grammar and therefore of the greatest interest to the linguist both theoretically and methodologically, while the standard constitutes a more formal, “super-posed” style which rarely yields “systematic data” (Labov 1984: 29). This assumption has only recently been questioned. Singler (2007: 126–127), for example, says that, [a]fter all, the assertion that casual speech is more “systematic” than careful speech is axiomatic and has not to my knowledge been proven (if, indeed, it is provable). Further, the statement that the vernacular (casual speech) “gives us the most systematic data for our analysis of linguistic structure” need not imply that careful speech is a-systematic.

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One of the fundamental problems of sociolinguistics is the contradiction between the quest for the vernacular and what has been labeled the “observer’s paradox” (1984: 30), i.e., the fact that the mere presence of a researcher will induce a speaker to shift to more formal and therefore less systematic speech styles. An elaborate set of techniques has been devised to overcome the observer’s paradox and access “authentic” vernacular speech; what is important in this context is that attention to the observer’s paradox is also not an “invention” of twentiethcentury linguistics but is already evident in the writings of nineteenth-century phoneticists. It will be dealt with in more detail below.

6.2.6 Rural, traditional dialects vs. new, urban forms of speech With the explosive growth in population and with urbanization, with the development of capitalism and the growth of industry came a new class consciousness; the term actually first occurs in English in an 1887 translation of Marx’s Capital, as Bailey (1996: 365) points out. Class as a category describing social structure was on the whole very much a nineteenth-century “invention”; whereas before, rank and order had been the terms of choice in discussing social structure (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003: 32–36), the nineteenth century saw a proliferation of terms involving class, such as class consciousness or class conflict (Bailey 1996: 365). As Bailey points out, this proliferation was very much the result of the rise of the new discipline of sociology “with its obsession for classification.” The study of the dialects not only reflected but also substantiated this new nineteenth-century class consciousness, as it clearly opposed three inherently and unalterably different forms of English speech: the traditional, rural dialects, the educated spoken standard, and urban, working-class, “vulgar” speech. Only the former two were considered “legitimate” varieties of spoken English, with folk speech clearly subordinate to educated language use in that only the latter really and properly constituted “English” and the former only served to legitimize the latter in that it extended its history backward by providing copious “Saxon” words and “primitive” forms of grammar. The transition from a society of estates or orders to a class-based society has been described as one of the most significant processes characterizing modern British social history; even though the process had clearly begun before the nineteenth century, it reached a climax in the half-century between 1875 and 1925, with its “growing importance of social class and the consolidation of British workingclass culture” (Romaine 1998a: 15). This process was obviously reflected in language, more specifically in the creation and rise to significance of urban speech. That of London was heavily influenced not only by Cockney, even though features

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of that dialect were often singled out for particular opprobrium (cf. below), but also by the rural dialects of the neighboring counties of Essex, Kent, Suffolk, and Middlesex, as tens of thousands of people from the countryside there flocked to the metropolis in search for work. As Romaine (1998a: 15) points out, “[w]e now know that a number of features made their way into working-class London speech from their regional dialects, and eventually became part of middle-class usage.” The irony about the process to be described in this section is thus that, while dialectologists rushed to the countryside to preserve the remnants of Anglo-Saxon language via the recording of traditional folk speech, the folk at the same time poured into towns, where they created their own, new form of speech. As soon as urban speech moved into linguistic focus, it was immediately contrasted with both standard spoken English and traditional folk speech; in both cases, it fared badly and was evaluated negatively on all counts. That late nineteenth-century linguists saw a clear tripartite division in terms of the varieties of English becomes clear in the following quotes: It has not been without an important practical object that we have thus invited attention to the progressive tendency of our literary language and the stationary character of the vulgar tongues. It must be obvious even from this extremely cursory glance that our English, enriched with French, Latin, Greek, and other words, and formed into complicated sentences by rules of grammatical construction, is an unknown tongue to the masses, especially in some districts. […] It is not merely the peasantry of rural districts that are thus ignorant. The lower middle classes of our large towns are deplorably so, and many of higher position too; but because they can express themselves tolerably in speaking or writing on the business of their every-day life, which requires no extensive vocabulary or complicated paragraphs, it is taken for granted, that they understand all that can possibly be said to them in the language which we call English. (Foster and Foster 1995 [1860]: 328)

The preceding excerpt once again contrasts “our English,” which is defined as the literary standard, with the language of the “masses,” these being divided into “the peasantry of rural districts” and the “lower middle classes of our large towns”; the important point, however, is that both of them are “ignorant” of standard (written) English. What follows from this if, as just pointed out, this form of English is defined as the language per se, is that such population groups are not even really speakers of English. The use of vulgar to refer to both urban working-class speech and the speech of “the peasantry of rural districts” evidenced in the above quote is unique; usually, the adjective was reserved for town dwellers of the “lower sort” and clearly carried negative connotations of the kind “of low breeding and inferior education” as well as “below the mark in intelligence, self-respect, and energy.” This is demonstrated in the next excerpt, which contains Alford’s scathing criti-

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cism of “the worst of all faults in pronunciation,” the use or non-use of the wordinitial glottal fricative: I pass from spelling to pronunciation. And first and foremost, let me notice that worst of all faults, the leaving out of the aspirate where it ought to be, and putting it in where it ought not to be. This is a vulgarism not confined to this or that province of England, nor especially prevalent in one county or another, but common throughout England to persons of low breeding and inferior education, principally to those among the inhabitants of towns. Nothing so surely stamps a man as below the mark in intelligence, self-respect, and energy, as this unfortunate habit: in intelligence, because, if he were but moderately keen in perception, he would see how it marks him; in self-respect and energy, because if he had these he would long ago have set to work and cured it. (Alford 1864: 37)

To linguists of the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, urban speech, particularly that of the working classes, represented everything that was despicable linguistically. The large towns had become symbols of linguistic degradation, and their speakers were the worst of all. They were unfavorably contrasted not only with standard speakers but also with the users of rural dialects. This tripartite division lasted well into the twentieth century, as the following quote from the Newbolt Report (1921: 65) shows: “It is emphatically the business of the Elementary School to teach all its pupils who either speak a definite dialect or whose speech is disfigured by vulgarisms, to speak standard English, and to speak it clearly, and with expression.” It was elevated to the status of a theoretical and methodological axiom in the work of Henry Sweet, who defined his subject matter, “educated spoken English,” by delimiting it from, on the one hand, “provincial English” and, on the other, “vulgar” speech: “The object of this book [i.e., A Primer of Spoken English] is to give a faithful picture – a phonetic photograph – of educated spoken English as distinguished from vulgar and provincial English on the one hand, and literary English on the other hand” (Sweet 1911: v). Wyld made the same distinction: “[W]e speak of Good English, or Standard English, or Pure English, as distinct from what is known as Provincial English, or Vulgar English” (Wyld 1907: 49). In the following excerpt, he notes the historical legitimacy of “a Provincial or Regional accent” and advocates bidialectalism for those possessing “a native Provincial Dialect”: The first thing is to realise that in itself a Provincial or Regional accent is just as respectable, and historically quite as interesting, as Standard English. […] The best thing to do, if you have a native Provincial Dialect, is to stick to it, and speak it in its proper place, but to learn also Standard English. (Wyld 1909: 208)

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Vulgarisms, by contrast, have nothing of that respectability; rather, they are defined as intrusions, “importations,” and therefore inauthentic, “bad” English or even non-speech: a “noisy clatter” consisting of a “series of jerks.” Vulgarisms, thus, are unnatural and therefore “perfectly indefensible” (Wyld 1969 [1906]: 375). What we see in these various epithets is the construction of a hierarchy of varieties: at the top stood standard English as spoken in casual encounters by educated Englishmen; this form of the language was contrasted with the traditional rural dialects, which were also evaluated favorably in as much as they contributed to the historicization and thus legitimization of the standard language; at the bottom of the hierarchy stood the urban varieties, which, as new forms of speech, not only lacked history entirely but had to be considered inauthentic in that they resulted from their speakers’ attempts at “false refinement”; as such, they also had to be seen as threats to the standard language, which had to be protected from such “abortive creations” (Wyld 1969 [1906]: 380). To sum up this chapter, the establishment of the standard ideology, i.e., the belief that any language exists in a single “true,” “correct,” and “authenticated” form, together with its codification in, e.g., the OED and its promotion in a wide range of contexts and functions led to the devaluing of other varieties of the same language. This devaluing did not affect all of them equally. On the one hand, there were the traditional rural dialects, which had to be studied and preserved (if not as actual media of communication) because they contributed to the historicization and thus legitimization of the standard by endowing it with a venerable pedigree of “primitive” forms and “Anglo-Saxon” words. Comparative-historical linguistics had demonstrated that attention to these forms of English was useful if not inevitable in reconstructing the earlier stages of the language. The folk dialects, therefore, not only had histories of their own but also and crucially contributed to the history of the standard language; they therefore moved into sharp linguistic focus in conjunction with the establishment of the standard as the central form of the language. Opposed to both of these forms of speech were the new, urban varieties. These were labeled “vulgar” speech by latter nineteenth-century linguists and described as “abortive” attempts by “ignorant” speakers at imitating the standard. What was even worse, it was these forms of speech which were seen as threatening the standard by vulgarizing it; the latter, therefore, had to be protected from the former. Although they were probably used by the majority of the population in Britain even then, they were not seen as representative of the language and therefore not of interest to linguistics; this was primarily because of the fact that they were “new” varieties which lacked histories of their own. Late nineteenth-century linguists thus distinguished two “legitimate” forms of speech from “illegitimate” language use, with standard English inevitably at the top of

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the pile. The dialects had the virtue of the “primitive” and the “pure” and thus not only constituted an essential part of the linguistic past which had resulted in the glorious present but also served to (d)evaluate new forms of speech. Nevertheless, it had to recognize its subordinate position and eventually yield to the standard.

7 Spoken vs. written language and the native speaker 7.1 Why are there no native writers? The discovery of spoken language and its acceptance as a legitimate object of scientific analysis marks one of the most decisive theoretical and practical turning points in the history of language-science. […] In as much as linguistics turned towards the analysis of spoken language and actual speech events, „Native Speaker“ became one of its head figures. (Ehlich 1981: 154) In establishing a testing procedure [for native speaker status], I think only externalized linguistic features should be considered and pronunciation should certainly be one, if not the most important of them. After all, we are trying to define the native „speaker“ of a language. (Paikeday 1985: 23)

The preceding two chapters have traced developments in the notion of standard English in the course of the nineteenth century and have linked it with the nativespeaker concept. It was pointed out that both of these ideas satisfied urgent theoretical and methodological demands in that they solved the problem of how to define the English language. Whereas standard referred to the literary language and actually implied uniformity and homogeneity at least to some extent, standards for spoken English were also debated. In this respect, commonality was clearly unattainable; therefore, standard speech was defined as the utterances of educated speakers of British English. However, the reference to education did not imply that this form of speech could actually be learned; rather, one either was or was not one of the “best” speakers. It was these speakers, also characterized as the “more native speakers,” who were viewed as the owners of the language and norm setters. In short, English was equated to standard English, so only speakers of the latter could be considered “real” speakers of the language. As the quotes in the final section of Chapter 6 show, the strong nineteenthcentury interest in spoken English also played a crucial role in the emergence of the native-speaker concept. The present chapter points to some of the assumptions and arguments that accompanied the emergence of what was later labeled the “ideal speaker-listener.” Reference to the spoken language and the nativespeaker concept are, in fact, so closely associated that the relationship is rarely ever made explicit. Contemporary linguists of all orientations regard speech as the primary form of language. Only critical SLA theorists occasionally question whether the premium put on competence in the spoken language and methods focused on oral interaction are really applicable in SLA contexts worldwide.

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7.1.1 The spoken language, the native speaker, and linguistic theory In the debate surrounding the native speaker, the focus on speech is not questioned. If the concept is defined at all, this happens in terms of competence in the spoken language; writing either receives no mention or is simply listed as an additional requirement. A few examples will suffice to illustrate this. To start off with, even though it is not a definition of the native speaker as such but of what linguistics ought to be concerned with, Chomsky’s remarks on the “ideal speaker-listener” (1965: 3–4) arguably constitute the most influential description of the concept. Note that it is a “speaker-listener” rather than a writerreader who, according to Chomsky, must constitute the center of all linguistic theorizing. Here is a short but typical dictionary definition: the native speaker is simply a person “who has spoken a certain language since early childhood” (McArthur 1992: 682). Even in the literature which looks critically at the notion, the native speaker is defined exclusively as a “speaker.” According to Rampton (2003: 108), [a] particular language is inherited, either through genetic endowment or through birth into the social group stereotypically associated with it. […] Inheriting a language means being able to speak it well. […] Being a native speaker involves the comprehensive grasp of a language.

The following quotes from Paikeday’s investigation into the “linguistic myth” of the native speaker also clearly bring out the focus on spoken language that characterizes the discussion of the concept. Man is described as “Homo loquens” (1985: 12); pronunciation is suggested as “certainly […] one, if not the most important” criterion in “trying to define the native ‘speaker’ of a language” (1985: 23); and a language is defined as “a system of sounds and symbols […] acquired by each new member of the society that speaks the language” (1985: 59). Davies also expounds on phonology as a criterion for “Passing as a Native Speaker” (2003: 72); devotes an entire chapter to “Intelligibility and the Speech community” (2003: 118); and views the production of “Fluent spontaneous discourse” (2003: 201) and the presence of particular “Paralinguistics” such as “facial expression, head and arm movements, body posture and distance” (2003: 202–203), which, obviously, only play a role in spoken interaction, as eminently “relevant to our understanding of the native speaker” (2003: 198). As indicated above, writing is occasionally mentioned but rarely discussed in greater detail. Sometimes, particularly in connection with academic writing, non-native speakers are reproached for not having had their articles or books double-checked by a native speaker (e.g., Paikeday 1985: 47; Piller 2001: 109);

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sometimes, creative writing skills of some sort are listed in criteria enumerations such as Davies (2001: 517): To attempt a definition, the native speaker may be characterized in six ways. The native speaker: […] acquires the L1 of which they are a native speaker in childhood; […] has a unique capacity to produce fluent spontaneous discourse […]; has a unique capacity to write creatively.

What is interesting is that these two forms of writing, i.e., academic and creative, are usually only practiced by a very restricted group of native speakers, namely the highly educated ones discussed above. For linguists in general, speech clearly has priority over writing (cf., e.g., Bolinger and Sears 1981: 274; Lyons 1972: 62–63). A typical account is provided by Pyles and Algeo, whose textbook definition of language as “a system of conventional vocal signals by means of which human beings communicate” (1993: 3) has become a classic: […] speech is primary and writing secondary to language. Human beings have been writing […] for at least 5000 years; but they have been talking for much longer […]. When writing did develop, it was derived from and represented speech, albeit imperfectly […]. Even today, there are spoken languages that have no written form. Furthermore, we all learn to talk well before we learn to write; any human child who is not severely handicapped physically or mentally will learn to talk: a normal human being cannot be prevented from doing so. […] On the other hand, it takes a special effort to learn to write. (1993: 9)

An interesting twist on the theme is added by their remark that if “speaking makes us human, writing makes us civilized” in that it is more permanent, “thus making possible the records that any civilization must have” (1993: 9). The link between writing and “civilization” is dealt with in more detail below. One of the few to criticize the exclusive focus on spoken language is Davis (1999: 73), who points out that linguists tend to forget that it is only through writing that speech becomes visible and thus analyzable, as utterances are extremely variable acoustically and lack sufficient duration. In his view, arguments such as the above have a tradition dating back to the nineteenth century in language study, a tradition which, although antedating the sound spectrograph, was reacting against the non-scientific prescriptivism according to which the written language of certain authors embodied “correct” language.

This quote indicates that it was the nineteenth century in which contemporary ideas about the relationship between speech and writing were shaped in that

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spoken language in its various manifestations moved into the center of linguistic interest. What this means for the notion of the native speaker is that it could not have come into being before that time, i.e., before the nineteenth-century insight into the difference between spoken and written language and the postulate of the priority of speech over writing. That the spoken language also enjoys an almost unquestioned monopoly in all modern approaches to second-language acquisition is almost a commonplace. According to Pennycook (1994: 135–136), “phonocentrism,” i.e., the belief in the priority of spoken language,²⁴ has pervaded applied linguistics from its inception; all of it, whether in the form of the Direct Method, with its emphasis on oral explanation, of post-war Audiolingualism, with its oral drilling, or of the later “communicative approaches,” with their emphasis on “humanistic” or communicative activities, has tended to emphasize oral language as primary and prior to written language.

Numerous commentators have questioned this focus on spoken language and oral interaction in second-language teaching and learning. In their influential critique of traditional SLA research assumptions with regard to bilingual users of English in the Outer Circle, Sridhar and Sridhar point out that much SLA research does not take into account the roles that English plays in the local community. There are many bilinguals who employ English alongside other languages to communicate in a restricted set of domains or functions. In some cases English functions similarly to the H(igh) variety in a diglossic situation, being called upon primarily in public, more or less formal situations, and often in the written mode (1994: 47). It is often assumed that the motivation of learners is inevitably integrative, i.e., “involves admiration for the native speakers of the target language and a desire to become a member of their culture” (1994: 44). In the Outer Circle, this is usually not the case; apart from the fact that native-speaker accents are often “frowned upon” and regarded as “distasteful and pedantic,” sometimes even “affected or […] snobbish” (1994: 45), in many contexts, the acquisition of English is driven by an instrumental motivation such as the necessity to pass an examination, to read academic or other literature in the language, or to access

24 The term phonocentrism actually appears to have been coined by Derrida (1976), who viewed the coupling of writing and speech and the privileging of the latter over the former as a “violent hierarchy” (cf. Selden 1989: 88–89).

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information on the world-wide web; it thus naturally focuses on the written language. Along the same line, Valdés (1998: 6) doubts whether skills in the spoken language are actually relevant to what is usually the focus of foreign language teaching at Western universities, i.e., literary and cultural studies. In her view, no research has been done on the question of what kinds of language proficiencies are required in order to work in the area of literary and cultural studies. […] We have no evidence, for example, that creditable “readings” of foreign language texts demand excellent control of the structure of the spoken language.

It is also pointed out (e.g., Pennycook 1994: 136) that most people learning English as a second language have already acquired literacy in a first language and are therefore at a very different stage both cognitively and linguistically than a child learning his or her first language; however, if second-language learning is viewed as a process akin to first-language acquisition theoretically and/or methodically, this inevitably trivializes both the learner and the learning situation. At the other end of acquisition process, the premium put on spoken language in SLA tremendously privileges native speakers as teachers. Auerbach, for example, critically examines the English-only-in-the-classroom practice that has come to be one of the mainstays of the communicative approach; in her view, it not only unnecessarily and unfairly excludes the experience of non-native speakers in the teaching process (1993: 25–28) but also prevents successful uses of the learners’ native language in both initial literacy and ESL instruction for adults (1993: 9). Kramsch (1997) also questions the idealization of the native speaker in second-language teaching and links it to the importance placed on spoken communicative competence in SLA research since the 1960s. Finally, according to Widdowson, the insistence on the use of “authentic, naturally occurring language” in the classroom (1994: 386) privileges native-speaker teachers and invests them with an undue authority which derives from the fact that “authenticity can only be determined by insiders.” Thus, native-speaker teachers are deferred to not only in respect to competence in the language but also to competence in language teaching. They become the custodians and arbiters not only of proper English but of proper pedagogy as well. (1994: 387)

Interestingly, in applied linguistics, too, the belief in the priority of spoken language has been traced back to the nineteenth-century. Stern (1983: 163), for example, indicates that “the primacy of speech in language teaching […] is the oldest of the reform trends” but at the same time was backed up by the growing

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“interest in the descriptive study of the spoken language in its own right.” According to Phillipson (1992b: 186), the teaching methods concentrating on spoken language evolved as a result of the “Reform” movement in foreign language teaching associated with the discovery of phonetics and such names as Sweet, Jespersen, Palmer, and Hornby. The theme linking these thinkers is a concentration on classroom methodology and the promotion of good spoken language learning habits and activities.

Mackin (1964: iv) also traces the concentration on speech in SLA research and teaching to the late nineteenth-century reform movement and more specifically to Henry Sweet: “He considered that a knowledge of phonetics was the first essential step in learning a foreign language.” Pennycook (1994: 135), finally, links general linguistic and applied linguistic phonocentrism: In the same way that linguistic phonocentrism appears to have arisen both out of a long philosophical tradition and out of immediate academic struggles at the turn of the century in Europe, applied linguistics seems to have adopted this emphasis partly because of linguistics and partly because there were now better scientific tools available for the analysis and teaching of the sound system.

In the following sections, I will trace the emergence of the strong belief in the priority of spoken language in the nineteenth-century linguistic literature and link it with the native-speaker concept.

7.1.2 The relationship of speech and writing before the mid-nineteenth century As indicated above, the absolute priority of speech over writing is a nineteenthcentury idea. Before that time, “in an age when recorded speech was unimaginable and writing alone promised permanence, it was perhaps only natural that the written word served as the model for speaking” (Finegan 1998: 550). Thus, the relationship between the two modes of language was perceived in exactly the opposite way of how it is viewed today: Change, says Hooker, is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better. There is in constancy and stability a general and lasting advantage, which will always overbalance the slow improvements of gradual correction. Much less ought our written language to comply with the corruptions of oral utterance, or copy that which every variation of time or place makes different from itself, and imitate those changes, which will again be changed, while imitation is employed in observing them. (Johnson 1755: 3)

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The written language provided stability and “constancy,” and it was that mode that grammarians and lexicographers turned to in their search for models of usage. Often, it was the practice of great authors such as Shakespeare, Spenser, or Milton that the eighteenth-century codifiers upheld in their works, as Johnson did with his famous reference to the “wells of English undefiled” (1755: 11). As Finegan points out, two facts are likely to have contributed to this exclusive reliance on written sources: first, in the absence of recording devices other than pencil and paper, examples of good spoken usage would have been very difficult to come by and would have been subject “to contest in ways in which written ones would not” have been; second, to admit spoken language would have resulted in an “excessive latitude in choosing authorities” (1998: 551). Thus, as far as the codification of the language in grammars and dictionaries was concerned, the written language was the exclusive focus in terms of both theory and methodology. As for pronunciation, if writing had priority over speech, spelling pronunciations would have to be favored over all others, and, in fact, it was widely held in the eighteenth century that spoken English was the better the closer it was to the written mode (cf. Görlach 1999: 27). Not all codifiers recommended spelling pronunciations, however. Particularly the great eighteenth-century elocution masters favored pronunciations which reflected the rapidly progressing social stratification of the period more than those which mirrored the written language. Sheridan (1991 [1762]: 68), for example, discusses spelling in connection with the v-w confusion prevalent among Cockney speakers; his general recommendation is to abide by the “polite pronunciation” employed “at the court end” of the metropolis. In sum, “[w]ith respect to pronunciation, there was no consensus” as to what the norm ought to be (Finegan 1998: 551). In the course of the nineteenth century, all of this changed so that, eventually, Max Müller (1862: 58) was able to pronounce confidently that language “lives in being spoken, it dies with each word that is pronounced, and is no longer heard. It is a mere accident that language should ever have been reduced to writing, and have been made the vehicle of a written literature.” The following section traces the developments that enabled speech to assume priority over writing as the primary mode of language and ultimately the native speaker to emerge. These developments have to do with the Romantic emphasis on folk speech and the new comparative-historical focus on sound change as well as with the rapid progress, toward the end of the nineteenth century, of phonetics in the description and classification of speech sounds.

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7.1.2.1 The Herderian notion of “Volksstimme” A first glimpse at the importance that spoken language was to assume in the nineteenth century may be had in J. G. Herder’s essay Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache, published in 1772. With this essay, Herder not only expounded the basics of Romantic linguistic theory, which saw language as the Volksstimme, i.e., the outward expression of the spiritual essence of a people or nation, and individual languages as the linguistic realizations of particular historical cultures or civilizations; he also, for the first time, clearly articulated another mainstay of nineteenth-century philology: the assumption that all the life of a language inhered in its spoken form, while written languages were merely dead representations (cf. Dowling 1986: 10–15). In doing so, Herder drew on linguistic arguments centering around the structure of the Hebrew alphabet. In his 1766 Beweis, daß der Ursprung der menschlichen Sprache göttlich sey, J. P Süßmilch had maintained that the fact that all the languages in the world could be represented by alphabets containing no more than twenty-something letters had to be proof of a divine economy in language. Herder denied this, maintaining that particularly the Hebrew alphabet very imperfectly represented speech, as, in its traditional form, it contained the language’s consonants only; the vowels, on account of their living and spiritual nature, escaped representation in writing. Vowels, in Herder’s view, were “sounds of nature” (quoted in Dowling 1986: 11), as they most directly represented human breath, and thus life, in their articulatory structure. The trouble with such an account of language is that “in identifying language with breath he has granted the derivation of the conceptual from the material, the utter dependence of mind or thought on the brute reality of sound itself” (1986: 12). In order to avoid getting too close to materialist accounts of language, Herder insisted that language was contingent upon both the conceptual and the material, and sound became language only by virtue of the thought that permeated it. This thought, according to Herder, was no longer divine or divinely bestowed but dependent upon the constraints of human history. For languages came into being “in conformity with the manner of thinking and seeing of the people […] in a particular country, in a particular time, under particular circumstances” (quoted in Dowling 1986: 14). What this amounts to is the Volksstimme, the Romantic vision of the individuality of a historical culture or civilization as represented in language. In their interpretation of his ideas, Herder’s successors did not always maintain the link between the Volk ‘people’ and the Stimme ‘voice.’ Particularly his Victorian interpreters showed little interest in the spoken language; in their view, British culture and civilization were best represented by the written language in

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general, and by the English of Shakespeare, Milton, and the King James Bible in particular.

7.1.2.2 Coleridge vs. Wordsworth: “Lingua communis” vs. authentic folk speech One of the most important of Herder’s English-speaking followers was Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), and it appears to have been chiefly through Coleridge that German Romantic thought entered the intellectual life of Victorian England (Dowling 1986: 22–23).²⁵ As Dowling describes, Coleridge encountered Herder’s thought in Göttingen, where he studied, among other things, Luther’s translation of the Bible into German. This convinced him that [i]n Luther’s own German writings, and eminently in his translation of the Bible, the German language commenced. I mean the language as it is at present written; that which is called the High-German, as contra-distinguished from the Platt-Teutsch, the dialect of the flat or northern countries, and from the Ober-Teutsch, the language of the middle and Southern Germany. The High German is indeed a lingua communis, not actually the native language of any province, but the choice and fragrancy of all the dialects (quoted in Dowling 1986: 26).

What emerges in this excerpt is the notion of the lingua communis, described by Coleridge as the written variety of a language, not actually spoken anywhere but nevertheless crucially important in that “it seemed to represent an important cultural ideal – an organic yet humanly perfected language capable of voicing an idealized national life” (Dowling 1986: 26). What makes the lingua communis the only variety capable of fulfilling this great task is the fact that it is written – and just like the eighteenth-century codifiers of the language, Coleridge viewed only the written medium as stable and permanent. Stability and permanence, however, were two indispensable prerequisites for the coming-into-being and survival of civilizations in that particular populations were thus able to situate themselves on the long line uniting past,

25 Coleridge is quoted explicitly by a number of authors in the corpus used for this study; it may thus be safely assumed that his ideas were not only widely known but also exercised considerable influence on linguistic thought in English-speaking countries in the second half of the nineteenth century. Note the following examples: “The rule of Coleridge has nowhere a juster application than here: That, when we meet an apparent error in a good author, we are to presume ourselves ‘ignorant of his understanding, until we are certain that we understand his ignorance’” (Marsh 1859: 83); “Coleridge, who keenly appreciated the significance of words, says that there are cases where more knowledge of more value may be conveyed by the history of a word than by the history of a campaign” (Mathews 1876: 283).

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present, and future in a grand historical whole. This link between the written language, stability, and civilization has survived into the present; as indicated above, writing is still often described as a prerequisite of civilization on account of its permanence (e.g., Pyles and Algeo 1993: 9). It was not only history, however, with which the members of a civilization were brought into communion through their use of the written language but also the great national life beyond the confines and contingencies of family, neighborhood, and village with their restricted and restricting modes of speech, the local dialects. Only a variety common to the entire nation – a condition fulfilled only by the written language – was able to create a nationwide discourse universe and thus the “imagined community” described by Anderson (1991: 44): These print-languages laid the bases for national consciousness […] they created unified fields of exchange and communication below Latin and above the spoken vernaculars. Speakers of the huge varieties of Frenches, Englishes, or Spanishes, who might find it difficult or even impossible to understand one another in conversation, became capable of comprehending one another via print and paper. In the process, they gradually became aware of the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in their particular languagefield, and at the same time that only those hundreds of thousands, or millions, so belonged. These fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed, in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community

In sum, Coleridge’s contribution to Victorian thought consisted in the idea of the lingua communis, the written form of the language which lifted the members of a civilization above their partial and contingent lives and united them with their fellow nationals and their history. It is important to note that, even though the idea of the lingua communis was powerfully influenced by Herder’s belief in the historically determined spirit characterizing each people’s inner life, the association of that spirit with the Volksstimme had been severed. For whereas Herder had linked the spirit with the spoken language, in Coleridge’s version of the theme, it was the written language which embodied the national life. This mix-up, however, was not unique to Coleridge’s thought. As Dowling (1986: 32) notes, “Romantic philologists such as Herder’s intellectual heirs Friedrich Schlegel and Wilhelm von Humboldt did not distinguish with any great sense of urgency between written and spoken forms of the language.” Thus, even among German Romantic thinkers, among whom the notion of the Volksstimme had originated, and who were so intently interested in orally transmitted folk songs and fairy tales, spoken and written language were not yet clearly differentiated. In this context, it is interesting to note that what was later named Grimm’s Law first appeared in the second edition of the Deutsche Gram-

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matik (1822), in a section on “letters” (von den Buchstaben); only later, in the third edition of his work (1840) did Grimm rename that section to bring out the sounds (von den Lauten). As Robins (1997: 199) notes in this context, it was the still prevalent insecurity as to the nature and significance of sounds and letters that also permitted the thoroughly unphonetic identification of aspirated plosives such as [ph], [th], [kh], with the corresponding fricatives [f], [θ], [x] (or [h]), an identification surely only possible when the study of sound change was still undertaken as the study of letters.

However, whereas Grimm, Schlegel, and Humboldt simply did not sufficiently distinguish written and spoken language, Coleridge focused on the written language exclusively and thus entirely replaced one side of the Volksstimme equation. Moreover, it was not written language in general that Coleridge was interested in and that he considered the embodiment of the national culture and civilization but rather – and not surprisingly for a poet and critic – the literary language. His convictions on speech and writing, language and literature, and civilization and culture are centrally expounded in the debate on poetic diction between himself and William Wordsworth published in the Biographia Literaria (1817). In the preface to their Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth had rejected eighteenth-century aristocratic norms of taste and literary conventions in favor of a “purified” rustic language that was to be based on folk speech. This was a typically Romantic gesture, of course: the return to the simple and immediate speech of the peasant and the primacy of preverbal feeling rather than of precise expression are common themes in Romantic aesthetic debates. Of course, Wordsworth was well aware of the fact that to use authentic dialectal speech in literary works might cause dislike or repulsion and thus possibly detract from his own success; thus, even though he claimed to be interested in “real” people and “natural” voices, [a]s a poet, he “translated” folk speech into conventional English, the kind that one might expect of a shepherd who had idled a few years at Cambridge and taken a pass degree. (Bailey 1996: 274)

Nevertheless, even “purified” folk speech did not find favor with Coleridge. He argued, as outlined above, that dialectal speech locked its speakers into the confines of their own region, occupation, and associations, and that only the lingua communis, the written medium, brought them into contact with the larger world of ideas. In his view, to employ spoken dialects in poetry amounted less to a grounding of poetic language in the real world than to the demotion of a great

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tradition. By exposing poetry to the forces of spatial and temporal circumstance, one undermined not only the stability, permanence, and thus significance of poetic language itself but also of the culture and civilization that had produced it and that it now sustained. Thus, if that culture and civilization were to be maintained in their greatness, the greatness of the literary tradition would have to be maintained – and this was possible only through the employment of the lingua communis. The conflict between the spoken dialects and the written literary language, on the one hand, and the complex of anxieties surrounding the significance of language for civilization, culture, and the nation, on the other, were to become dominant themes in the literature on language and linguistics in general and the English language in particular in the second half of the nineteenth century, and they very clearly surround the emergence of the English native speaker, as illustrated in Marsh’s (1859) lecture, which has been discussed in Chapter 4.

7.1.3 The ascendancy of spoken language The ascendancy of spoken language took place within comparative-historical linguistics and its study of the development of and relationships between the IndoEuropean languages. Initially, however, sounds did not play a prominent role in the new philology. In his famous remarks on the similarities between Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, and other Indo-European languages, Sir William Jones focused on morphological features such as “the roots of verbs” and other “forms of grammar” (quoted in Obst and Schleburg 2004: 14–15). Grammar or, more specifically, morphology was also the focus of the work that laid the methodological foundations of the new discipline (2004: 15), Franz Bopp’s treatise Über das Conjugationssystem der Sanksritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache (1816). In sum, [i]t was indeed the comparison of the inflexional and derivational morphology of Sanskrit and the other Indo-European languages, especially Latin and Greek, on which the early comparatists concentrated. (Robins 1997: 197)

However, the significance of sound correspondences for the comparativist-historical endeavor soon became clear. Rasmus Rask first systematically matched etymologically related words from different languages according to their sound structure and eventually formulated the correspondences now known as Grimm’s Law, still, however, referring to them as “letter changes” (quoted in Robins 1997:

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198). As indicated above, Grimm also initially spoke of “letters” in his account of the famous consonant shift that was later to bear his name. Nevertheless, even though this confusion of terminology afflicted both Rask’s and Grimm’s work, that work “marks a very definite advance on the hitherto rather indiscriminate assumptions on the possibilities of substituting one sound (letter) for another in the history of languages” (Robins 1997: 199). As the knowledge about the regularities of sound changes and their significance for the history and relations of the Indo-European languages increased, terminology tightened. Whereas Bopp (1816: 13, 16, 144) had only mentioned “Regeln des Wohllautes” (‘rules of melodious sound’), “Verwechslung” (‘confusion’), and “zufällige Verwandlung” (‘random change’), Grimm (1821: 580) talked about “schwankende Vokalverhältnisse” (‘volatile vowel relationships’) and their “bis jetzt noch unaufgedeckte Gesetze” (‘rules that have so far not been discovered’). The term sound law (Lautgesetz) seems to have been first used in Bopp (1825: 195). Later (1833: ii), Bopp demanded that the “physical and psychological laws of language [my translation]” be discovered, and Curtius (1845: 3) stated about sound laws that it was “[d]ie Aufgabe der Lautlehre […], diese Gesetze in Bezug auf die einzelnen Sprachen nachzuweisen” (‘the problem of the study of sounds […] to demonstrate these laws in relation to individual languages’). Schleicher (1850: 3), finally, uttered the famous dictum of the “Walten unabänderlicher natürlicher Gesetze, an denen der Wille und die Willkür des Menschen nichts zu ändern vermögen” (‘power of incontrovertible natural laws that the will and choice of men can in no way change’) (quoted in Beyer 1981: 244–245). Nothing in those writers’ works, however, paralleled in strictness the conception and formulation of the sound laws as envisaged by the Neogrammarians, who clearly recognized the necessity of tighter theoretical and methodological foundations if their discipline, linguistics, was to assume its proper place among the sciences.²⁶ To summarize, even though early comparative-historical work did not specifically focus on sounds, the patterns governing the “letter” correlations in related languages soon emerged; with the formulation of the sound laws underlying these correlations, the phonetic-phonological basis of language could no longer

26 The basic premise of the comparative-historical endeavor was that languages could be proved to be related via the investigation of cognates, or sets of words that showed obvious similarities in both form and meaning. The history of individual languages, too, was traced through formal and semantic correspondences observable in the realizations of words in different periods. If the form of a word was subject to random, inexplicable variation, such correspondences rested on shaky ground, and historical linguistic relationships could be proved only with the help of extralinguistic evidence – which would have undermined the nature of linguistics as an autonomous discipline.

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be missed or denied. An important theoretical implication followed from this: language was identical with speech. At least for linguistic analysis, the spoken language was as valuable as the written, the speech of the peasant or “savage” as interesting as the literary language of Shakespeare or the Bible. And even more: whereas spoken language was viewed as “real,” written languages were considered “artificial,” “lifeless,” and “decayed.” This, of course, severely undermined the Victorian equation of a nation’s culture or civilization with its literature as formulated by Coleridge. In terms of methodology, the Neogrammarians also occasioned an important shift. If historical linguistics was to be practiced through the study of spoken language, two fields would have to be moved to the center of the enterprise: phonetics and dialectology. Whereas descriptive phonetics had been practiced successfully by the ancient Indian Sanskrit scholars (Robins 1997: 170–177) and also, to some extent, in Renaissance Europe (1997: 135), it received a tremendous boost in the nineteenth century, particularly in England, from the Neogrammarian insistence that writing and speech must not be confused and that letters only inadequately represented actual pronunciations. The spoken dialects of Europe had been a matter of interest since the Romantic philologists and folklorists had fastened their eyes on the language, history, and mythology of “the people”; the tremendous significance that the dialects were endowed with by the Neogrammarian enterprise derives from the assumption that they represented the latest stage in the diversification of the Indo-European languages and therefore were vital in the discovery and demonstration of principles of sound change. In what follows, I will trace all of these assumptions in the texts of my corpus.

7.1.3.1 The significance of spoken language in the second half of the nineteenth century: Max Müller’s influential Lectures on the Science of Language One of the most important exponents of the new science of language in Britain was Max Müller (1823–1900), who, as a German expatriate, had been appointed to Oxford’s first Chair of Comparative Philology and eventually became one of the best-known Indo-Europeanists of his day. In 1861 and 1863, he held two series of Lectures on the Science of Language, published in 1862 and 1865 respectively, at the Royal Institution in London. As indicated in the introductory chapter of this study, the significance of Müller’s Lectures for the development of linguistics in the English-speaking world of the latter part of the nineteenth century cannot be underestimated. As also indicated, Müller’s aim in these lectures was to establish and substantiate the claims of his discipline as a science. In this respect, science referred to the natural sciences, and the science of language, on account of its subject

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matter, clearly belonged to the latter rather than to the historical sciences: “Physical science deals with the works of God, historical science with the works of man” (Müller 1862: 32). Thus, whereas the older philological approach had treated language “simply as a means” of accessing “the literary monuments which by-gone ages have bequeathed to us” (1862: 32–33), in the new science of language, [d]ialects which have never produced any literature at all, the jargons of savage tribes, the clicks of the Hottentots, and the vocal modulations of the Indo-Chinese are as important, nay, for the solution of some of our problems, more important, than the poetry of Homer, or the prose of Cicero. (1862: 33)

As did the early comparativists and later the Neogrammarians, Müller regarded change as a – if not the – central characteristic of language, which, however, seemed to necessitate the classification of the science of language as a historical discipline. Müller vehemently denied, however, that human agency had anything to do with linguistic change: “We must distinguish between historical change and natural growth. Art, science, philosophy, and religion all have a history; language, or any other production of nature, admits only of growth” (1862: 47). But how do languages grow? If language equals speech, this process must be observable at the phonetic-phonological level, and, in fact, according to Müller, the two principles governing the natural growth of language are “Phonetic Decay” or corruption and “Dialectical Regeneration” (1862: 51). Müller’s explanation of these principles clearly illustrates the exclusive focus on spoken, non-literary language that had by then come to permeate linguistic thought. As for phonetic decay, instead of an explicit definition, Müller forwards and discusses numerous examples, such as English twenty for “two-ten” (1862: 52). Phonetic decay, in his view, destroys “the most essential character of all human speech, namely, that every part of it should have a meaning” (1862: 53); therefore, once the process has set in, the words affected by it can only be maintained “artificially or by tradition” (1862: 54). To counter impending extinction, language must possess counterforces, which are to be found in dialectical regeneration. According to Müller, an understanding of this process necessitates a clear definition of the term dialect, and it is in this definition (1862: 58) that we find one of the most forceful expressions of the new belief in the priority of dialectal speech over literary language: “The real and natural life of language is in its dialects,” whereas writing amounts to “accident” and must be considered “artificial” but nevertheless towers over the former in the fashion of a “tyranny.” But Müller goes even further, for, according to the science of language, dialects must no longer be regarded as mere “corruptions of the literary language”

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but as tremendous assets, both for their speakers, whom they provide with a greater wealth of vocabulary items than the latter, and for linguists, whom they present with “more primitive” forms, which, on account of their antiquity, constitute crucially important pieces in the Indo-European comparative-historical puzzle (1862: 60). Literary languages, by contrast, become “stationary” and “stagnant” and “pay for their temporary greatness by inevitable decay” – all because they are no longer allowed to do what is most natural for language, i.e., to change. Thus, according to the new science of language, literary language, whether “the poetry of Homer, […] the prose of Cicero” (Müller 1862: 33), or the drama of Shakespeare, amounts to nothing more than a dead form of language, just as it succeeds in withdrawing itself from the inevitable and all-pervading instability and impermanence of human speech, whereas the “wild and illiterate tribes of Siberia, Africa, and Siam” possess languages full of “power” and life. Moreover, Müller claims that the natural reconstitution of languages via dialectical regeneration involves “political commotions” and “religious and social struggles” in which the “higher classes” of society are either “crushed” or forced to mix with the lower ones, state and church property is destroyed, and cultural achievements are annihilated – in short, riot, revolt, and revolution (1862: 68–69). Such passages must have portended doom to Victorian audiences, which had adopted Coleridge’s belief in the identity of national spirit and literary language and had made this equation the foundation of all the hopes they held for their culture and civilization. And those hopes were grand, indeed; at least since the middle of the century, English writers like Newman (1947 [1854]) regarded their society and civilization not only as the best in the world but as the epitome of society and civilization as such: This civilization, together with the society which is its creation and its home, is so distinctive and luminous in its character, so imperial in its extent, so imposing in its duration, and so utterly without rival upon the face of the earth, that the association may fitly assume to itself the title of “Human Society,” and its civilization the abstract term “Civilization” (quoted in Dowling 1986: 33).

Müller must have been aware of such associations, and, in fact, according to Dowling (1986: 67–68), it is largely his “reassuring portrayal of scientific philology” which prevented “widespread anxiety” from occurring among the recipients of the new linguistic doctrine: “For in Müller’s idiosyncratic and soothing version of the new philology, ‘science’ did not diminish literature or subvert the noumenal realm of values that underlay civilization” (1986: 68). The following excerpt, also quoted in Dowling (1968: 68), illustrates this. It also shows that religion constituted a very important pillar in Müller’s conservative portrayal of the

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science of language. Müller’s firm conviction in this respect rested on his theory of linguistic roots, which stood not only at the beginning of all human language but also crucially distinguished it from animal communication by guaranteeing its immaterial, spiritual character: And now, that generations after generations have passed away, with their languages, – adoring and worshipping, the name of God, – preaching and dying in the name of God, – thinking and meditating over the name of God, – there the old word stands still, as the most ancient monument of the human race – ære perennius – breathing to us the pure air of the dawn of humanity, carrying with it all the thoughts and sighs, the doubts and tears of our by-gone brethren, and still rising up to heaven with the same sound from the basilicas of Rome and the temples of Benares, as if embracing by its simple spell millions and millions of hearts, in their longing desire to give utterance to the unutterable, to express the inexpressible. (Müller 1995 [1851]: 162)

Roots, according to Müller (1862: 384), are “phonetic types” which exist, “as Plato would say, by nature; though with Plato we should add that, when we say by nature, we mean by the hand of God.”²⁷ When the majesty of Creation first exhibited itself to man’s senses, a divinely bestowed instinct or “creative faculty,” which later atrophied because of disuse, supplied “each conception, as it thrilled for the first time through the brain” with a distinctive sound or sound combination. Thus, even though a process of natural selection must have later reduced the multitude of phonetic types, there must have initially been a boundless variety of such sound-thought combinations. In sum, Müller’s account of language, even though it crucially centers on the sounds of speech and thus on the material side of language, is far removed from any kind of materialist theory. In fact, in his view (1995 [1873]), materialist thinking is inapplicable to language, as materials themselves are entirely devoid of meaning. Müller’s theory of roots hinges on his a priori assumption that language is thought and thought is language: “Without speech no reason, without reason no speech” (1865: 70). Roots are the link between language as sound and human cognition; they offer “the mystic nexus between mind and matter” (Dowling 1986: 71).

27 It is interesting to note that Müller attributes this view to “Professor Heyse,” whose works “have been very carefully published since his death by one of his pupils, Dr. Steinthal” (1862: 384). Hermann Steinthal, in turn, in a chapter “Von der Liebe zur Muttersprache” (1880), gives an account of the native language that, in parts, sounds almost like a literal translation of Marsh (1859; cf. Chapter 4). It is unclear to me at this point whether or what kind of a connection might have existed, but it does not seem entirely far-fetched to assume one, given the international orientation of scholars of all disciplines even in the nineteenth century.

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It was exactly this “mystic nexus” which later generations of scholars were to deny. In the meantime, however, Müller’s influential Lectures had established one important premise of the new science of language: language was sound; therefore, its “real” life resided in the spoken dialects, and literary languages had to be considered “artificial” and decayed. This, of course, threatened the Victorian notion of the lingua communis, which had brought forth the great monuments of English culture, such as the King James Bible and Shakespeare’s works, and which was viewed as the reflection and carrier of all that was valuable in English civilization. The linguistic literature of the second half of the nineteenth century is full of attempts at repelling this threat. Whereas Müller vaguely reinstated literature and strongly advocated faith, Marsh (1859), in Coleridgean spirit, appealed to the significance of the written language and the duty and privilege of individual masters of language in preserving it (cf. chaper 4). The following section comments on some other excerpts illustrating the “phonocentric” turn that linguistics had taken and points out some of the implications that were seen to derive from the assumption that language was speech, and speech only.

7.1.3.2 Late nineteenth-century thought on speech and writing A short but pertinent comment on contemporary linguistic theory and methodology is supplied by an anonymous writer: “Till we look upon all languages with perfect impartiality, ranging side by side the dialect of Plato and of some naked savage, we are in no position to enter on the study of philology” (Anonymous 1995 [1866]: 91). W. D. Whitney (1875: 178) is more explicit; according to him, linguistics has “democratized our views” in that, all of a sudden, any form of speech is “just as much a language” as any other. The literary language is just “one of the forms of English”; it is demoted to the status of “only” a “dialect” used “by the educated class for certain purposes”; and all forms of language have the same value to the linguist. Whitney continues by distinguishing carefully between the use of the term dialect in linguistics and in “popular parlance”; whereas in the latter, it always carries evaluative undertones in terms of “dignity and importance,” in scientific usage, it is meant to be value-free, denoting simply “one of a body of related forms of speech.” In this account, the new science of language is overthrowing the value system associated with a particular established terminology and way of viewing the linguistic world, in which the literary variety alone is accorded language status, and the spoken forms of the language are called dialects. This issue will be treated in more detail below. An important piece on the relationship between spoken and written language is the following:

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In philology phonetics is gradually assuming its due importance; it is beginning to be known that language is nothing but sounds associated with ideas, so that to ignore sounds is to ignore an essential part of it. […] But the phrase “written language” still exercises that power of confusion for which its ordinary use admirably fits it. If a man has been photographed, he may be called a photographed man; but few people would apply this name to the photograph, and no one would be thereby induced to take the picture for a human being. Similarly, if a language has been represented by written symbols, it is appropriately called a written language; thanks to travellers and missionaries, there are now few which have not a more or less perfect claim to the title. But the term is also universally used to denote the representation, and, further, to distinguish the representation from the original, which has therefore acquired the name “spoken language”; as if the term “photographed man” came to be applied chiefly and distinctively to portraits, so that men had to be called “living men.” As if this were not sufficiently confusing, writing is not only called language, but believed to be language. Many philologists think that when they have compared those always imperfect and often incorrect representations of languages which, except with living tongues, are the sole means we have of knowing them, they have discovered linguistic relations; and if they allude at all to the sounds which are the real languages, treat pronunciation as an accident of little importance. More accurate results would be obtained by studying men solely from rough and faded portraits; little mistake is possible as to the meaning of the artist’s symbols, however conventional they may be, but the determination of the phonetic values of letters is one of the most difficult parts of linguistic investigation. (Nicol 1995 [1872]: 116–117)

Even though it comes from an article entitled “English philology,” it deals almost exclusively with the progress of phonetics in Britain; with orthographic reform and the pros and cons of phonetic spelling; and with the indispensability of good articulation – evidence of the great significance that the study of spoken language had assumed by then. In order to illustrate the relationship between speech and writing, Nicol employs a variant of the mirror analogy; according to him, there are still many who not only call writing language but also believe that it is. In his view, therefore, the term spoken language should not be used, because it implies that there might be such a thing as written language. Because writing so inaccurately reflects speech, Nicol demands great care and caution in philological investigations: “Many philologists think that when they have compared those always imperfect and often incorrect representations of languages […], they have discovered linguistic relations.” Another point behind Nicol’s insistence on the primacy of speech over writing and the importance of phonetics for philology is the attempt to establish the study of language as a “real” or “proper” science. As one of the first to do so explicitly, Nicol consequently argues for the separation of linguistics from the study of literature; in his view, the two disciplines have as much in common as the study of “vegetable physiology” and “taste in arranging bouquets” (1995 [1872]: 117–119). However, in Nicol’s view there are also insurmountable differences between

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earlier schools of British philology and modern, scientific linguistics; he chides “[p]eople destitute of any knowledge of the science” who nevertheless had the presumptuousness “to edit manuscripts in any language they understand at all.” What Nicol seems to be alluding to here is the so-called “Anglo-Saxon controversy,” which is dealt with in Chapter 9 in connection with the racial origins of the English native speaker. Finally, in Nicol’s view, a language user is not equivalent to a linguist: “It would be as correct to think that he who can use sword and spear is therefore well acquainted with the chemistry of iron”; philology, as the study of the nature and history of languages, is not equivalent to knowledge of those languages. What this point foreshadows is the distinction between native speakers, who have knowledge “how to” but whose intuitions about language must be distrusted, and expert linguists, who have knowledge “that” and control the accumulation of linguistic facts and the generation of theories about those facts. The following excerpt also explains Müller’s principles of linguistic growth. Note how the language as a whole (“our English language”) is equated with literary English, i.e., its written variety, and opposed to the “provincial dialects”: To understand phonetic decay, we must premise that all grammatical terminations were originally independent words which have lost their independent meaning. […] This same process of phonetic decay may also be seen in the manner of which the terminations of verbs have been formed; for instance, the past of “I love,” was originally formed of two verbs, “I love, did,” which finally, by this law, became diminished into “I loved.” […] To understand the second process by which languages become changed – dialectical regeneration – it is necessary to premise, that the natural life of all language is in its dialects; when any becomes the medium of a settled community, when it becomes stratified in a literature, its natural growth ceases, or is only contingently maintained by intermixture with the former. Our English language, for instance, has long ceased to be creative – centuries have passed since any great addition has been made to its vocabulary or idiom; but, in its provincial dialects, new forms are perpetually springing up […]. (Irwin 1995 [1862]: 302–303)

The next excerpt also debates the relationship between spoken and written language: language “proper” consists in speech, which is a “natural product,” and writing is – like dress – artificial but necessary in civilized society. Note also how races are simply assumed to be the most natural of human aggregates (“race or community of human beings”) and the terms nation and race are basically used synonymously – another issue to be discussed more fully in Part III: [I]n its proper nature language is independent of writing. Writing is only a visible representation of language, which in itself consists […] of sounds uttered by the voice and the organs of articulation. […] Every language that has come to be written has also existed in an unwritten state. No language has been born a written language […]; with much more

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truth might writing be called the dress of language. It is an artificial or non-natural addition which language assumes as it grows up and gets civilized […]. What is never to be forgotten, however, is, that, while writing is unquestionably and by universal admission artificial, language proper is essentially a natural product. […] A race or community of human beings without a language would be as extraordinary a phenomenon as a race without hands or without heads. […] As for literature, it is not the synonyme even of written language. It is not either coextensive with that, or limited to that. […] literature is not, like language, a necessary product of our humanity. Man has been nowhere found without a language: there have been and are many nations and races without a literature. A language is to a people a necessary of existence [sic]; a literature is only a luxury. (Craik 1875: 21–23)

The equation between writing and civilization is picked up in the following passage. Behind the assumption that “civilised nations” eventually develop written languages to represent the sounds of language “upon paper,” which, albeit in less nationalistic form, still emerges in definitions of language such as Pyles and Algeo’s (1993: 9; cf. above), lies a well-known functionalist argument: the more developed a speech community’s intellectual capacities and thus the domains and functions that need to be expressed, the more developed its language, or, put the other way round, languages expand and improve with the increasing demands that their speakers’ expressive wants and needs put on them, which, in turn, are determined by a speech community’s mental state of development. This idea is also discussed in more detail in Part III: What a Language is. – A Language is a number of connected sounds which convey a meaning. These sounds, carried to other persons, enable them to know how the speaker is feeling, and what he is thinking. More than ninety per cent of all language used is spoken language; that which is written forms an extremely small proportion. But, as people grow more and more intelligent, the need of written language becomes more and more felt; and hence all civilised nations have, in course of time, slowly and with great difficulty made for themselves a set of signs, by the aid of which the sounds are, as it were, indicated upon paper. But it is the sounds that are the language, and not the signs. The signs are a more or less artificial, and more or less accurate, mode of representing the language to the eye. Hence the names language, tongue, and speech are of themselves sufficient to show that it is the spoken, and not the written, language that is the language, – that indeed gives life and vigour to the other. (Meiklejohn 1899: 3)

What also emerges very clearly in this passage is what has been labeled the “telementational fallacy” (Harris 1981: 9), i.e., the assumption that the task of language is simply to transfer idea X from speaker A to hearer B. This is possible because ultimately the ideas that words stand for are universal – a thought which can be traced back to Aristotle but, according to Harris, has permeated Western linguistics up to the present. The “telementational fallacy” is crucially supplemented by the “determinacy fallacy, or ‘fixed code’ fallacy” (Harris 1981: 10), which provides

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the explanation of how telementation works: if ideas are universal, all it takes for them to be exchanged between speakers is a fixed set of symbols linking ideas and sounds – et voilà, language. The “determinacy fallacy” can still be detected behind arguments appealing to a common core, native-speaker standards, etc. in the discussion concerning mutual (un)intelligibility among World Englishes, as discussed in Chapter 2. The following excerpt appeals to the artificial/natural or living/dead distinction in order to describe the difference between spoken and written language. This distinction is then linked to the components of the English vocabulary: the Latin words are “fixed,” “catalogued and imprisoned in our dictionaries,” whereas “the genuine English words” have “life and movement” and express “our inmost thoughts and our deepest feelings.” Thus, the spoken form of English is the true soul of the language, as it consists primarily of native words that best express English feelings and sentiments: The Spoken Language and the Written Language – a Caution. – We must not forget what has been said about a language, – that it is not a printed thing – not a set of black marks upon paper, but that it is in truest truth a tongue or a speech. Hence we must be careful to distinguish between the spoken language and the written or printed language; between the language of the ear and the language of the eye; between the language of the mouth and the language of the dictionary; between the moving vocabulary of the market and the street, and the fixed vocabulary that has been catalogued and imprisoned in our dictionaries. If we can only keep this in view, we shall find that, though there are more Latin words in our vocabulary than English, the English words we possess are used in speaking a hundred times, or even a thousand times, oftener than the Latin words. It is the genuine English words that have life and movement; it is they that fly about in houses, in streets, and in markets; it is they that express with greatest force our truest and most usual sentiments – our inmost thoughts and our deepest feelings. Latin words are found often enough in books; but, when an English man or woman is deeply moved, he speaks pure English and nothing else. (Meiklejohn 1899: 281)

Vocabulary differences between spoken and written English pertain not only to kind but also to number. The following excerpt paraphrases Müller’s ideas about the forces of growth in language, i.e., phonetic decay and dialectical regeneration, and links them to “poverty” and “wealth” in word stock. Dialects are described as almost “unbounded in variety,” whereas “speech reduced to writing” is characterized by severe restrictions in that respect: [S]peech reduced to writing loses its essential character, and […] the first tendency of language must have been towards an unbounded variety. Few notions can be more mistaken than that languages advance from poverty to wealth. When a written language has three or four synonyms for any object, its cognate dialects will produce tens or hundreds. Every employment and occupation has its own nomenclature, and would despise the poverty of

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the literary language. While the latter speaks of the young of all sorts of animals, “farmers, shepherds, and sportsmen would be ashamed to use so general a term” […]. Every written language is therefore one which has passed into an artificial condition of arrested growth and inevitable decay. It has lost the power of regeneration which the dialects retain: it is exposed not less than they are to phonetic corruption: it cannot issue out into new forms by any powers of its own. (Cox 1995 [1862]: 257)

Nevertheless, as Irwin (1995 [1865]: 3) explains, the significance of the study of dialects for modern linguistics lies not in their rich and widely differentiated lexical means, but in their phonetic-phonological structure: it is the contemporary dialects, not the classical literary languages, which “let out the secrets of language,” which, in turn, consist in sound laws governing things such as “the interchangeability of guttural and labial tenues.” One of the main goals of linguistics during all of the second half of the nineteenth century was the search for the origins of language. The following excerpt links this obsession with the speech/writing distinction, insisting that it is erroneous, first, to equate written, standardized, literary languages with language in general and, second, to analyze language by resorting only to its written representation, since, as had been pointed out repeatedly (e.g., Tylor 1995 [1866]: 44), “[w]ritten letters can indeed do little more than suggest the real sounds”: In days gone by there was great dispute as to whether Hebrew or Welsh was the veritable idiom of Eden […]. We who live in an age of enlightenment can smile at that […]. Yet a little while and a new generation will be smiling at us. For I may as well be unkind at the outset, and say that the ways whereby we now seek for the primæval tongue are just as wrong, only their vagaries are smothered up in an atmosphere of greater learning. […] The first weak point is that we are […] dealing with literary languages only, and few of us realise what artificial and abnormal things literary languages are. They do not exactly represent the speech of any one, and the speech of the many they ignore altogether. A language, in the literary sense, has no real existence; it is a mere political expression. In every country there are, and always were, unnumbered dialects, one almost for every hill and every dale. […] The second weak point is that we are not dealing with the whole of even a few dialects, but only with the symbols that imperfectly record them. For besides vocabulary and grammar, speech has sound, and sound has range and tone, stress and time, timbre and song, all of which have their tales to tell, if we could listen. Take an instance. The speech of Kerry and Yorkshire are much alike to the eye, both mere modified Queen’s English; to the ear, they are wholly different. For in Kerry we have the range of sound, the timbre, the ring, the sing-song of the vanishing Gaelic – Gaelic, indeed, in all but the vocables, the whole natural substance of Gaelic speech. And in Yorkshire we have, if we put aside the vocables, the whole substance of Scandinavian speech, almost unchanged from the days of the conquering Danes, with its characteristic ring, its range of sounds, its own quite different sing-song, all these things being capable of most exact estimation and expression For the so-called Anglo-Irish dialects are really nothing but this: old Gaelic dialects surviving […]. And the sounds tell of race, while the vocables tell of politics. And so it is, not in these two cases only, but the

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world over; and all this is lost sight of by the sciences that deals only with written speech. (Johnston 1995 [1899]: 464–467)

Another interesting twist on the theme is added by the observation that the phonology of any dialect is that dialect’s real “substance” and more truthfully shows its descent and thus its speakers’ race than its vocabulary, which is merely overlaid and tells “of politics” only. What a look at the sound structure of a dialect thus affords the linguist is a glimpse at the racial origins of its speakers; this perspective is completely lost if scholars focus on written forms of language only. The issue of race and language is dealt with in Chapter 8; for now suffice it to point to the urgency with which the new insights into the nature of language are applied to social and political issues of the day.

7.1.3.3 The late-nineteenth century concern with spelling reform and what it implies for the native speaker As indicated above, a prominent concern in the second half of the nineteenth century was the reform of English orthography. Although the connection between spelling reform and the concept of the native speaker must initially appear tenuous at best, the debate shows very clearly to what extent the phonocentric view had come to determine the study of language. Moreover, as Widdowson (1994) points out in connection with the question of the ownership of English (cf. Chapter 2), “it tends to be the communal rather than the communicative features of standard English that are most jealously protected: its grammar and spelling” (1994: 381). Correct spelling is seen as a marker of “conformity to convention,” expressing adherence to the “identity, […] conventions, and values” of the “custodians” of standard English, i.e., educated native speakers (1994: 380–381). Thus, spelling links the speech/writing issue with the ownership question and the emphasis on educated native speakers as the setters of linguistic norms. By far the most influential nineteenth-century proposal for the reform of English orthography was put forward by A. J. Ellis in his five-volume work On Early English Pronunciation (1869–89). In this work, Ellis actually suggested two systems: “Glossic,” which has been described as “a kind of initial teaching alphabet” (Görlach 1999: 48), and “Paleotype,” which was intended to capture “the minutest shades of sound heard” by way of regular letters, their turned and inverted versions, digraphs, and “modifiers” (Ellis 1869: 3–4). What this description clearly shows is a phonocentric view of language: speech is what matters, and spelling must conform to it rather than the other way round. An interesting aspect of Ellis’s work is his detailed attention to what in modern sociolinguistics is known as the “observer’s paradox” (Labov 1984: 30),

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a phenomenon that resembles the so-called “experimenter effect” in other sciences: the very observation of a particular object distorts that object’s qualities, characteristics, or behavior. Ellis (1874: 1086–1087) is acutely aware that the validity of observation data for phonetic description is subject to many and complex factors and therefore recommends listening to the “natural speaking of some one who does not know that he is observed.” In his view, while this can be done easily when listening to public performances such as sermons or lectures, any speaker in such situations is conscious of being observed and “may therefore indulge in rather a theoretical than a natural delivery.” Even the ordinary speech of educated speakers presents problems in this regard, as such speakers are wont to correct themselves in the direction of the standard or what they perceive to be prestigious pronunciations: “I have an idea that professed men of letters are the worst sources for noting peculiarities of pronunciation; they think so much about speech, that they nurse all manner of fancies, and their speech is apt to reflect individual theories” (Ellis 1874: 1209). The employment of word lists will not help, either, since these, too, prevent speakers from “uttering the word naturally.” The best data, in Ellis’s view, come from phonetically trained native speakers, “such as Mr. Murray for Scotch.” In spite of his acknowledgement of Murray’s qualities as a fieldworker and phonetician, Ellis nevertheless remains skeptical of phonetic descriptions of English produced by Scotch observers – after all, even observers “who have lived long among the people, and spoken their language naturally” (note the idea of the acquisition of a language in its “natural” environment!) have difficulties in “throw[ing] off their former habits enough” to really “appreciate the received English sounds” (1874: 1087). Other late nineteenth-century phoneticians also commented on the observer’s paradox and the suitability of particular speaker groups as informants in phonetic fieldwork; Sweet (1911: viii), for example, cautioned that “the statements of ordinary educated people about their own pronunciation are generally not only valueless, but misleading.” Lounsbury (1903: 582), too, rejected educated speakers as informants: “On this subject […] there is no ignorance so profound and comprehensive as that which envelops the minds of many men of letters” (quoted in MacMahon 1998: 380). In sum, what we see in the writings of the early English-speaking phoneticians is an acute awareness of the problems surrounding data collection and the suitability of particular speaker groups as linguistic informants, phrased in terms which very much resemble those of modern sociolinguistics. For the first time, we encounter native speakers of a language or dialect as data sources. However, we also immediately encounter the restrictions placed on specific speaker groups

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in this context. As a modern commentator on the role of native speakers as the providers of material for linguistic analysis has put it, [o]bviously, not all utterances made in a language can qualify as data on which a sound description can be based. The linguist must be careful not to let his analysis be biased by data that are […] exceptional, unnatural, or deviant. (Coulmas 1981a: 4)

Just as the modern linguist does, the nineteenth-century phonetician determined what was “exceptional, unnatural, or deviant” in terms of linguistic data, and just as in the nineteenth century, in contemporary linguistics, it is educated speakers who are often seen to produce such “exceptional, unnatural, or deviant” data. Even though he mentions the practical advantages that the work with a linguistically trained native speaker may have, Coulmas (1981a: 8), for example, cautions that [t]he pitfalls that the linguist must be careful to avoid in working with a sophisticated native speaker are […] apparent. It is not an empty metaphor that the sophisticated informant has lost his innocence. Once he begins to wonder whether an utterance is “right or wrong” he is liable to become a victim of the long recognized and often commented on problem of the gap between linguistic norm and practice, i.e., the problem that informants’ reports often tend to reflect the norms they aim at rather than their actual practice […]. The native speaker’s linguistic awareness may hence turn out to be a mixed blessing.

Distrust of educated native speakers and metalinguistic statements in general is particularly strong in dialect geography and variationist sociolinguistics; cf., for example, Chambers and Trudgill (1998: 47) on the representativeness of the socalled “NORM” informants, who are “not only [male, rural, and] elderly but also uneducated and untravelled, because it was felt that this method would produce examples of the ‘most genuine’ dialect”; Trudgill’s notion of “over-” and “underreporting” of nonstandard phonetic variants in Norwich (1983: 91); and Labov’s insistence on “attention to speech” (1984: 29) as the most important influence preventing the researcher from accessing an informant’s vernacular. Only recently have sociolinguists begun to reevaluate their deeply ingrained skepticism with regard to native speakers’ opinions about language; Boberg, for example, describes a number of situations in which “native speakers’ intuitions about it [i.e., the phonemic inventory of their variety] are in fact fairly reliable” but nevertheless ends with a caveat: While it may sometimes be necessary or even desirable to turn to native speakers’ intuitions as evidence in linguistics, such evidence should always be interpreted with caution and even skepticism. (2002: 12)

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To return to the spelling reform debate, even though some authors (e.g., Nicol 1995 [1872]: 113–114) favored Bell’s Visible Speech, many other comments discuss Ellis’s proposals for spelling reform. His early publications on the matter were reviewed by an anonymous author in 1849, whose arguments for a reform of English orthography focus less on linguistic matters than on sociopolitical ones and tie in with other important discourses to be discussed more fully below. The first is the debate about English as a world language. According to Anonymous (1995 [1849]: 106–107), if English is to continue its worldwide spread, which is any “patriot’s desire,” it must be made easier to learn for foreigners. In terms of structure, it is already “the easiest language in the world” – an argument which resembles Marsh’s (1859: 73) insistence on the lack of English grammar – but it is hampered by a “whimsically antiquated orthography.” Another important advantage to phonetic spelling is, according to Anonymous (1995 [1849]: 109–111), that it will preserve a pronunciation standard as well as enable speakers distant in space and time to understand the national literary treasures. Most importantly, English has reached the climax of its development, and phonetic spelling will help preserve the language in the great state in which it is now. This argument is interesting in that it attempts to bridge the gap between the phonocentric view of language and the Victorian belief in the insoluble link between national, literary, and linguistic greatness, as discussed above. To sum up this section, even though, at first sight, the debate concerning the reform of English spelling does not have much to do with the emergence of the native-speaker concept, a closer look reveals the interconnectedness of the two issues. First, nineteenth-century authorities on pronunciation were well aware of the problems surrounding the collection of linguistic data from native speakers. In this context, the differentiation between more and less “authentic” speakers and the criteria for selecting them have basically remained the same; they still strongly underlie, for example, modern dialectology as well as sociolinguistic theory and methodology. Second, a reform of English spelling also tied in with the debate about the worldwide spread of English. In that respect, the idea of the necessity of maintaining a specific standard both for mutual intelligibility among speakers of different forms of English and for the preservation of the language itself still surfaces in the modern literature concerning English as an international language, as, for example, in the Quirk–Kachru debate (cf. Chapter 2).

7.2 Summary of Part II Part II has outlined the debate about standards of English as it took place in the nineteenth century. As numerous commentators have emphasized, this debate

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has crucially shaped contemporary perceptions about varieties of English and its speakers as well as basic concepts and terms of modern linguistics, including the native speaker. In Chapter 5, a distinction was made, first, between standardization as a process and the “standard ideology” (Milroy 2001: 533) and between two different senses of the term standard, i.e., uniformity or commonality, on the one hand, and an evaluative sense, on the other. Whereas written English had actually become a highly codified and fairly homogenous variety by the end of the nineteenth century, with regard to spoken English, the standard ideology, i.e., the belief in an excellent level of speech to be emulated by all others, has proved much more influential. It is in this context that we find the distinction between the “more native speakers” (Whitney 1875: 156) and the others, the former being educated speakers of English in Britain. What surfaced in the nineteenth century is the idea that the only “natural” way of acquiring a language is either from birth onwards or among native speakers and that the only “proper” teachers of the language are native speakers of “Good English, or Standard English, or Pure English” (Wyld 1907: 49). The traditional folk dialects also had a role to play in that they contributed to the “historicization” (Milroy 1999: 28) of the standard language by allowing linguists access to its heritage, i.e., “primitive” forms and “Anglo-Saxon” words. The nineteenth-century debate about standards for English is important for the contemporary perception of the native speaker in another way. One of the problems that the new science of language was facing in the nineteenth century was the delimitation of their object of study. What was a language? How was one to define the English language? What was to be done about linguistic heterogeneity? The idea of the standard provided a convenient solution to these questions and enabled nineteenth-century linguists to focus their efforts on the description of an invariant system – an idea which still lies at the heart of Chomsky’s “ideal speaker-listener” (1965: 3). Two other issues discussed in Part II are the speech/writing distinction and why there are native speakers only but no native writers. I have outlined how the “discovery” of spoken language in comparative-historical philology and, later, phonetics and phonology contributed to the exclusive focus on speech in linguistic theory as well as in second-language research and teaching. Finally, in the contributions to the nineteenth-century debate about the reform of English orthography, we first encounter native speakers of a language or dialect as data sources and the restrictions placed on specific speaker groups in this context, phrased in terms which very much resemble those still current in modern sociolinguistics.

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The following excerpt neatly summarizes the late nineteenth-century debate about English, standard English, educated speech, and the dialects: When we say simply “English,” we mean the language of our time, such as we ourselves understand and use. But there are considerable differences in the language even of English speakers at the present day. Thus, almost every region has some peculiarities in the way in which its speakers use their English. There are, for example, the peculiarities of the English of Ireland, noticed by us in the Irish emigrant; those of the English of Scotland, seen in the poetry of Burns, the stories of Scott, and other such places; and those of the negro English of the Southern United States. And, in general, an Englishman can tell an American, and an American can tell an Englishman, by the way he talks. When these peculiarities amount to so much that they begin to interfere a little with our understanding the persons who have them, we say that such persons speak a dialect of English, rather than English itself. Then there is also the difference between what we call “good English” and “bad English.” By good English we mean those words, and those meanings of them, and those ways of putting them together, which are used by the best speakers, the people of best education; everything which such people do not use, or use in another way, is bad English. Thus bad English is simply that which is not approved and accepted by good and careful speakers. Every one who speaks any language “naturally,” as we call it, has really learned it from those whom he heard speak around him as he was growing up. But he is liable to learn it ill, forming bad and incorrect habits of speech; or he may learn it from those who have themselves learned it ill, and may copy their bad habits. There are indeed, very few who do not, while they are learning to speak, acquire some wrong ways, which they have to correct afterwards. It is partly in order to help in this process of correcting bad habits, that the good and approved usages of a language are collected and set forth in a book which is called a “grammar.” Hence, the English language, as made the subject of a grammar, means the English of the present day, as used by good speakers and writers; and English grammar is a description of the usages of the English language in this sense. (Whitney 1886 [1877]: 3–4)

What this passage shows is, first, the equation between the language as a whole and standard English, defined as the variety used by educated speakers (“the English language […] means the English […] as used by good speakers and writers”). Second, speakers of regional varieties such as Irish, Scottish, or American English, are not really speakers of the language: “such persons speak a dialect of English, rather than English itself.” In other words, “English itself” is British English. Third, even though linguistic features are adduced (“those words and those meanings […] and those ways of putting them together”), “good” English is actually based on entirely different criteria, which are social rather than linguistic. “Good” English is the language of the “best” speakers, who, in turn, consist of “the people of best education.” Whatever these people use is “approved and accepted,” anything else is disqualified as “bad” English. Fourth, and finally, the only “natural” way of acquiring a language is by being born into a speech community (“[e]very one who speaks any language ‘naturally,’ as we call it, has really learned it from those whom he heard speak around him as he was growing up”).

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What all of this means in combination is that only English speakers who are born into the community of educated Britons can really be speakers of English, i.e., a “proper” native speaker of the language is a speaker of educated British English.

Part III: Language, nation, and race: Of AngloSaxons and English speakers conquering the world

8 Nationalism, racism, and the native speaker Modern linguistics sees itself as a forward-looking discipline, and regards the activity of linguistic analysis as either ideologically neutral (“scientific”) or ideologically positive, in that most linguists rhetorically claim the equality of all language systems. […] Whatever the merits of this position, […] it [does not] encourage […] honest contemplation of the history of linguistics. […] many of its descriptive or methodological principles reflect the politics of European nationalism in the last two centuries. Notions such as “native speaker” and “native speaker intuition,” “natural language,” “linguistic system,” “speech community” have their roots in nationalist organicism, and the fundamental “vernacularism” of linguistics needs to be seen as an ideology with a complex history and real political consequences. That ideology is alive and well today. (Hutton 1999: 1)

Part II established the link between the notion of the English native speaker as it emerged in the second half of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries and the “standard ideology” (Milroy 2001: 533). It was emphasized that an important concern in contemporary linguistic debates was the legitimization of standard English, which was all the more necessary as the standard form was equated with the language as a whole. Much of the legitimization of standard English was achieved, as has also been pointed out, via “historicization” (Milroy 1999: 28), i.e., the creation of a long and continuous history for the language, which metaphorically rendered this form of the language the legitimate heir of venerable ancestors (cf. Watts 2011: 30–34), with other varieties which did not share in this glorious past (the folk dialects constituted the exception here) thereby downgraded to illegitimate offspring. But why was the proper legitimization of standard English so important at the time? For one thing, as has also been discussed, the standard variety was to be the foundation of a unified national society and culture; in other words, standard English had to be recognized as a valuable national language. For another, in being equated with the language as a whole, standard English also came to stand for the worldwide hopes and aspirations of English-speaking people, i.e., English had to be established as the language not only of a worthy British Empire but also of an aspiring American superpower. In this imperial view, the language was in competition not only with other European languages, to whom it was, of course, at least on a par if not superior, but also with “savage” or “primitive” languages spoken by “inferior” peoples, who were going to have to yield to the power of English speakers and their language. In short, English was the only worthy candidate for world language status. What this means for the link between language and nation with regard to English is that it could be made from two points of view (cf. Crowley 1991: 136).

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Watts (1991 [1850]), for example, approached the topic from the perspective of world politics and tied the fate of English speakers and their quest for global dominance to the rise of English to universal language status. We find the same idea in Marsh’s Columbia speech (1859: 68), where it is taken up as an argument for the study of the native language at university level. Another perspective on the link between language and nation, taken, for example, by Trench (1927a [1851]), focused less on the external development of the language but approached the issue from a historical point of view. For Trench, language was “fossil history,” i.e., it revealed the past and, more specifically, how particular nations had developed morally and politically. Or, in Trench’s words, language, containing “so faithful a record of the good and of the evil which in time past have been working in the minds and hearts of men,” had to be considered “a moral barometer, which indicates and permanently marks the rise or fall of a nation’s life. To study a people’s language will be to study them” (1927a [1851]: 40). Importantly in this context, history was conveyed linguistically not just through texts, but even more directly through linguistic development itself. Words contained “boundless stores of moral and historical truth” (1927a [1851]: 9), and “[o]ften where history is utterly dumb concerning the past, language speaks” (Mathews 1876: 285). What this meant for the study of the native language was that the historical perspective was crucial. Entirely in line with this, Marsh (1859: 70–71) delineates a very specific field in his appeal for the study of English at American universities, which is primarily literature in Old English. The study of “those Old English writers” is advocated not only because it will provide English speakers with excellent models of language use (“the most forcible forms of expression”) or for scientific reasons (“we advocate […] the scientific notion of philology”), but mainly for political ones: studying Old English texts will offer insight into the mental or spiritual basis of the Englishspeaking peoples (“the mighty thoughts, out of which has grown the action that has made England and her children the wonder and the envy of the world”). The theoretical and methodological underpinnings of both perspectives may be found, first, in the adaptation of the principles of comparative-historical philology to the study of English and, second, in the development of nationalism as it took place in Britain and the U.S. in the second half of the nineteenth century. The English native speaker is thus a product not only of debates about linguistic standards but also of nationalist discourses. Part III looks at the ideological background of this development, which has to do with the rise and focusing of Anglo-Saxonism as a historical theory and political ideology. It also turns to the consequences of the new-found national and linguistic self-confidence: the construction of linguistic hierarchies and the idea of the impending world-wide dominance of English and its speakers.

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[…] national identity plays a crucial – and at times decisive – role in determining who is and who is not a “native speaker” of English. (Brutt-Griffler and Samimy 2001: 103) Notions such as “mother-tongue” and “native speaker” are fundamental in contemporary formal as well as sociological linguistics, yet their status within organicist ideology and radical-nationalist identity politics is forgotten or ignored. (Hutton 1999: 287)

As the preceding quotes show, the link between linguistic nativeness and the ideology of nationalism has been made before (cf. also Coulmas 1997: 34–35; Leung 1997: 553; Kramsch 1997: 359; Piller 2001: 114; Acevedo Butcher 2005: 16; Foley 2007: 16; Bonfiglio 2010: 1). It obviously draws directly on the core meaning of the words native and nation, with natural also entering into the association. All of these words ultimately go back to Latin nāt-, the past participle stem of nāscī ‘to be born.’ In this way, the phrase native speaker inevitably conjures up a sense of being born to a speech community and thus language, which implies a naturally determined, inalienable, and perfect competence and therefore right to ownership, and connects linguistic identity and political membership by way of the idea of the nation. And even though all of these phenomena may, in reality, be contingent and variable, they appear – via the naturalness association – as inherited and non-negotiable, in other words, destiny (cf. Brutt-Griffler and Samimy 2001: 104). Even though the link between the native speaker, the nation, and naturalness has been criticized and exposed as an ideological construct, it nevertheless still surfaces in the twentieth-century linguistic literature: Any person born to the English speaking nation becomes a native speaker if he lives long enough, 8–10 years, his residency in the nation being uninterrupted, his input to his language decoding device (his brain) being customary, and his brain being undamaged by defect or accident. Any (?) person not born to the English speaking nation may acquire native speaker fluency, the more likely, of course, being the individual who joins the English speaking nation before lateralization has been completed. (Chisholm, quoted in Paikeday 1985: 68)

A number of questions may be asked in this context. Is there only one “English speaking nation”? If so, which one is it? And how is brain development, i.e., a biological process, related to being “born to” a specific nation, i.e., a political unit? It is presumably such mix-ups which have caused a number of commentators to attempt to ban non-linguistic considerations from definitions of the native speaker altogether:

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I think we must not allow politics, ethnography, etc. to influence our definition of “native speaker” although, of course, since language is a social phenomenon, the evidence on which we base our definition would have to be drawn from the social sciences and the humanities. (Paikeday 1985: 28)

However, as Paikeday also observes (1985: 28), “language is a social phenomenon,” and it is precisely for this reason that it is impossible to treat the nativespeaker concept without reference to social, cultural, or political phenomena such as “self-perception, perception by others, nationality, [or] ethnicity” (cf. Myhill 2003). That nationality actually still determines who is and who is not accorded native-speaker status in English becomes clear when we look at the distinction between the New Englishes and the “traditional bases of English” (Kachru 1992: 3). As the following excerpt shows, in general only inhabitants of the latter – and thus members of particular nations – are classified as native speakers of the language and enjoy the benefits that come with that status, among them employment as teachers of English as a Second or Foreign Language (cf. Canagarajah 1999a): An important component of the socially constructed notion of the native speaker is the idea that the language belongs to those who speak it natively, or to those nations where it is spoken natively. It is held to be tied up inextricably with those cultures. […] This idea has been effectively challenged […]. But its application to the construct of native speaker has not received the same consideration. Kachru and Nelson (1996) point out that British and Americans are “expected to be rather tolerant of each others’ English” but “intolerant of the usage of South Asians, Southeast Asians, West Africans, or East Africans” (p. 81). (BruttGriffler and Samimy 2001: 103)

The etymological and ideological association between nativeness and nationalism is thus clear, but in order to establish a definitive link between the notion of the English native speaker and nationalism in English-speaking countries, we will have to look into the history of both. And, incidentally, the former emerged exactly when the latter intensified and changed its character in significant ways, in both Britain and the U.S. Nineteenth-century nationalism, however, revolved not only around nations or peoples, but also, and perhaps centrally, around races; in fact, for nineteenthcentury thinkers, language and race crucially combined to define a nation (cf. Bonfiglio 2010: 142–184). And even though race has been thoroughly disparaged as a classificatory category in the meantime, the following excerpts show that the contemporary idea of the native speaker is at least implicitly associated with it:

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Nor can we ignore the wider sociopolitical considerations of a construct that is based on such factors as national origin – despite the development of English into an international language – and thus immediately leads to questions of ethnicity and, implicitly at least, race, all of which enter to some degree into the social construction of “native speaker”. For this reason, this term is therefore tied up with other hegemonic discourses that serve as bases of disempowerment in society. (Brutt-Griffler and Samimy 2001: 104) […] the quest for the pure native is part of a larger agenda that in other epochs manifested itself – and in some quarters still does – as the quest for the pure race. Indeed the parallel is alarmingly striking. […] The truth of the matter seems to be that such categories as race and native speaker are the result of insidiously applying certain strategies of exclusion to a world that no longer lends itself to such division into such neat compartments. Their continuing attractiveness may ultimately have to do with their underlying ideological agenda that turns out, upon careful inspection, to be that of passionately safeguarding the alleged purity of the identities they seek to embody. (Rajagopalan 1997: 229–230)

The following sections outline nineteenth-century linguistic nationalism and its connection with racial thinking or even racism.

8.1 Nineteenth-century linguistic nationalism The nineteenth century, and particularly its second half, was the golden age of nationalism in Europe. The new science of language, in the form of comparativehistorical philology, had contributed crucially to this development (cf. Anderson 1991: 71, 84). This was recognized even by contemporary observers: In modern times the science of language has been called in to settle some of the most perplexing political and social questions. “Nations and languages against dynasties and treaties,” this is what has remodelled, and will remodel still more, the map of Europe. (Müller 1862: 22)²⁸

The reverse is also true, however: in both Continental Europe and English-speaking countries, nationalism had fired interest in the study of language in general and national languages in particular. As noted by Marsh (1859: 63–64), the “impulse to the study of English” had “had its origin wholly in the contagion of Continental example,” where “the jealousies and alarms of the turbulent period

28 We find an almost word-by-word repetition of Müller’s famous slogan in Mathews (1876: 285; cf. below): “‘Nations and languages against dynasties and treaties,’ is the cry which is remodelling the map of Europe.”

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which followed the first French Revolution” had “naturally stimulated the selfconscious individuality of every race, and led them alike to attach special value to everything characteristic, everything peculiar, in their own constitution,” language, of course, being one of the most important of such characteristics or peculiarities. Thus, even though speakers of English had, after Sir William Jones’s famous pronouncement concerning the relations between Sanskrit and the major Western languages, initially contributed relatively little to the study of their own language (cf. Dowling 1986: 51), the second half of the nineteenth century saw a boom in English philology, much of which was nationalistically colored (cf. Crowley 1996: 149). The basic assumption underlying nineteenth-century thinking on language and nation was that the former directly reflected the latter’s qualities, and particularly its mental, cognitive, and spiritual constitution, the “national mind.” In the Marsh’s view, for example, language mirrored thought both in the individual and in the nation qua aggregate of like-minded human beings: The relations between man and his speech are not capable of precise formulation, and we cannot perhaps make any nearer approach to exact truth than to say, that while every people has its general analogies, every individual has his peculiar idiosyncracies, physical, mental, and linguistic, and that mind and speech, national and individual, modify and are modified by each other, to an extent, and by the operation of laws, which we are not yet able to define, though, in particular instances, the relation of cause and effect can be confidently affirmed to exist. […] We think by words, and therefore thought and words cannot but act and react on each other. As a man speaks, so he thinks, and as a man thinketh in his heart so is he. (1874: 152–153)

This idea obviously goes back to Wilhelm von Humboldt, who, in his great work Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts (1836), had written that “language is the outward appearance of the intellect of nations: their language is their intellect and their intellect their language: we cannot sufficiently identify the two” (transl. Donaldson 1850: 56). Thus, in the nineteenth century, language assumed significance not merely as an outward “pedigree” of a nation, as Samuel Johnson had seen it in the previous century, but as a reflection of its inner constitution (cf. Dowling 1986: 35). What this meant was that language was no longer simply one symbol of nationality among others but its constituting element (cf. Fishman 1989: 280), which, in turn, meant that it assumed primacy among all possible expressions of national belonging: “what constitutes the ideal unity of a nation lies far more in the intellectual factors, in religion and language than in common descent and common blood” (Müller 1995 [1872]: 122).

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For nineteenth-century writers, the identification of nations with languages happened “instinctively” (Freeman 1995 [1877]: 280). At the level of the speech community, this implied that the “natural condition” of language was that of national languages: [A] language, which has passed from what we may call its natural condition of true and full vitality as a national speech cannot, apparently, be thus far preserved, with something of the pulse of life still beating in it, merely by such a knowledge of it being kept up as enables us to read and translate it. (Craik 1875: 54)

At the individual level, the “instinctive” association between languages and nations crucially linked the native speaker with the nation: The first idea suggested by the word Frenchman or German or any other national name, is that he is a man who speaks French or German as his mother-tongue. We take for granted, in the absence of anything to make us think otherwise, that a Frenchman is a speaker of French and that a speaker of French is a Frenchman. (Freeman 1995 [1877]: 280)

In other words, any speaker was less an individual than a member of his or her national speech community: [T]hough every man has a dialect of his own, as he has his own special features of character, his distinct peculiarities of shape, gait, tone, and gesture, in short, the individualities which make him John and not Peter, yet, over and above all these, he shares in the general traits which together make up the unity of his language, the unity of his nation. (Marsh 1874: 152)

Such a view of language amounts to an immensely powerful social theory where personal identity (the identity of the individual as a native speaker of language X) is merged into a higher order community, the cohesion of which is guaranteed by a shared linguistic system of fixed form-meaning relations. (Hutton 2002: 132)

This social theory is a nineteenth-century development. Whereas various forms of national thought had emerged from the end of the Middle Ages onward, nationalism as a coherent ideology can be traced to the post-Napoleonic period. It was then that political Romanticism, which believed in nations as the most natural human aggregates characterized by a specific, transcendent, historically transmitted essence, the “national soul,” turned into state-nationalism, i.e., the idea that each nation had “a natural or moral right to be incorporated in its own state, while conversely every state should incorporate the natural, organic solidarity of

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its proper constituent nation” (Leerssen 2006: 21). Both ideas are expressed in the following excerpt: “Unity of speech,” says a Danish writer, “is a necessary condition of the independent development of a people, and the coexistence of two languages in a political state is one of the greatest national misfortunes. Every race has its own organic growth, which impresses its own peculiar form on the religious ideas and the philosophical opinions of the people, on their political constitution, their legislation, their customs; and the expression of all these individualities is found in the speech. In this are embalmed that to which they have aspired, that to which they have attained. There we find the record of their thought, its comprehension, wealth, and depth, the life of the people, the limits of their culture, their appetencies and their antipathies, whatsoever has germinated, fructified, ripened, and passed away among them, – yes, even their shortcomings and their trespasses. The people and their language are so con-natural, that the one thrives, changes, perishes with the other.” (Marsh 1874: 152–153)

The ideological background to this model was to be found primarily in the writings of Herder.²⁹ Whereas Herder, however, had been concerned above all with cultural and linguistic diversity as the prime feature of human nature, one main reason for this concern lying in a then widespread resistance against the dominance of French elite culture all over Europe (cf. Leerssen 2006: 97), and his ideas eventually assumed political significance. The nation was defined and pursued as a political as well as a cultural entity. What was required of all nations was,

29 Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) is generally credited with having established the close link between the “mother tongue” and a nation’s spirit or “soul.” Herder had argued that each nation possessed a particular language, which alone permitted communion between the individual members of the nation. Language was not merely an instrument which allowed for the more or less precise exchange of ideas, as Hobbes or Locke, for example, had maintained, but it embodied the collective experience of a nation by conserving all of the thoughts and emotions that had occurred in its history. In this way, the national language was the true expression of a nation’s Volksgeist, or national genius. What this meant for the individual was that one had to be born into a national community in order to be a real, proper, or authentic speaker of the respective national language, because the Volksgeist was inaccessible to foreigners. In speaking a foreign language, one was necessarily inauthentic, as the foreign language expressed a spirit which was not one’s own and which one would never completely understand. At the national level, this meant that language was crucial for the maintenance of national identity in that it alone permitted the transmission of the national genius from generation to generation. This was due to the fact that the vocabulary of a language derived its meaning from a semantic network which the speakers of a language entered as they acquired that language. This semantic network, in turn, conserved, as already noted, the feelings and emotions of the national community; in other words, in learning to speak, one became a member of a particular nation and inevitably remained bound to that nation linguistically forever (cf. Motyl 2001: 282).

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first, that they “discover their ancient history, find the continuity of their ancient traditions, recreate their half-forgotten languages, remember their old literatures, and, with the aid of indigenous statistics retrace on the map the generous […] frontiers of the past” (Fishman 1989: 134). In the end, all of these achievements would have to be protected and furthered by the institutions of the state, such as the schools. As the century progressed, nationalism acquired further implications, among them the “implicit tendency to see the ideal state as a monocultural one,” the “transition from cultural self-assertion to territorial demands,” and the impact of scientific thought, “with its tendency to see nations in racial-biological terms” (Leerssen 2006: 21). All of these points will be taken up in the course of the following sections.

8.2 Language and race The concept of race and the distinctions that were constructed around it were certainly among the ideological cornerstones of the second half of the nineteenth century. Racism played a central role in colonialism – in fact, it has been called the “sine qua non” of colonial life (Memmi 1965: 74, quoted in Pennycook 1998: 51) – but originated earlier in European thought and has outlasted the colonial era (cf. Errington 1998). Moreover, as we see in the work of E. A. Freeman, for example (cf. below), racial thinking was also a defining element of the late nineteenth-century search for a national identity in English-speaking countries. The sense of belonging to an Anglo-Saxon race whose history had shown it to possess a particular aptitude for liberty and cooperative government was an important element of national self-consciousness in both Britain and the U.S. between roughly 1850 and World War I and resulted in a “quasi-anthropological nationalism” (Harvie 1976: 222, quoted in Parker 1981: 827). In sum, both thinking on the origins, growth, and character of the English-speaking nations and the colonial expansion of English speakers and their language were steeped in racism during the second half of the nineteenth century and first decades of the twentieth. Put briefly, from the eighteenth century onward, Europeans developed a view of mankind which divided the latter into various races which differed in terms of their physical and psychological characteristics and could be ordered hierarchically. At the top stood either the white race, or the European, or the Anglo-Saxon; the bottom rung of the ladder was inevitably occupied by the African, who was often described as a savage and compared to an ape or monkey, linguistically as well as otherwise. In his report on his observations on and work with capuchin monkeys in various zoological gardens in the U.S., with which he wanted to

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prove that “‘articulate speech’ prevails among the lower primates, and that their speech contains the rudiments from which the tongues of mankind could easily develop,” Garner (1995 [1891–92]: 373), for example, compared African languages to “the Simian tongue”: If we compare the tongues of civilised races with those of the savage tribes of Africa which are confined to a few score of words, we gain some idea of the growth of language within the limits of our own genus. The few wants and simple modes of life in such a state account for this paucity of words; and this small range of sounds gives but little scope for vocal development, and hence their difficulty in learning to speak the tongues of civilised men. This is, doubtless, the reason why the negroes of the United States, after a sojourn of two hundred years with the white race, are unable to utter the sounds of “th,” “thr,” and other double consonants. (1995 [1891–92]: 380)

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the work of ethnologists, phrenologists, and other race theorists had become widely accepted (cf. Horsman 1981: 157). Based on the comparison and classification of physical characteristics, this work had established “scientific” theories of racial difference which demonstrated that there were presumably innate and unalterable differences between the races of man in terms of brain size, intelligence, character, and so on. Moreover, the old distinction of mankind into a few races characterized by skin color was now elaborated into numerous “racial” distinctions separating people of roughly the same skin color. Thus, Aryans were set off from Semites, for example. The combination of these ideas with Darwinian evolutionary theory resulted in ideas of racial struggle and survival. A powerful set of “scientific proofs” was marshaled to justify keeping out or even expelling or murdering people from other races. A final important point is made by Pennycook (1998: 55). If other races were disparaged by white, European, or Anglo-Saxon theorists, the other side of the coin was, of course, the glorification of Anglo-Saxon superiority. In his view, as well as in the view of numerous commentators on the contemporary native speaker of English (e.g., Acevedo Butcher 2005), while the overt expression of racism is much less acceptable today, triumphalism with regard to Anglo-Saxon ways of life and speaking still regularly occurs. Faced with the immense popularity that race theory and physical anthropology had begun to enjoy by the mid-nineteenth century, linguists had a number of choices in positioning themselves and their science (cf. Hutton 1999: 7). One was to assume that there were indeed direct links between language and race so that the former reflected the latter in a straightforward way. This implied, of course, that each language evidenced race-features, i.e., characteristics that could be traced back to the environmental, physical, or psychological circumstances of its speakers. For the English language, this meant that, since its speakers, “the

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English,”³⁰ were such “a noble and puissant nation,” it had to be one of the greatest languages, if not the greatest language on earth. Morally and mentally degenerate nations, on the other hand, inevitably evidenced a language characterized by the same vices. As in many other works of the time, nation, people, and race are used synonymously in the following passage: Every race has its own organic growth, its own characteristic ideas and opinions, which are impressed on its political constitution, its legislation, its manners and its customs, its modes of religious worship; and the expression of all these peculiarities is found in its speech.³¹ If a people is, as Milton said of the English, a noble and a puissant nation, of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent and subtile to discourse, its language will exhibit all these qualities; while, on the other hand, if it is frivolous and low-thoughted, – if it is morally bankrupt and dead to all lofty sentiments, – its mockery of virtue, its inability to comprehend the true dignity and meaning of life, the feebleness of its moral indignation, will all inevitably betray themselves in its speech. (Mathews 1876: 60–61)

Another possibility was to maintain that there were actually no direct links between a language and its speakers’ race. Racial unity could thus be dispensed with in the nation; rather, it was language which created community in the absence of or above a common race, religion, or culture. The following excerpts may be seen as exemplary of that view: Community of language is a stronger bond than identity of religion or of government, and contemporaneous nations of one speech, however formally separated by differences of creed or of political organization, are essentially one in culture, one in tendency, one in influence. (Marsh 1874: 153)³²

30 This formulation is interesting in view of the fact that it comes from the work of William Mathews, an American lawyer, journalist, librarian, and professor of rhetoric and English literature (1818–1909). It squares well, however, with Anglo-Saxonism as defined as “the sentiment of being ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or English ethnologically” (Frantzen and Niles 1997: 2). As will be shown in Chapter 9, in the second half of the nineteenth century, many Americans viewed themselves as members of the “Anglo-Saxon race” or “Anglican people” (Marsh 1859: 79, 80), i.e., as racially, culturally, and linguistically one with the British. 31 This passage offers a striking exemplification of the phenomenon of implicit intertextuality (cf. Chapter 3), as it appears to be reworked (without attribution) from Marsh (1874: 152), who writes: “Every race has its own organic growth, which impresses its own peculiar form on the religious ideas and the philosophical opinions of the people, on their political constitution, their legislation, their customs; and the expression of all these individualities is found in the speech.” 32  Again, without giving credit to Marsh, Mathews (1876: 46) echoes this idea almost verbatim: “Community of language is a stronger bond than identity of religion, government,

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A third possibility was to view language “as an organically-structured ‘mothertongue’, and to see in the bond between mother and child the primal site of socialization. In this bond, the link between race and language was determined indirectly, but at a fundamental level by the primary socialization of the child” (Hutton 1999: 7–8). The ideology of the mother tongue plays a crucial role in Marsh (1859), the text which features the first attested use of the phrase native speaker (cf. Chapter 4).³³ In his introductory remarks, Marsh (1859: 59) equates the “tones of the native language” with “the nutriment drawn from the maternal breast.” Thus, what mother’s milk does for an individual’s physical development is achieved by the native language in his or her intellectual and emotional progress. Later on, the native language of speakers of English is described as “the mother tongue” (1859: 59), “the English tongue” (1859: 68), “the Anglo-Saxon tongue” (1859: 69), “our national speech” (1859: 70), and “the Anglican speech” (1859: 76). Its native speakers are described as the “Anglo-Saxon race” (1859: 79) or the “Anglican people” (1859: 80); they comprise “the Englishman and the American.” In other words, English is not only the mother tongue of speakers of English and the national language of Britain and the United States, but also the language of a race, i.e., the descendants of the Anglo-Saxons. National languages, in turn, determine the native speaker’s thinking; when speculating about the reasons for the lack of achievements by English speakers in the historical study of their own language compared to the output of Continental scholars, Marsh says: “I believe the cause to lie much in the different intellectual habits which are formed in early life, by the use of the respective languages of those nations” (1859: 72). In sum, the notions of native speaker, mother tongue, nation, and race are closely linked, with first-language acquisition constituting the basis of this link. As Marsh (1859) shows, the three positions were not necessarily mutually exclusive. In addition to celebrating the mother tongue, he also revels in dreams about the impending world dominance of English and its speakers. Just like its speakers, the language is described as “rapacious”; whereas the former acquire territory after territory, the latter adopts words: “The Anglo-Saxon tongue has a craving appetite, and is as rapacious of words, and as tolerant of forms, as are its children of territory and of religions” (1859: 69). English is also described as

or interests; and nations of one speech, though separated by broad oceans and by creeds yet more widely divorced, are one in culture, one in feeling.” 33 Without, of course, implying any direct links here, the ideology of the mother tongue constituted a central element of National Socialist thought (cf. Hutton 1999: 4).

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a “Christian speech” (1859: 86), “the vehicle of a wider purer, more beneficient moral action than any other existing tongue.” The worldwide spread of its speakers, even at the expense of other races and languages, is justified because “English is emphatically the language of commerce, of civilization, of social and religious freedom, of progressive intelligence, and of active catholic philanthropy; and, therefore, beyond any other tongue ever used by man, it is of right the cosmopolite speech” (Marsh 1859: 87–88; cf. below). That Marsh indeed viewed languages and races as insolubly connected is shown by his remarks on “the Celtic,” whose lingering death he describes in detail. According to Marsh (as well as to many other observers at the time), languages were so closely linked with the races by whom they were spoken that it was only possible to eradicate a language by eradicating its speakers: “Languages adhere so tenaciously to their native soil, that, in general, they can be eradicated only by the extirpation of the races that speak them” (1859: 88). And even though “the Celtic” had shown “less vitality, less power of resistance, than any other speech accessible to philological research,” the many “years of Roman and Teutonic triumphs” had not been able to rid either the Continent or the British Isles of it: “It has died only with its dying race, and centuries may yet elapse before English shall be the sole speech of Britain itself” (1859: 88). While numerous nineteenth-century writers speculated on the topic, according to some, the vitality of languages and races did not necessarily have to be entirely congruent. That the phenomena were closely linked, however, was not doubted by these contributors to the discourse, either: [W]e may say that a language is only liable to that sort of accidental and violent death to which a race of men is occasionally liable. […] Language possesses even more vitality than any given race of men, for as long as places and things in America are called by Indian names, such as Mississippi, Susquehanna, Toronto, it cannot be said that the Indian language is dead. The Hebrew certainly is a case where the race may be said to possess more vitality than the language, for the Jews are all over the world, and retain everywhere their distinctive features, manners, customs, and religion, while their language is each case is that of the people amongst. (Swayne 1995 [1862]: 281)

To sum up this section, for nineteenth-century thinkers, the category of race represented one of the most important dividing lines among human beings. Race was associated with language both implicitly and explicitly, and the relationships between languages and races could be imagined in at least three different ways: languages either presumably directly reflected the racial characteristics of their speakers; or they made up for deficits in racial unity in the formation of a nation; or they constituted the primal site of the socialization of children into

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their racially determined national community via the acquisition of the “mother tongue.” As Marsh’s writings show, these positions co-occurred as well.

8.3 Language, nation, and race and the writings of Edward A. Freeman A very influential thinker on language, nation, and race in the latter decades of the nineteenth century was the Englishman Edward A. Freeman (1823–92), who was not only professor of modern history at Oxford but also ran for Parliament as a Liberal in the 1850s and 60s. He has been described as “an indefatigable publicist of his own ideas,” and his “ideas on race were for a time influential, particularly in America” (Parker 1981: 826). Freeman’s racial thinking was part of a quest for national identity and as such may be seen as one facet of the “moment of Englishness” (Kumar 2003: 175; cf. below), which, in the late nineteenth century, transformed a formerly institutionally based British orientation into a culturally, historically, and linguistically founded English nationalism. For Freeman, as well as for numerous other writers at the time, “a physical, largely inalienable and genetically-determined basis for their national growth and character” had tremendous appeal (Parker 1981: 828). Even though he was often considered “the ultimate empiricist” (but then a preference for the concrete, specific has always been one of the most cherished features of English national character, as opposed to a preference for the abstract, theoretical, and speculative in Romance thought;³⁴ cf. Collini 1991: 358), Freeman actually devised a comprehensive racial theory, which, however, was Aryan rather than Teutonic and philological rather than ethnological; “he would have nothing to do with measuring skulls or any other physiological evidence” (Parker 1981: 826). In this, he may have been influenced by his many contacts in the academic world, two of the most important of which were the philologists A. H. Sayce and Max Müller (cf. Chapter 7).

34 Marsh (1859: 75) picks up this argument with regard to the study of the native language and applies it to Americans, who, of course, constituted the other important branch of the great “Anglo-Saxon race” (1859: 80): “We must, in the main, study English with reference to practical use, rather than to philosophic principle; aim at the concrete, rather than the absolute and the abstract. And this falls in with what is eminently, I will not say happily, the present tendency of the American mind. We demand, in all things, an appreciable, tangible result, and if a particular knowledge cannot be shown to have a value, it is to little purpose to recommend its cultivation because of its worth.”

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Freeman laid out his theory in an article first published in the Contemporary Review (1995 [1877]: 261–288). What he recognized was the power of the newly discovered relations of race and language to change the horizons of political identification and affiliation in ways hitherto unimaginable. In his view, up until the end of the eighteenth century, societies had been structured along lines of birth or “immediate descent” (1995 [1877]: 264): “political communities” were organized around “this or that prince” and had their “traditional alliances and enmities,” but their members’ loyalties seldom went beyond “some purely local privilege or local feeling.” An important element in determining alliances was “religious sympathy,” and rulers generally portrayed themselves and were perceived by their subjects as divinely bestowed (cf. Anderson 1991: 19). According to Freeman, “the new lines of scientific and historical inquiry which have been opened up in modern times have had a distinct and deep effect upon the politics of the age.” The decisive impact in this respect had come from comparative-historical philology: “the world is not the same world as it was when men had not yet dreamed of the kindred between Sanscrit, Greek, and English.” Knowledge about this “kindred” is what led to “the sentiment of nationality.” In other words, according to Freeman, the new science of language had brought about a new political ideology, nationalism. But how did nations define themselves and set themselves off from one another? The crucial dimensions in that respect were race and language. According to Freeman (1995 [1877]: 280), race defined a nation, and language indicated nationhood. But language was more than a simple indicator of national community, it actually created that community. In other words, community of language was the necessary and essential component of nationhood. To be sure, as Freeman acknowledged, there were nations without a common language, and these were certainly nations as well. But they were not nations “in the highest sense.” Nations such as Switzerland possessed “an artificial nationality, a nationality which may be good for all political purposes […]. Still this is not quite the same thing as that fuller national unity which is felt where there is a community of language” (1995 [1877]: 280). To sum up Freeman’s argument so far, nations had a racial basis, but unless they also evidenced community of language, they remained “artificial nationalities.” Thus, in their natural form, nations were racially identifiable communities of speakers, or, put the other way round, the ideal native speaker was a member of a particular national community, which was also definable racially. However, in many cases language and race obviously did not coincide. Individuals migrated, and entire populations spoke languages other than those spoken by their ancestors:

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A man settles in a foreign country. He learns the language of that country; sometimes he forgets the use of his own language. His children may perhaps speak both tongues; if they speak one tongue only, it will be the tongue of the country where they live. In a generation or two all trace of foreign origin will have passed away. Here then language is no test of race. […] Every nation will have some adopted children of this kind, more or fewer, men who belong to it by speech, but who do not belong to it by race. And what happens in the case of individuals happens in the case of whole nations. […] Spanish, German, English. Each of those tongues has become the familiar speech of vast regions where the mass of the people are not […] Spanish or English, otherwise than by adoption. (1995 [1877]: 270)

In this excerpt, Freeman is, of course, referring to the linguistic situation characterizing the European colonies. Whereas the first case resembles that found in the United States, the “regions” described in the second case are the locations of what was to become the so-called “New Englishes.” The wording here is significant: in all such cases we are looking at “adopted children,” who may belong language-wise but never racially. This is an unnatural situation, the opposite of what is described by Marsh (1859: 59), who, as outlined in Chapter 4, equates the “tones of the native language” with “the nutriment drawn from the maternal breast” and ascribes English as “the mother tongue” (1859: 59) to the “Anglo-Saxon race” (1859: 79). Freeman expands on this point. He draws an analogy between nations or races and the family (“tribes, nations, races, were all formed according to the original model of the family”), which, even though it “starts from the idea of the community of blood,” also “allows artificial adoption” (1995 [1877]: 278). Once more, relatedness by descent or “blood,” is described as natural, whereas adoption is “artificial.” Nevertheless, because the latter is so widespread, “there is not in any nation, in any race, any such thing as strict purity of blood.” For Freeman, such purity was thus not only non-existent but also not desirable. As pointed out by Parker (1981: 837), for Freeman, the liberal, it [i.e., racial impurity] was an entirely acceptable, indeed fundamentally important phenomenon. Elsewhere, he even suggested that relative purity of race was usually achieved in backwaters by less active and smaller nations, and that impurity was the necessary consequence of having played a great part in the mainstream of history.

This train of thought can also be found in arguments about the greatness of English. Even if they were portrayed as a problem as well (according to Marsh 1859: 69, for example, “there is much of the speech of England which has never become connatural to the Anglican people”), the language’s diverse origins of Germanic, Romance, and many other elements constituted one important factor

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in its fantastic development, and the fact that English and its speakers were making “hourly conquests” (Marsh 1859: 87) on their way to world language status (cf. below), whereas other, more homogenous races and their languages were decaying, was, at least in part, put down to the “craving appetite” and tolerance of foreign elements that characterized not only the language but also “its children” (1859: 69). In any case, what such situations show is that the categories of language and race must be kept apart and that “language cannot be an absolutely certain test of physical descent. A man cannot, under any circumstances, choose his own skull; he may, under some circumstances, choose his own language” (Freeman 1995 [1877]: 269). In other words, language cannot be proof of physical descent, because languages are not unalterable physical facts. What underlies this argument is what, following Hutton (2002: 126), might be labeled the “original congruence” model. It basically states that a given language belongs to a particular race, and that the two must have initially evidenced complete overlap. According to Müller (1995 [1872]: 212), for example, “[n]ations and languages were in ancient times almost synonymous.” And in the view of Whitney (1875: 274), “[i]t still remains true that, upon the whole, language is determined by race, since each human being usually learns to speak from his parents and others of the same blood.” This implies a conception of identity which is based on the idea that speaking a particular language goes together with a particular national or racial identity, or, put the other way round, an authentic national or racial identity involves speaking a particular language.³⁵ What this indicates is that there are “proper inheritors” to any language, i.e., those speakers to whom the language has been transmitted by decent or “blood” (Whitney 1875: 271–272). Of course, as all contemporary commentators on the matter were eager to emphasize, precisely because of situations such as those sketched out above, linguistic affinity and anthropological type had to be established separately, and linguistic and racial categories had to be kept separate. In fact, the two disciplines, linguistics and anthropology, were entirely distinct endeavors: It is but too easily forgotten that if we speak of Aryan and Semitic families, the ground of classification is language, and language only. There are Aryan and Semitic languages, but

35 As Hutton (1999: 5) notes, this ideology is fraught with anti-Semitism. Jews have often been claimed to lack loyalty to the mother tongue and thus possess an unnatural relationship to language, as, being dispersed around the world, they generally acquired the languages of their gentile neighbors. Because of this separation of language and race, language for Jews must be at best simply a medium of communication, at worst a means of entering a Volksgeist which is not theirs (cf. above).

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it is against all rules of logic so speak, without an expressed or implied qualification, of an Aryan race, of Aryan blood, of Aryan skulls, and to attempt ethnologic classification on purely linguistic grounds. These two sciences, the Science of Language and the Science of Man, cannot, at least for the present, be kept too much asunder; and many misunderstandings, many controversies, would have been avoided, if scholars had not attempted to draw conclusions from language to blood, or from blood to language. (Müller 1995 [1872]: 122)

This was because language was a transmitted institution, not a physical feature, a “race-acquisition,” not a “race-characteristic.” Just like other institutions, such as religion or science, it formed a part of the culture of any race, which allowed it to be “borrowed and lent,” whereas physical features could “only go down by blood” (Whitney 1875: 280–281). Nevertheless, linguistics involved “too much of the element of race” (1875: 276). In fact, none of the writers on language and race in the nineteenth century seemed to doubt that the two phenomena coexisted in an exceedingly close relationship, even if they were not now congruent: “We may say unhesitatingly that there are such things as races and nations, and that to the grouping of those races and nations language is the best guide” (Freeman 1995 [1877]: 278). This was because languages faithfully recorded history (an idea which was most prominently expounded by R. C. Trench; cf. below), and particularly “race-history” (Whitney 1875: 274). Of course, the speakers of Germanic languages, for example, were not all members of the Germanic race. But that way of thinking about language and race was only justified if one assumed the former existence of a Germanic race, for how could one otherwise refer to both language and race by means of the same label (cf. Hutton 2002: 125)? If, however, neither language unmistakably indicated race, nor was there such a thing as purity of race in the modern world, how could the identification of nations by means of languages be upheld? This was because each of the former possessed a “true essence […], something which sets its standard and determines its character.” In other words, the “national spirit” or “soul” or “genius,” as expressed in the national language, defined and delimited the nation, and everything that was added, all newcomers, had to abide by the beliefs, norms, and values that made up the “genius” of the nation (Freeman 1995 [1877]: 278). While this national “essence” could not give the nation’s “adopted children” a new “natural” ancestry, it was powerful enough to endow them with a new linguistic, cognitive, and emotional background (1995 [1877]: 278). What we have here is, of course, Macaulay’s infamous “class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” (1920 [1835]). In such contexts, language is afforded an almost mystical power. It thoroughly

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transforms identities in all aspects, cognitive, spiritual, and moral. What it does not do is give its new speakers a new racial identity. It is this racial identity, however, i.e., relatedness by descent or “blood,” which is the badge of true, or “natural,” membership in a nation. What this meant for colonial speakers of English was, of course, that, no matter how well they spoke the language of the “Anglo-Saxon race” or “Anglican people” (Marsh 1859: 79, 80), they would never quite belong. Transferred to the modern situation, it suggests that speakers of “New Englishes” will never be classified as native speakers, as they are not members of the nations in which language acquisition happens in its “natural” environment, i.e., in the nations in which language and race are congruent. An important question in this context concerned the relationship between the various branches of the Indo-European, or “Aryan,” race. For those commentators who believed that all of the world’s languages had sprung from a single Ursprache and all of their speakers from a single race, it was difficult to postulate any kind of inherent inequality between the races. Nevertheless, in the second half of the nineteenth century, few believed in the old, theologically founded idea of monogenesis (cf. below), and elaborate justifications were put forward to bolster claims of racial superiority of one group, usually Indo-European, Teutonic, or Anglo-Saxon, over others. Max Müller was one of the last staunch believers in fundamental human unity: Nay, if we look but steadily into those black Chinese eyes, we shall find that there, too, there is a soul that responds to a soul and that the God whom they mean is the same God who we mean, however helpless their utterance, however imperfect their worship. (Müller 1871: 394–395, quoted in Hutton 1999: 266)

This belief also did not, of course, imply that all races stood at the same level of civilization or that all languages evidenced the same degree of sophistication. In any case, as pointed out by Hutton (1999: 266), a monogenetic orientation was “indeed a prerequisite for some conceptions of colonialism,” i.e., those which viewed it as “the white man’s burden.” Its basic assumption was that what separated the Anglo-Saxon and the “Hindoo,” for example, was not race but culture or civilization and that, with appropriate guidance, the latter could be (re)gained in the East, too. In this view, Britain appeared as the ideal Aryan nation (cf. Hutton 1999: 266), which was going to export its attainments in civilization, commerce, and Christianity to those in need: It is the duty, as it is the destiny, of the nations of Europe to give back to the east the treasure of heavenly light which they once received from it. To Asia they owe the first impulses to thought, the earliest lessons in the arts, the invention of writing, and the priceless deposit of

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divine revelation. […] England has received the rule of India for this purpose, that she may become the teacher and evangelizer of India. Commerce and war have opened up the gates of China, that Christian truth may enter them. All new facts, therefore, should be welcome that tend to show that the Chinese are one with us in origin, and that their history, their institutions, their language even, derive their source, as ours do, from Western Asia. Let the kindly sympathy of the west for the east be the more called forth as the proofs of common brotherhood are accumulated. (Edkins 1871: 402–403, quoted in Hutton 1999: 267)

Sometimes, the “proofs” quoted above were adduced to criticize the excesses of British colonialism in India. According to Farrar, for example, if it had been recognized that “we Europeans, together with the Persians and Hindoos,” despite all “apparent and superficial differences,” formed “a close and common brotherhood in the great family of nations,” British rule need not have been so brutal, “calling them and treating them [i.e., the subject peoples] as ‘niggers’ [and] absorbing with such fatal facility the preposterous notion that they were, with few exceptions, an abject nation of cringing liars, to be despised and kicked” (1878: 303, quoted in Hutton 1999: 265). However, Farrar, too, did not, in principle, object to colonialism and, just like most other observers, expected thankfulness for the great “gifts” of civilization from the colonized. According to some writers, original racial and linguistic unity had no consequences for contemporary political relations. Freeman, for example, viewed geographical separation and cultural differences as more decisive than racial and linguistic affinity and as such remained entirely “unimpressed by any claims made on behalf of the Aryan Hindu or Persian to have a special relationship with the European” (Parker 1981: 838). In his view, modern India was merely “a far-off Aryan land” with a distinct political and cultural way of life. In his view, “original community of descent and language are not all […]. We have far-off kinsfolk, sprung from the same ancestral stock, speaking dialects of the same ancestral language, who have been parted off so long and so utterly that the original kindred has now become mere matter of curious interest” (quoted in Parker 1981: 838). In sum, even though the original racial and linguistic unity between all IndoEuropean peoples was widely recognized, for the most part, it had no practical consequences. What it certainly did not imply, even among the most critical observers, was a condemnation of colonialism as such.

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8.4 Language and nation historically: The development of English and its speakers As pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, the link between language and nation with regard to English and its speakers could be made from two points of view. Watts (1991 [1850]), for example, but many other authors as well, approached the topic from the perspective of world politics and tied the fate of English speakers and their quest for world dominance to the rise of English to world language status. Another perspective, taken, for example, by Trench (1927a [1851], 1927b [1855]), focused less on the external development of the language but linked language and nation from a historical point of view. Before we turn to Trench’s work, a few remarks on the historical perspective on language, nation, and race with regard to English generally are in order.

8.4.1 The historical perspective on language, nation, and race: Constructing a venerable history for English As noted by Crowley (1996: 150), interest in the history of the English language had appeared in the eighteenth century: Swift had given an account of the linguistic and political history of the nation, and Johnson had prefaced his Dictionary with a “History of the English Language.” However, as Crowley (1996: 150) also points out, “this does not amount to the appearance of the new academic subject at an earlier time,” as “the interest was hardly sustained and was often sketchy and limited.” What prompted the emergence of the new discipline in England was, on the one hand, the arrival in Britain of the new science of comparative-historical philology, since judged against the methodical rigor evidenced even by its early Continental representatives, the linguistic basis of the English works just mentioned appeared shallow. In his influential essay on “The English language,” De Quincey, for example, bemoaned the lack of activity in the comparative-historical study of English, listing a number of “inferior attempts to illustrate the language,” among them Ben Jonson’s and Lowth’s grammars, Webster’s essays and dictionary, and Murray’s and Priestley’s publications (1995 [1839]: 82–84). On the other hand, interest in the history of English was not only scientific, but also fueled by nationalism (cf. above). Marsh (1859: 66–67), for example, viewed the historical study of individual languages as a sign of the vitality of the nations possessing and employing them, an act of “intellectual patriotism”:

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Modern philology […] did not, like ancient grammatical lore, originate in the life-and-death struggle of perishing nationalities, nor in a morbid consciousness of internal decay and approaching dissolution, but in a sound, philosophic appreciation of the surest safeguard of national independence and national honor – an intelligent comprehension, namely, of what is good and what is great in national history, national institutions, national character. […] The zeal with which these studies are pursued is a high expression of intellectual patriotism.

In his study of the reception of Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik by English-speaking audiences, Marggraf Turley (2001) shows how the history of the language in nineteenth-century Britain was nationalistically colored. According to him, around 1818, “if not before, linguistic history and national perceptions of self-worth became widely accepted as mutually contingent” (2001: 235). This happened for at least two reasons.³⁶ First, in 1818, J. G. Lockhart published an “alarmist and bestselling” translation of Schlegel’s Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur (1815), which popularized the apocalyptic vision that barbaric speech was inevitably linked with barbaric civilization. The best example of this had been provided by the classical languages, whose “golden age” cultures had not endured. If that was the case, however, what chance did English stand, which, after all, had long been regarded only as a “poor cousin” of those venerable languages? Second, the new ways of looking at language fostered by comparative-historical philology had undermined age-old beliefs with regard to the relationships between words and their meanings. For a long time, word meanings had been viewed as either guaranteed by God or as negotiated by mutual contracts between speakers, but

36 In Language Myths and the History of English, Watts places the emergence of what he calls “the myth of the ancient language,” in which “English is constructed as having a very long history” (2011: 24), in the period “from around 1830 to well into the twentieth century” (2011: 31) and relates it to wider sociopolitical concerns: “The major nonlinguistic impetus towards its construction was the blatant contrast between, on the one hand, social inequality in Britain separating the country into Disraeli’s ‘two nations,’ the wealthy to immensely wealthy uppermiddle and aristocratic classes and the at times poverty-stricken working classes and, on the other hand, the rapid social and economic transformations created by the second stage of the Industrial Revolution and the growth of a colonial empire” (2011: 32). He sees the anxieties of the rising and expanding middle class, which eagerly assimilated to the behavior of the upper echelons of society, while forcefully separating itself from its lower end, as instrumental in the creation of nationalist feeling, which, in turn, spurred interest in the idea of a national language, whose long history and excellent literary achievements were seen as both reflecting and supporting the legal, political, and social achievements of a strong nation-state (2011: 32–33). Despite differences in emphasis, this argument is, of course, entirely consistent with the one made here.

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all of a sudden, linguistic relationships were seen to reside entirely within a language itself (cf. Dowling 1986: 61–62). This new way of looking at language had tremendous consequences for contemporary thought about languages and nations: if English were decaying or already decadent or, for that matter, if there were no links between language and civilization at all, as Grimm’s work seemed to imply, then the claims to cultural and thus national excellence of imperial Britain were imperiled. A critical analysis of Grimm’s was thus clearly necessary; as Marggraf Turley (2001: 234–236) demonstrates in detail, this analysis generally took the form of a nationalistically colored re-reading, which involved not only a series of works summarizing, publicizing, and criticizing the Deutsche Grammatik (e.g., Donaldson 1850), but also the Anglo-Saxon controversy (cf. below), in which the willingness of traditional scholars of Old English literature, to admit to the superiority of Continental philological methodology was severely tested. On the whole, a significant shift in popular and scholarly perceptions of the English language occurred in the 1830s and 40s. For one, language change was no longer inevitably seen as decay. As Grimm had shown, “words such as ‘piscis’ and ‘fish’ were […], to all extents and purposes, identical” (Marggraf Turley 2001: 236). While this could be taken to mean that languages were simply autonomous systems “developing apart from any sphere of human values in blind obedience to impersonal phonological laws” (Dowling 1986: xv) and could therefore no longer be taken as representing particular cultures or civilizations, it was read by English speakers primarily as implying the revaluation of things English vis-àvis those classical. If sound changes were neutral and worked inevitably, English no longer had to be viewed as inferior to the classical languages. This revaluation permeates Marsh’s entire address, both implicitly and explicitly. As noted in Chapter 4, he begins his speech (1859: 59), for example, by pointing out that the Roman approach to language was good but the English one is better. But the English re-reading of Grimm involved not only a revaluation of the “mother tongue” vis-à-vis the classical languages; it also, and very importantly, involved a re-affirmation of the link between language, culture or civilization, and nation. This link was based on a language/mind connection, which was seen to exist both at the individual level and at the level of the nation. Thus, whereas civilized nations possessed highly developed languages, barbaric or primitive peoples had inferior ones: But while it is thus with him [i.e., the savage], while this is the downward course of all those that have chosen the downward path, while with every impoverishing and debasing of personal or national life there goes hand in hand a corresponding impoverishment and debasement of language, so on the contrary, where there is advance and progress […], where new

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thoughts are rising up over the horizon of a nation’s mind, new feelings are stirring at a nation’s heart, new facts coming within the sphere of its knowledge, there will language be growing and advancing too. (Trench 1927a [1851]: 20–21)

This excerpt clearly foreshadows the entire complex of values surrounding the debate about English as the only worthy world language, to be discussed more fully below. As Marggraf Turley (2001: 247) points out, [i]t is no coincidence that just as the status of English, with Grimm’s help, is being so radically revised, eighteenth-century conceptions of a qualitative link between language and culture are reasserted (this time in a more favourable form), even though the idea of such an index ran contrary to the theory of “Lautverschiebung” taken to its logical end. But such views […] conveniently buttressed the idea that British culture, supported by the linguistic edifice of English, deserved to be “bestowed” upon inhabitants of the expanding empire, whose own languages (and, by the terms of the equation, cultures as a whole) were often pronounced “barbaric” or “degraded” […].

To sum up, the emergence of the distinct discipline of linguistic history in nineteenth-century Britain illustrates in what way scientific concerns could be endowed with political significance. The study of the history of the language was viewed as benefiting national glory. As pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, this link could be made from two points of view: the worldwide process of competition between languages and nations, and the development of an individual language in accordance with the national “genius.” It is to the latter that we now turn to in the writings of R. C. Trench, who asserted that the study of the history of the language would reveal the glories of the history of the nation and thus “help to form an English heart in ourselves and in others” (1927a [1851]: 23–24).

8.4.2 R. C. Trench on language as a nation’s “moral barometer” One of the most important writers on language and nation in mid-nineteenth century Britain was Richard Chenevix Trench (1807–86). A theologian by profession (and later Archbishop of Dublin, where he supervised the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland; cf. Milne 2004: 296), Trench, just like Marsh, took up philology only later in life but nevertheless eventually emerged as one of the crucial figures in the field. In fact, Finegan (1998: 564) believes that “[w]e can trace much of the [late nineteenth-century] enthusiasm for discussions about language in both Britain and America to the influence of […] Trench.” However, Trench was not only a popular writer but also one of the central figures in launch-

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ing the OED; in Aarsleff’s view (1967: 233–234), his two best-known publications, On the Study of Words (1927a [1851]) and English Past and Present (1927b [1855]), “did far more than any previous publication to make language study popular, and without that popularity it seems unlikely that the New English Dictionary would have been able both to obtain the readers it needed and to arouse the general interest which sustained it.” In his philological writings, Trench subscribed to the then still prevalent British view that language study, rather than being an end in itself, served higher goals. By taking as his object of study vocabulary rather than linguistic structure, Trench followed an English tradition which had begun with Locke and continued with Horne Tooke and the Utilitarians. All of these thinkers had shared the belief that words stored information about thought, feeling, and experience, but other than, for example, Locke, Trench was not interested in the metaphysical reality behind words, i.e., in the “original, philosophical constitution of mind” (Aarsleff 1967: 238), but saw words as a clue to the historical reality of their past users. In this sense, grammar was unimportant, as grammar was merely a reflection of the universal gift of reason which all men, “barbarous” or “civilized,” shared equally. Linguistic structure, therefore, yielded no information on how different peoples or nations had used their God-given linguistic talents. Evidence as to the latter could only be found in words, where one could observe how mankind distinguished itself in the expression of ideas and emotions (Trench 1927a [1851]: 21–22). For Trench, language was not only, as Emerson, “a popular American author,” had formulated it (1927a [1851]: 11), “fossil poetry,” but also “fossil ethics” and “fossil history.” What this means is that language revealed the past and, more specifically, how particular nations had developed morally and politically. Or, in Trench’s words, language, containing “so faithful a record of the good and of the evil which in time past have been working in the minds and hearts of men,” had to be considered “a moral barometer, which indicates and permanently marks the rise or fall of a nation’s life. To study a people’s language will be to study them, and to study them at best advantage; there where they present themselves to us under fewest disguises, most nearly as they are” (1927a [1851]: 40). Importantly in this context, history was conveyed linguistically not just through texts, but even more directly through linguistic development itself. Words contained “boundless stores of moral and historical truth” (1927a [1851]: 9), and “[o]ften where history is utterly dumb concerning the past, language speaks”

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(Mathews 1876: 285):³⁷ An example of this was constituted, according to Trench, by the word frank, which, in his view, still truthfully reflected the political, social, and moral qualities of the people it had once denoted – a people with which the Anglo-Saxons, another virtuous and freedom-loving Germanic people, could still identify (1927a [1851]: 15–16). But a language not only mirrored a nation’s moral and spiritual development, but also crucially shaped it. A language was not simply “the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved” (Trench 1927a [1851]: 22), but there was, in Trench’s words (1927a [1851]: 44), also “a moral element in words; […] they do not hold themselves neutral in the great conflict between good and evil, light and darkness, which is dividing the world,” but “they receive from us the impressions of our good and or of our evil, which again they are active further to propagate amongst us.” A language was thus an active and powerful force which linked the speech community with both its past and its future. It did so by conserving the group’s set of values, as expressed linguistically in the past; these linguistic means, in turn, also influenced the group’s future social, political, and religious development. In other words, language not only reliably recorded a nation’s morality, it also acted to enhance or downgrade it. What this meant was clear: words had to be subjected to strict policing, lest corruptions of language caused the corruption of the spiritual life of a nation. And since language was God’s perfect gift to mankind, and only corrupt nations forfeited that gift by sloth and sin, using language well and studying it was a Christian obligation (1927a [1851]: 115). Every language user therefore had the duty and obligation to become a conscious and active language user and to use his or her language well, because corrupt language use equaled corrupt morality, and vice versa. Good language use, on the other hand, equaled good morals via truthfulness (1927a [1851]: 114). In other words, good language use was not just a national, political obligation, but also a religious, Christian duty. Incidentally, we find the same motif in Marsh’s Columbia speech (1859: 76–77).

37 William Mathews was one of the great popularizers of Trench in America. In Words; Their Use and Abuse (1876), Mathews presents a compendium of then current views on language in general and English in particular. Chapter XIII, entitled “Curiosities of language,” contains a wonderful example of what Watts (1999: 44) identifies as the two most important practices characterizing a discourse community (cf. Chapter 3): “explicit references to earlier works and the reworking of sections of text from earlier works, with or without acknowledgement of the source.” The chapter basically presents a rundown of Trench’s major ideas: words are described as living powers, language as fossil history, and dictionaries as vast historical memorials.

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It will have become obvious by now, but is worth emphasizing again, that the basic unit of analysis in terms of language users was the nation. A speech community was a national community; thus, what authors like Trench were interested in were national languages. The study of the national language was the study of the history of the “national life”; its aim was “to form an English heart” in all language users, i.e., to foster patriotism (Trench 1927a [1851]: 23). The lexicon of a language thus laid open the national character; this held for both homegrown words and those it had had to borrow (1927a [1851]: 43). In the following excerpt, Trench contrasts the truly virtuous and manly character of the English with the “weak and ineffectual” one evidenced by Romancespeaking nations such as the Italians: [W]e cannot wonder that Italy should have filled our Exhibition of 1850 with beautiful specimens of her skill in the arts, with statues and sculptures of rare loveliness, but should only rivet her chains the more closely by the weak and ineffectual efforts which she makes to break them, when she can degrade the word “virtuoso,” or “the virtuous,” to signify one accomplished in painting, music, and sculpture, such things as are the ornamental fringe of a nation’s life, but can never be made, without loss of all manliness and character, its main texture and woof – not to say that excellence in these fine arts has been in too many cases divorced from all true virtue and worth. (1927a [1851]: 42–43)

The idea of the close link between a language’s vocabulary and the character of the speaker group employing it has survived into the present. It is employed by, e.g., Jespersen (1982 [1905]: 11), who contrasts the “business-like, virile qualities of the English language,” which, of course, are a direct reflection of the qualities of its speakers, with phonological, morphological, syntactic, and lexical peculiarities of, for example, Italian, which, in his view, only attest to the fact that “the speakers [of this language] are innocent, childish, genial beings, with no great business capacities or seriousness in life” (1982 [1905]: 9). And even though Bryson (1990: 4) appears to be praising the Romance languages for their great lexical expressiveness and flexibility by saying that “other languages have facilities we lack […] the Romance languages can distinguish between something that leaks into and something that leaks out of […] Italians even have a word for the mark left on a table by a moist glass (culacino),” what he is actually describing is distinctions that appear irrelevant if not outright ridiculous, the implication being, obviously, that speakers of English, on account of their possession of a copious but at the same time finely shaded and precise vocabulary (cf. below), are best equipped for labeling and categorizing the world (cf. Pennycook 1998: 139–147). Another popular motif taken up by numerous writers following Trench is the great assimilative power of the English language, which, again, was seen as truly

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reflecting the character of both the English-speaking people and their institutions. English was the great borrowing language, which not only ransacked the world for useful additions to its already vast vocabulary (cf. below) but also took in words like refugees, thoroughly “Englishing” them and thus turning them into true members of the community of English vocabulary items. The English language, Trench argued, truly reflected the national character in terms of generosity and liberality. Thus, just as it was part of “the very character of our institutions to repel none, but rather to afford a shelter and refuge to all, from whatever quarter they come,” so the language had “thrown open its arms wider, with a greater confidence, a confidence justified by experience, that it could make truly its own, assimilate and subdue to itself, whatever it thought good to receive into its bosom” (Trench 1927b [1855]: 43). What aided the language in showing this generosity was its great assimilative power. The basis of all these equations between language and nation, on the one hand, and vocabulary development and national history, on the other, was the close link between language and thought (cf. above). Languages reflected thought, and thought was national thought. Thus, by implication, the national “genius” was faithfully embodied in the current structure of a language’s word stock; and moreover, etymology could reveal the thoughts that earlier generations of speakers had embedded into it and that thus revealed themselves to current generations of language users. The following excerpt summarizes this train of ideas: Every word has its history, and the beginning of this history, which is brought to light by etymology, leads us back far beyond its first historical appearances. Every word, as we know, had originally a predicative meaning, and that predicative meaning differs often very considerably from the later traditional or technical meaning. This predicative meaning, however, being the most original meaning of the word, allows us an insight into the most primitive ideas of a nation. (Müller 1995 [1872]: 124)

The most “primitive” stage of the English language had, of course, been Old English or “Anglo-Saxon,” and the glorification of the Anglo-Saxon language, literature, and way of life constituted, in fact, the central element of nineteenthcentury linguistic nationalism in English-speaking countries. It is to Anglo-Saxonism that we now turn in the following chapter.

9 Anglo-Saxonism and the English native speaker The link between the English native speaker and Anglo-Saxonism has been present ever since the concept came into being. In his appeal for the study of English at American universities, Marsh labels the English language not only as “the mother tongue” (1859: 59) and “our national speech” (1859: 70), but also as “the Anglo-Saxon tongue” (1859: 69) and “Anglo-Saxon” (1859: 76). If we turn to Marsh’s strategies for labeling speakers of English, his Anglo-Saxonist leaning emerges even more clearly. According to Marsh, English is the language of both “the Englishman and the American” (1859: 78), both of which together make up “the Anglo-Saxon race” (1859: 79) or “the Anglican people” (1859: 80). The use of these referential expressions is clearly in line with Marsh’s appeal for the study of English at American universities (1859: 70–71), in which he focuses on a very specific field: literature in Old English. The study of “those Old English writers” is advocated not only because it will provide English speakers with excellent models of language use (“the most forcible forms of expression”) or for scientific reasons (“[t]he discipline we advocate embraces […] the scientific notion of philology, which, though familiar in German literature, has not yet become the recognized meaning of the word in English”), but mainly for political ones: studying Old English texts will offer insight into the mental or spiritual basis of the English-speaking peoples (“the mighty thoughts, out of which has grown the action that has made England and her children the wonder and the envy of the world”). Elsewhere in his speech, Marsh also calls the study of Old English texts an act of “intellectual patriotism” (1859: 67; cf. above). In his focus on the earliest period of the English language and literature, Marsh was not alone; in fact, a fascination with things Anglo-Saxon was typical of the time (cf. Watts 2011: 30–52). It had begun with Ingram’s (1807) pronouncement on the utility of Anglo-Saxon literature but had soon come to dominate nineteenthcentury thought on language, literature, and politics. It abated around World War I. In 1918, for example, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch denied the relevance of AngloSaxon to contemporary English literature, tracing English poetry and prose back to “the democratic Greeks, not the Teutonic barbarians” (Crowley 1996: 152). Still, even then, there were pronouncements affirming the importance of Old English to the present-day form of the language; thus, according to the Newbolt Report (1921: 223), there was a “direct linguistic descent of modern English from AngloSaxon.”

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9.1 The rise of Anglo-Saxonism in philology James Ingram’s Inaugural Lecture on the Utility of Anglo-Saxon Literature (1807) marks the beginning of the nineteenth-century fascination with the origins of English language, literature, and culture. In the present context, two of Ingram’s arguments are particularly interesting. The first is political in nature and appeals to the patriotic feelings of Englishmen: I shall then proceed to examine, what inducements there are to the cultivation of AngloSaxon literature; and these, I trust, will be allowed to be sufficiently strong and powerful, if it shall appear, that the knowledge of it is of the greatest importance to Englishmen, and that it is intimately connected with the original introduction and establishment of their present language and laws, their liberty, and their religion. (1807: 2)

What Ingram voices here is what has been labeled the Anglo-Saxon component of the “Whig interpretation of history,” i.e., the tendency “to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present” (Butterfield 1951 [1931]: v, quoted in Kumar 2003: 202). Proponents of this view (cf. below) saw the success of the English as based on the continued development of their political liberties, parliamentary institutions, and legal proceedings, which, even though ultimately of Germanic origin, had been perfected by the Anglo-Saxons. In his second argument for the study of Anglo-Saxon literature, Ingram asserts (1807: 12–13) that as a consequence of the fact that the great mass of the people of this country […] continue at this day to be of Saxon origin […] the present language of Englishmen is not that heterogeneous compound which some imagine, compiled from the jarring and corrupted elements of Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, and Italian, but completely Anglo-Saxon in its whole idiom and construction.

It is because of this unbroken continuity that Anglo-Saxon is of profound help in reconstructing the nation’s past, elucidating the topography and antiquities of our own island, […] explaining our proper names and the origin of families, […] illustrating our provincial dialects and local customs; all which are the memories of the ancient manners and character of our ancestors, and without a knowledge of which every Englishman must be imperfectly acquainted with the history of his own country. (1807: 28)

The significance of studying the earliest English texts was soon recognized by English-speaking philologists, but the development of the field was by no means smooth; in fact, more than fifty years after Ingram’s plea, Marsh still recognized

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a problem (1859: 62). In the following excerpt, he echoes one of the positions of the so-called “Anglo-Saxon controversy,” i.e., the debate fought in England in the 1830s over issues arising from the application of the comparative-historical method to Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. The debate saw “the antiquarians, the dilettantes […], and the old saxonists” (Aarsleff 1967: 205) poised against younger scholars trained in the Continental European tradition, and while the controversy “was ostensibly fought over character fonts, dictionary formats and interpretations of manuscripts […], a general awareness that a foreign method of study was poised to supersede traditional British scholarship contributed greatly to the heightened pitch of debate” (Marggraf Turley 2001: 242). Marsh’s stance is basically that of John Mitchell Kemble (1807-57), who dominated and eventually won the debate with his vocal and eloquent advocacy of the new philology: The standard of linguistic science in England is comparatively low. British scholars have produced few satisfactory discussions of Anglo-Saxon or Old English inflectional or structural forms, and it is to Teutonic zeal and talent that we must still look for the elucidation of most points of interest connected with either the form or the significance of primitive English. A large proportion of the relics of Anglo-Saxon and or early English literature remains still unpublished, or has been edited with so little sound learning and critical ability as to serve less to guide than to lead astray. (Marsh 1859: 71)

It is clear that what was at stake in the Anglo-Saxon controversy was not just philological or linguistic matters; rather, social and political concerns were involved. And while the Anglo-Saxon controversy had long subsided by the time Marsh was making his plea for the study of Anglo-Saxon language and literature, the sociopolitical implications of the endeavor were still clearly recognized (cf. Doyle 1986: 91–93); in fact, Marsh himself points out that one of the reasons why English speakers ought to study their own language was nationalism, or as he himself calls it, “intellectual patriotism” (1859: 67; cf. above). But how did the relation between nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon studies, on the one hand, and the phenomenon of nationalism, on the other, come about, in other words, where is the link between a fascination with Anglo-Saxon language and literature and a historical theory and political ideology?

9.2 Anglo-Saxonism in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and the U.S.A. [O]ur history clearly begins with the coming over of the Saxons; the Britons and Romans had lived in our country, but they are not our fathers; we are connected with them as men indeed, but, nationally speaking, the history of Caesar’s invasion has no more to do with

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us, than the natural history of the animals which then inhabited our forests. We, this great English nation, whose race and language are now overrunning the earth from one end of it to the other, – we were born when the white horse of the Saxons had established his dominion from the Tweed to the Tamar. So far we can trace our blood, our language, the name and actual divisions of our country, the beginnings of some of our institutions. (Arnold 1860: 23–24) The condition of England is in all these respects closely assimilated to that of the United States; and not only the methods, but the instruments, of popular instruction are fast becoming the same in both; and there is a growing conviction among the wise of the two great empires, that the highest interests of both will be promoted by reciprocal goodwill and unrestricted intercourse, perilled by jealousies and estrangement. Favoured, then, by the mighty elective affinities, the powerful harmonic attractions, which subsist between the Americans and the Englishmen as brothers of one blood, one speech, one faith, we may reasonably hope that the English tongue on both sides of the Atlantic, as it grows in flexibility, comprehensiveness, expression, wealth, will also more and more clearly manifest the organic unity of its branches, and that national jealousies, material rivalries, narrow interests, will not disjoin and shatter the great instrument of social advancement, which God made one, as He made one the spirit of the nations that use it. (Marsh 1874: 484)

As a term, Anglo-Saxonism seems to be of unclear origin. Frantzen and Niles (1997: 2) situate its first appearance in the mid-nineteenth century and use it to denote “the sentiment of being ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or English ethnologically,” with a frequent implication being the belief in the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race, “often (though not always) with the understanding that ‘race’ in such a formulation denotes not so much a biological state as a social identity that is compounded of ethnicity, culture, tradition, and language.” The term, in any case, entered contemporary scholarly discourse in the early 1980s with two publications: Reginald Horsman’s Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (1981) and Hugh A. MacDougall’s Racial Myth in English History (1982). As a historical theory and political ideology, Anglo-Saxonism held sway from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries; its beginning and end can be placed in the contexts of the Reformation and World War I respectively. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a gradual increase in the frequency and self-assurance with which English speakers propounded their Anglo-Saxon origins. In the first half of the nineteenth century, a marked shift and focusing of the discourse towards a clearly racist perspective occurred. Anglo-Saxonism finally reached the climax of its popularity in the second half of the nineteenth century.

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9.2.1 The origins myth: Anglo-Saxons and their religious and political heritage As a discourse, Anglo-Saxonism consisted of numerous strands, which, in the course of time, became closely entangled; in fact, Kramer (2002: 12) calls it “an echoing cavern of banalities out of which even a well-lit historian might never emerge.” The beginnings of Anglo-Saxonism are generally (cf. Horsman 1981: 10–11; Kumar 2003: 204) located in the search for an alternative origins myth necessitated by the sociocultural and political developments of Renaissance England. Ever since Norman times, the English had seen themselves as firmly tied to Rome via descent from Brutus, grandson of Aeneas, the founder of Rome. While it granted the English the status of an imperial people, Henry VIII’s break with Rome made this self-portrait problematic. The first scholarly interest in Anglo-Saxon England was thus a product of the Reformation. Its main aim was to show that, while the original English Church had been pure and uncorrupted, its later version, under the influence of a “foreign” religion, had decayed. A nineteenth-century writer on language describes this as follows: The original form of the English language […] was revived in England in the middle of the sixteenth century […]. It was first recurred to as a theological weapon. […] the English Reformers turned to the oldest writings in the vernacular tongue for evidence of the comparatively unromanized condition of the early English church. (Craik 1875: 54–55)

In emphasizing the pre-Roman tradition of the English Church, scholars and writers of the early seventeenth century linked the English cause to the general Germanophilia which was sweeping through Europe at the time (cf. Bailey 1991: 42). Moreover, whereas in the sixteenth century, religious issues had been at the forefront, in the first half of the seventeenth century, political and legal issues assumed greater importance, and the myth of a pure Anglo-Saxon church was supplemented by the even more powerful myth of a free Anglo-Saxon government. The reason for this shift in interest was the growing rift between Parliament and the Crown. As royal pretensions increased, so did interest in the supposed antiquity and continuity of English parliamentary and legal institutions. When, following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, social and political turmoil abated, the way was free for the emergence of the “Whig” view of English history (Kumar 2003: 202–203). In this view, the Anglo-Saxon period had been a golden age of good government. The “Norman yoke” had eroded political and civil liberties, but in a long struggle, marked by such glorious victories as the Magna Carta and the successful rebuttal of the Stuart usurpations, their foundations had successfully been restored. As a consequence of such victories, the English were a nation with a continuous tradition of parliamentary and legal institutions stretch-

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ing back to the free Anglo-Saxons; their innate love of freedom and outstanding capacity for good government had time and again saved them from falling prey to Continental “convulsions” or incursions. With this new emphasis, “the way was now clear for the emergence of a fullblown Anglo-Saxon ideology” (Kumar 2003: 205), an ideology which described English speakers as the possessors and progenitors of unique, “free” political values and institutions, which not only maintained them as a consistently liberated people despite usurpation and oppression but also enabled them to liberate others. Even though they annexed territories and extirpated “inferior” races, all of this happened in the name of liberty: lands were freed from neglect, trade emancipated from tariff barriers, and conquered peoples liberated from ignorance and savagery.

9.2.2 Framing Anglo-Saxonism racially: Of superior and inferior peoples While the close connection with Protestantism and the appeal to the Germanic, libertarian heritage of the English people had established two important components of Anglo-Saxonism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the ideology underwent substantial transformations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For one, until the middle of the eighteenth century, praise for the Germans often included other peoples, such as the Celts, which, according to Horsman (1981: 28), “reveals a lack of specific racial thinking.” Of course, this inclusive Germanophilia extended only to Europeans; no attempts were made to stretch the bounds of the privileged to “primitive” peoples in other parts of the world. Moreover, it was soon ended by two interrelated movements: a shift in focus on to a fascination with the history, language, and mythology of the “northern nations,” and the development of the new comparative-historical philology, which definitively linked language, nation, and race, and traced the Germanic peoples and their descendants back to their Indo-European, or “Aryan,” base (cf. Horsman 1981: 29). It was in the context of the separation of the Germanic-Norse branch from other European peoples that a relabeling of the former took place. In numerous publications in and after the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the terms Goth and Gothic occur. In his Northern Antiquities (1770), for example, Thomas Percy “indicated that the Gothic or Teutonic peoples were distinct from the Celtic and that descended from the former were the Germans, the Saxons, and the Scandinavians” (1981: 30). In his Columbia address, Marsh also employs the term Gothic. As already discussed in detail in Chapter 4, the Gothic is clearly distinguished from Greco-

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Roman civilization and tied to northern European life; in how far it is meant to exclude the Celtic does not become clear at this point. That the Celtic language and its speakers do not rank high in Marsh’s estimation, however, is made transparent at the end of the address, where Celtic is described as a language that lacks “vitality” and “power of resistance” and is spoken by a “dying race” (1859: 88). What Marsh’s address indicates here is an important shift in late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism: rather than merely lauding Anglo-Saxons or Germans or Goths, authors now turned toward debasing other peoples, such as the Celts. This new emphasis contributed crucially to the racial turn Anglo-Saxonism was to take in the nineteenth century. The scientific and philosophical prerequisites that enabled Anglo-Saxonism to assume such a racial cast include at least four major developments: (1) There was a shift in interest from the eighteenth-century emphasis on the universality of mankind and its power, progress, and problems, on to an emphasis on the particularities of individuals, peoples, and nations; the focus no longer lay on what united mankind but what distinguished its various manifestations. (2) The flowering of the new science of man in the first half of the nineteenth century effected the turn toward races as the basic unit of analysis in human affairs. (3) The various races were now seen to be distinctly endowed with innately unequal abilities, which would lead either to world domination or to subordination or extinction, i.e., the assumption still common among Enlightenment intellectuals and eighteenth-century naturalists that human differences resulted from factors in the environment such as climate, terrain, etc., gave way to an insistence on inherent inequality, which was seen to surface variously in “the blood,” in mental setup, or in anatomical and physiological characteristics in general. (4) The comparative methods underlying all of the new sciences enabled their practitioners to establish reasons for superiority and inferiority; in this context, arguments about the “inferiority” of other races soon assumed greater importance than those of the “superiority” of the white, Caucasian, or Anglo-Saxon race. Nevertheless, the latter remained significant and have outlasted the former. The starting point for all Western theories concerning human unity or diversity had, of course, been the Christian orthodoxy as laid out in Genesis. God had created Adam and Eve; from this pair had descended, through Noah and his sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth, all of mankind. This “monogenetic” position still stood firm in late eighteenth-century scientific writing, as illustrated, for example, by

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Sir William Jones’s “Discourse the ninth on the origin and families of nations” (1993 [1807]: 185–204), one of his Discourses Delivered at the Asiatick Society 1785–1792. It was increasingly called into question, however, by those who refused to believe that other peoples who appeared so fundamentally different could have originated with the same ancestors. The Age of Discoveries had brought Europeans into contact with a hitherto unimagined variety of “primitive” peoples. Could all these far-away “savages” have descended from that one pair of humans in the Garden of Eden? Underlying this “polygenetic” position was the tendency to exalt the white race and put down colored peoples, which surfaced early when Europeans thought about Africans. As a colonial power in contact with many different non-European peoples, Britain “was a fertile field for the theories of racial differentiation in the late eighteenth century” (Horsman 1981: 49). Edward Long, for example, in his popular History of Jamaica (1774), called blacks “a different species of the same genus,” which was characterized by unalterable physical properties such as wool rather than hair or a bestial smell (quoted in Horsman 1981: 50), and Sayce (1874: 163) maintained that “[t]he intellectual growth of the Negro stops at fourteen; […] although he has been brought into close contact with the civilisations of the ancient and the modern world.” Soon, attempts were made at uniting the Christian orthodoxy with the new thinking. Basic to such attempts was the idea that, no matter how they had originally come into being, the various manifestations of the human species were now permanently endowed with inherently unequal characteristics. To account for this fact, it was possible either to argue for divine intervention sometime after creation or simply to assume independent and divergent development. In the first half of the nineteenth century, then, scientific arguments were employed to rationalize the distinction into “superior” and “inferior” manifestations of the human species. By observing, classifying, and comparing, scientists were able to provide reasons for what many already believed anyway: that wide gaps separated Europeans from the “savage” peoples they had encountered on their voyages and explorations. It was particularly the development of the new sciences of man which boosted such views. Particularly phrenology proved important for both the formation of racist ideas and their dissemination. One of the most popular phrenologists was the Scotsman George Combe, who, in the 1830s, “ensured that some of the most influential writings on phrenology would take on a distinctly Anglo-Saxon cast” (Horsman 1981: 57). In general, phrenologists claimed that, by examining the skull and brain of an individual, his or her character as well as emotional and intellectual capacities could be determined. Just like other scientists and writers, phrenologists praised the white race and heaped abuse on colored peoples. Some even made more subtle distinc-

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tions on each side of the gulf. Combe, for example, thought that, among whites, the Celts were particularly despicable. The Celtic race, he said, was “far behind the Teutonic” (quoted in Horsman 1981: 58). Phrenology was also adduced to explain Anglo-Saxon world dominance and the subordination of other peoples. With regard to Indians, Combe maintained that phrenology explained why “one hundred millions of them are at this moment kept in subjection by forty or fifty thousand Englishmen […] the larger-headed nations manifest their superior power, by subjecting and ruling their smaller-headed brethren – as the British in Asia, for example” (quoted in Horsman 1981: 59). What these quotes show is that, by the middle years of the nineteenth century, the climate of opinion concerning the unity or diversity of mankind had irreversibly turned. Whereas the biblical account of creation was still frequently quoted in the scientific literature in the first half of the nineteenth century, by 1850, there were few writers who were prepared to defend the inherent equality of races. Even those who adhered to monogenesis generally believed that wide gaps had somehow arisen since the coming-into-being of mankind. It had become a commonplace that “the Caucasians were innately superior, and that they were responsible for civilization in the world, or to know that inferior races were destined to be overwhelmed or even to disappear” (Horsman 1981: 157).

9.2.3 Anglo-Saxonism in America The previous sections have described ideological developments in Englishspeaking Europe, but of course Americans were not aloof from the ideological tendencies of the age. This also holds for Anglo-Saxonism. But how could Americans view themselves as Anglo-Saxons? After all, if we follow Frantzen and Niles (1997: 2; cf. above), the term is defined as “the sentiment of being ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or English ethnologically.” Clearly, after 1776, American patriots would have cringed at being called “English.” And still, Marsh proudly flaunts his Anglo-Saxon identity: both “the Englishman and the American” (1859: 78) are members of the “Anglo-Saxon race” (1859: 79) or, variously, “the Anglican people” (1859: 80), this “pioneer race” leading “the march of man towards the highest summits of worthy human achievement” (1859: 80). How did that work? In other words, how could Anglo-Saxonism and Americanism be reconciled? Americans had inherited from their British ancestors the conviction that they were direct descendants of the freedom-loving Anglo-Saxons. The successful Revolution had intensified this belief by providing them with an impressive overt sign that their institutionalization of freedom had been approved by Providence. In breaking away from what they perceived as an outmoded, weak, and corrupt

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political system, Americans – so they thought – were merely reinventing and reinstituting ancient civil liberties, not disavowing their heritage. A clear distinction was made by the Revolutionary generation of politicians, writers, and other public figures between the English as a people of kindred spirits and the decadent British government. As Horsman (1981: 160) puts it, “attacking the aristocratic English government while praising the innate qualities of the English people” was entirely possible. The writings of Benjamin Franklin (1706–90), one of the founding fathers of the United States, are instructive in this respect. They make “little or no mention of Americans as distinct from the English either ethnically, socially, or linguistically” (Bonfiglio 2002: 75). Nevertheless, they clearly show an “emerging consciousness of race” in America (2002: 75), which pitted the Anglo-Saxons against all others, distinguishing not just between white and colored people but also between “Saxons” and other Germans: Why should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion […] which leads me to one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Corners) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. (Franklin 1961: 234)

Bonfiglio (2002: 78–79) offers the following comments on these – at first sight perplexing – remarks: Franklin moves directly from language to complexion; the presence of the other will diminish both the language and the race of the dominant group. It is as if he had concepts of lightness and darkness a priori that he subsequently applies to populations that he wishes to include and marginalize respectively. The fact that he should see both Italians and Swedes as swarthy is not primarily a function of an objective perception; this would be very difficult to justify empirically. It is rather one of organization and classification. […] Splitting the Saxons off from the rest of the Germans solves the problem by doubling the other into one group that is included and one that is rejected. Thus there are Germans who are related to Anglo-Saxons and Germans who are foreign.

The successful Revolution meant that Americans were a chosen people destined to lead the world as “the crusading agent of God’s will” (Horsman 1981: 82). This idea had been popular in England in the wake of the Reformation but

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had faded after the Restoration (Colley 2004: 368). Americans, on the contrary, never doubted that their colonies would set an example. The economic and political success of the young nation was interpreted as an impressive demonstration of the superiority of free institutions. By way of example as well as by physical expansion, this accomplishment would eventually reach all the peoples of the world. What underlay this conviction was a profound optimism in the universal abilities of mankind. The expansion of the American republic across the continent, however, brought not only increased prosperity and well-being to many Americans, but also put them in sometimes violent touch with peoples of other skin colors. This transformed attitudes. Particularly those in direct contact with Native Americans and blacks began to perceive a wide gulf between themselves and the peoples they were overrunning or enslaving. An important issue in this respect was slavery. Racist thinking was, of course, also widespread in the North, even though its reception there was much cooler. The descendants of the Puritans, in their strong sense of religious and moral obligation and mission, steadfastly rejected accounts that contradicted the Biblical story of the single origin and unity of mankind; yet, as Horsman (1981: 148–150) explains, the new ideas were nevertheless widely discussed in New England intellectual circles. Even though many longed to elevate members of the other races present on the American continent to the fullest of their potential, believing in the general and principled development potential of all of mankind, and thus vehemently advocated education, philanthropy, and religious teaching, few actually argued for racial equality. Thus, as Horsman (1981: 125) comments, [t]he sad irony of the years from the mid-1830s to the Civil War was that, as the northern attack on slavery increased in intensity, northern racial theorists generally agreed with the South that the colored races were unfit to mix with the whites on any equal basis.

By 1850, the innate and inherent inequality of races had assumed the status of an axiom. Numerous “proofs” of human differentiation had been adduced and widely disseminated in books and magazines (cf. Horsman 1981: 156–157), and the future of the American continent and the world was conceptualized in terms of white rule and the subordination or even extinction of other races.

9.2.4 Closing the lines: British and U.S. Anglo-Saxons unite As the preceding section has shown, Anglo-Saxonism was as popular in the nineteenth-century United States as it was in Victorian Britain. Just as much as the

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British, Americans viewed themselves as the legitimate heirs of the freedom-loving Anglo-Saxons; their institutionalization of freedom in the American republic represented not only the continuity of ancient civil liberties but also hope to the world. Under the influence of the new sciences of man, Anglo-Saxonism in the United States took on a racial cast, just as it had done in Britain; what was different in the former case was that encounters with other-colored peoples had taken place “at home” in the form of violent clashes with Native Americans and slavery in the South rather than far away in the colonies. But Anglo-Saxonism did not only exist in parallel fashion in Britain and in the United States; rather, it crucially linked the two countries in a network of “Atlantic crossings” comprising sociopolitical and institutional ideas and practices (Kramer 2002: 2). The present section outlines the way in which the ideology enabled British and Americans to draw together during the second half of the nineteenth century to close the lines both ethnically and linguistically. Numerous commentators have pointed out that, as a political ideology and historical theory, Anglo-Saxonism was integrative and inclusive. According to Kumar (2003: 206), for example, [r]acial Anglo-Saxonism rarely connoted “Little Englandism,” or attached itself to a narrow English nationalism. On the contrary, it was expansive, including all people of English blood or descent. It referred to a whole civilization or way of life; it included not just England, but the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other territories where English people had settled.

In the U.S., arguments invoking the Anglo-Saxon heritage assumed crucial importance in the legitimization of American expansion into the Pacific and the Caribbean at the very end of the nineteenth century. These arguments operated on two levels (Kramer 2002: 31). At the historical level, they were used to counter the anti-imperialist argument that maintained that U.S. overseas colonialism violated and undermined American republican traditions. Colonialists answered this national-exceptional challenge with a racial-exceptional one, maintaining that it was precisely the controversial overseas colonies which represented the logical completion of the unfolding of Anglo-Saxon liberties in time and space. At the political level, Anglo-Saxon talents were contrasted with their opponents’ weaknesses: manly vigor, a permanent expansive thrust, and an unwavering willingness to defend and spread civil and political liberties, on the one hand, a decadent, effeminate, Spanish or Latin empire, on the other. The Anglo-Saxonist advocacy of U.S. overseas colonialism emanated from both Britain and the U.S. British politician Sir Edward Grey, for example, described the Spanish-Cuban-American war thus: “The struggle in which the United States is engaged must be one to stir up our blood, and makes us conscious of the ties

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of language, origin, and race” (quoted in Kramer 2002: 11). And British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain declared: I have been called the apostle of the Anglo-Saxon race, and I am proud of that title […]. I think the Anglo-Saxon race is as fine as any on earth […]. I refuse […] to think or to speak of the USA as a foreign nation. We are all of the same race and blood. I refuse to make any distinctions between the interests of Englishmen in England, in Canada and in the United States […]. Our past is theirs – their future is ours […]. We are branches of one family (quoted in Kumar 2003: 206).

Appeals like this were appreciated in the United States. The Chicago Tribune, for example, interpreted Chamberlain’s speech as indicating that “the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race are drawing nearer and nearer together for cooperation in peace, and, in logical sequence, in war as well” (quoted in Kramer 2002: 35). But British commentators appealed to Anglo-Saxonism not only in support of their American cousins but also to further their own interests. Particularly toward the end of the nineteenth century, the United States were seen to hold important lessons for imperial Britain itself (cf. Kramer 2002: 21). Noticing both external and internal threats, among them European rivalries, colonial nationalism, and working-class unrest, numerous political thinkers advocated a reorganization of the British Empire along American lines in order to endow it with greater coherence and stability. This concentration process was to involve primarily or exclusively the white settlement colonies, i.e., Australia, New Zealand, etc. and was to be based on the criteria of language and race. One of the most prominent of such proposals was that put forward by Sir John Seeley (1834–95). In The Expansion of England (1914 [1883]), Seeley laid out his plans for what he called “Greater Britain.” The task at hand, according to him, was to unite the far-flung “English-speaking” settlement colonies and “to give moral unity to vast countries separated from each other by half the globe, even when they are inhabited in the main by one nation” (1914 [1883]: 203). In order to achieve this, Seeley called for the abandonment of the non-white colonies in what was to be less of an empire than “a vast English nation” (1914 [1883]: 89). The example in that respect was to be found in America, because “here too is a United States […] a great homogenous people, one in blood, language, religion and laws, but dispersed over a boundless space” (1914 [1883]: 184). Thus, the sociocultural scaffolding of this new empire-nation was to be provided by language, religion, and law; the biological basis was to be Anglo-Saxon blood. Anglo-Saxon ties existed not only in the form of a historical theory and political ideology, however; as Kramer (2002: 22) indicates, there were also dense “social, familial, intellectual, and literary networks that tied elite Americans and

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Britons together.” The late nineteenth century saw a proliferation of transatlantic marriages strategically linking British and American elites. As Kramer (2002: 23) notes, such marriages also provided the imagery by which future Anglo-American relations were envisaged. In The Anglo-Saxon Century and the Unification of the English-Speaking People (1903), John R. Dos Passos, the novelist’s father, maintained that these relations would be “as natural as marriage between man and woman,” because they “consummate […] the purposes of the creation of the race.” As Dos Passos’s book clearly shows, even contemporaries were thus viewing their times as Anglo-Saxon times determined by unity in language. However, not everyone agreed that Britons and Americans were essentially one race, nation, or people and therefore had identical interests. Particularly in the U.S., there was resistance to the idea of worldwide Anglo-Saxon unity. John Fleming, for example, noted in 1891 that the appeal to Anglo-Saxonism could also be interpreted as the self-serving attempt by Great Britain to maintain a hold on an imagined “cousin” of international significance: “In proportion as the North American Republic grows powerful and overshadowing […] grows the anxiety of Englishmen to have it understood that this potent factor in the world’s affairs is what they term Anglo-Saxon […] in race, feeling, and literature” (quoted in Kramer 2002: 10). Apart from historical-political considerations, social-biological ones also played a role in American opposition to an imagined Anglo-Saxon unity. All of these considerations were framed within a nationalist discourse in the United States. That discourse will be dealt with in more detail below; for now suffice it to note that the second half of the nineteenth century saw an intensification of American nationalism in response to a series of events which had suddenly increased and made noticeable the nation’s ethnic diversity. While this caused a nativist backlash propagating an exclusivist Anglo-American identity, there was also intense debate concerning Anglo-Saxonism itself, which led to various attempts at redefining the concept. All of a sudden, the question of whether Anglo-Saxonism was a matter of blood or culture became virulent. On the one hand, Anglo-Saxons had always been known by their language, their laws and institutions, and their religion; thus, it was common to refer to the “English-speaking people” interchangeably with the “Anglo-Saxon race,” something we also find in Marsh, who mentions “the Englishman and the American,” who are united by “our language” (1859: 78), as making up the “Anglo-Saxon race” (1859: 79) or “Anglican people” (1859: 80). Thus, for Marsh, as for many others at the time, “the English tongue, and the men who speak it” (1859: 81) formed a basic and indissoluble unit. On the other hand, as just shown, the cultural achievements of the “Englishspeaking people” were often regarded as bound to and traveling via Anglo-Saxon

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blood. Nevertheless, some writers, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century and particularly in the United States, attempted to tease apart blood and culture and to redefine Anglo-Saxonism by the latter. The impulse behind this, as Kramer (2002: 16) calls it, “disembodiment” of the ideology was to maintain its viability in a situation being drastically altered by increasing ethnic diversity. As Kramer (2002: 17) reports, in the U.S., it was often “assertive immigrants” who were “de-Saxonizing” U.S. nationalism. John Fleming (1891), again, pointed out that Anglo-Saxonism was “an idea received with enthusiasm by some here in America, with indifference by others, but by a large section of our people with dislike, because it is false and because it is offensive.” It was especially offensive to other white immigrants such as the Irish, Germans, or Scandinavians, who, upon their arrival in the country, found “the Anglo-Saxon to be something like a proprietor of these United States” (quoted in Kramer 2002: 17). In Fleming’s view, Americans should renounce Anglo-Saxonism and “be content with our Caucasian origin and American citizenship,” building the nation on “a type developing itself which is destined to pass into the future as essentially American, as different from Celtic as from Latin, as different from Anglo-Saxon as from either.” The opposition between an Anglo-Saxon orientation and a purely American one was also fought out in the American linguistic literature, pitting two of the great figures of the field squarely against one another: Brander Matthews (1852–1929) and Henry Louis Mencken (1880–1956). In The American of the Future (1909), the former, professor of literature at Columbia University in New York, voiced concern about the assimilability of the millions of new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who had recently swelled the population of the eastern metropolises, and especially New York. Quoting Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s “The unguarded gates” (cf. below), he also advocated the exclusion of “orientals,” who “abhor assimilation and have no desire to be absorbed” (1909: 5). In his view, what was crucial was that the newcomers quickly learn about American political traditions and learn to cherish them; in this case [w]e need not fear for any weakening of the Teutonic framework of our social order. Beyond all question we shall preserve the common law of England and the English language, – for these are priceless possessions in which the welcome invaders are glad to be allowed to share. The good old timbers of the ship of state are still solid and the sturdy vessel is steered by the same compass. (1909: 22)

As Bonfiglio (2002: 145) explains, [t]he invocation of England and of common law do [sic] not function to situate America as an obedient cultural, legal, and linguistic dependent and derivative of England. What Mat-

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thews seeks is a form of Anglo-Saxon commonality, a broad, umbrella-like understanding of a generally-shared phylogeny that would also contain individual differences. His concept of American culture and American language pivot [sic] around a general Teutonic essence, which is the parent of the Anglo-Saxon essence, which, in turn, is informed by a masculinist discourse of virility, vigor, strength, and order.

With regard to language, Matthews elsewhere notes “indisputable differences between Londoner and New Yorker […]. Yet when all is said the differences between British English and American English, however many they may be, are relatively few” (1921a: 13–14). It seems to have been precisely Matthews’s lack of acknowledgement of the importance of differences between British English and American English which infuriated Mencken and prompted him, in his preface to the third edition of The American Language (1923), to count Matthews among his adversaries, which also included the Society for Pure English, which had been founded in Britain in 1913 but “now has an American secretary” and “American collaborators” who “are rather intent upon […] augmenting the authority of standard English in America […] they are simply Anglomaniacs.” According to Mencken, Matthews was intent on portraying “England as the lordly husband and the United States as the dutiful and obedient wife” (quoted in Bonfiglio 2002: 143), an accusation which, according to Bonfiglio (2002: 144), only illustrates “Mencken’s own projections of a paranoia located in language and a profound Anglophobia.” Thus, at least from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, Anglo-Saxonism and American nationalism must be clearly distinguished. For many, the two ideologies were not historical or political extensions but antitheses. Nevertheless, those who stressed the uniqueness of the “American race” as a new hybrid elite rather than the continuities with an exclusively Anglo-Saxon past were not necessarily in the main line of thought. The tensions between the two positions were clearly present, but until World War I, Anglo-Saxonism as a transatlantic or even worldwide ideology of racial exceptionalism maintained a stronghold in the U.S. as well as in Britain. However, racial diversification had also affected Britain itself via imperialism: The accelerating extension of the British empire beyond the seas to all quarters of the globe, over its continents and islands, its civilizations old and wilds newly broken to human habitation, its varied populations, – Aryan, Semitic, Mongolian, white, brown, black – has had its undoubted reflex action upon the ethnic character of the conquerors. (Chapman 1900, quoted in Kramer 2002: 16)

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An important consequence of this “shifting and interchange of population” was, according to Chapman, that “the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ practically ceases to be a race designation […]. It stands rather for a civilization; for ideals and institutions, originating indeed with a certain ethnic type of mankind but no longer its exclusive property.” Thus, late nineteenth-century Britain, too, saw attempts at the “disembodiment” of Anglo-Saxonism (Kramer 2002: 16). Chapman wrote about people “bearing unquestionably English names and English (using the term in its broadest sense) in their language, their ideas, ideals and general mental culture,” whose “swarthy complexion, raven hair, deep dark irides [sic] and general aquilinity of physiognomy” betrayed “Italian, Levantine or Oriental blood.” Nevertheless, these people were Anglo-Saxons in Chapman’s view; they illustrated that Anglo-Saxonism had to be defined culturally rather than racially: Any rational being brought up under the dominance of these ideals and identified therewith, […] whatever his ancestral life currents, – Teutonic, Celtic, Semitic, Mongolian, Malay or African – is an Anglo-Saxon. (Chapman 1900, quoted in Kramer 2002: 16)

The most potent force in turning such people into Anglo-Saxons was the English language. In fact, English was often endowed with the power to “Saxonize” whoever spoke it. As Horsman (1981: 74) reports, “[i]t was even maintained that when a community began to speak the English language it was ‘half Saxonised’ even if there were no Anglo-Saxons there.” The idea was first applied to the Celts but could, of course, in principle be extended to any people entering the AngloSaxon orbit. What racial Anglo-Saxonism meant for those who were not members of the “Anglo-Saxon race” or “Anglican people” (Marsh 1859: 79, 80) is made clear by Anderson (1991: 90–93). He describes how, before Macaulay’s notorious minute on education (1920 [1835]), the “spirit” of Britain’s oversees conquests “was still fundamentally that of a prenational age” (1991: 90). When Macaulay declared that “a single shelf of a good European library is worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia,” a thoroughly English system of education was introduced which, he hoped, would produce “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect.” In other words, English-medium education was to effect a mental “Saxonization” among the indigenous Indian population, or, as Anderson (1991: 91) puts it, a “sort of mental miscegenation.” The consequences of this endeavor are illustrated by the memoirs of Bipin Chandra Pal (1932), who, almost exactly a century after Macaulay, wrote that Indian Magistrates

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[…] had not only passed a very rigid test on the same terms as British members of the service, but had spent the very best years of the formative period of their youth in England. Upon their return to their homeland, they practically lived in the same style as their brother Civilians, and almost religiously followed the social conventions and the ethical standards of the latter. In those days the India-born […] Civilian practically cut himself off from his parent society, and lived and moved and had his being in the atmosphere so beloved of his British colleagues. In mind and manners he was as much an Englishman as any Englishman. It was no small sacrifice for him, because in this way he completely estranged himself from the society of his own people and became socially and morally a pariah among them […]. He was as much a stranger in his own native land as the European residents in the country (quoted in Anderson 1991: 92–93). So far, so Macaulay. Much more serious, however, was that such strangers in their native land were still condemned […] to an “irrational” permanent subordination to the English […] no matter how Anglicized a Pal became, he was always barred from the uppermost peaks of the Raj. (Anderson 1991: 93)

Of course, “Saxonizing” colored peoples was not foremost on the agenda of most Anglo-Saxonists. As in the U.S., the majority position in Britain was still that of an exclusive racial exceptionalism, and it was assumed that, as Anglo-Saxons multiplied and expanded in the world, inferior races would simply disappear. Grandiose plans were made for that time, which were sometimes described in Roman terms. There was even an entire work devoted to the idea: Theodore Poesche and Charles Goepp’s The New Rome (1853). Poesche and Goepp ascribed “much of what was best in the world” (Horsman 1981: 294) to the Germanic tribes and their descendants, the Anglo-Saxons. The former had had the instinct for freedom, which had then been institutionalized by the latter. The white race in America would gradually eliminate all others, and the way would then be free for the incorporation of the world – including the British Empire – into an American union, which would then bring power and prosperity to the world. What is important in the present context is the role that Poesche and Goepp (quoted in Horsman 1981: 296) assigned the English language: “Nothing is more certain than that the English language will extend over all the earth, and will very shortly become the common medium of thought – the language of the world.” As Horsman (1981: 296) explains, Poesche and Goepp were two justly obscure writers and dreamers, but in The New Rome they inadvertently caricatured the thought of their expansionist generation. Their scientific […] theories […] were absurd, but […] [n]early all the ideas […] could be found one way or another in a variety of respectable sources.

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These ideas centered around the racial superiority of the Anglo-Saxons and their future world dominance. As the above quote shows, the status of English as a universal language is inextricably bound to those ideas and therefore not ideologically neutral. Chapter 10 deals more fully with that connection. To sum up the present section, in the second half of the nineteenth century, Anglo-Saxonism represented a powerful conceptual framework encompassing the British Empire and the U.S. in a logic of racial exceptionalism based on both descent and culture. In that framework, language played a crucial role, as the traits of the English-speaking people – an expansionist drive, a youthful and manly character, and an emphasis on political liberties – were seen to be traveling along lines of Anglo-Saxon blood. The fact that race was the underlying determinant of Anglo-Saxon unity permitted the inclusion of other white settlement colonies in the framework; whether the worldwide union of Anglo-Saxonists was then to be guided by the U.S. or Great Britain remained a matter of debate. The following excerpt once more illustrates the idea of Anglo-Saxon linguistic and racial unity as represented in the contemporary literature. We see that, in the description of the worldwide spread of the language, only (former) white settlement colonies are listed. Legitimate membership in the great English-speaking community is based not only on language but primarily on blood in that English is described as the language of the “Anglo-Saxon race” and assigned to what is nowadays called the “traditional bases of English,” i.e., the Inner-Circle countries in which English is the native language of the majority of speakers (Kachru 1992: 3): The English Language. – The English language is the speech spoken by the Anglo-Saxon race in England, in most parts of Scotland, in the larger part of Ireland, in the United States, in Canada, in Australia and New Zealand, in South Africa, and in many other parts of the world. In the middle of the fifth century it was spoken by a few thousand men who had lately landed in England from the Continent: it is now spoken by more than one hundred millions of people. In the course of the next sixty years, it will probably be the speech of two hundred millions. (Meiklejohn 1899: 272)

9.3 The development of nationalism in Britain and the U.S. The preceding sections have outlined Anglo-Saxonism as a historical theory and political ideology which fascinated thinkers and writers on both sides of the Atlantic particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century. As such, AngloSaxonism may be regarded as one of the fundamental ideologies surrounding the emergence of the English native speaker. It has also been pointed out that Anglo-Saxonism and nineteenth-century nationalism in both Britain and the U.S. crucially depended on one another. The following sections therefore turn pre-

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cisely to the latter in order to show how shifts in the nationalist discourses of the two countries permitted new ways of thinking about languages and their speakers and thus the occurrence of the English native speaker as a new and distinct linguistic identity.

9.3.1 British national identity in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries As Kumar notes, even though the United Kingdom has been the subject of some excellent works in political, economic, and social history, with regard to the question of national identity, there is a “conceptual hole” (2000: 575). For a long time, it used to be thought that there was no such thing as English nationalism (2000: 576), and attempts at defining Britishness were also not made frequently. The past two decades or so, however, have seen an upsurge in studies looking into precisely these issues (e.g., Colley 2004; Greenfeld 1992; Kumar 2000, 2003, 2006); it is on these studies that the following sections are built in order to explain the emergence of strong nationalist sentiment in the writings of British and American thinkers on language in the second half of the nineteenth century. As Colley has shown, for a long time English national identity remained contained within and subordinated to Britishness. The “forging” of the British nation took place between the Act of Union, which joined Scotland to England and Wales in 1707, and the accession of Queen Victoria to the throne in 1837 (2004: 1). Although earlier regional and/or ethnic identities, such as English, Welsh, or Scots, were not blended into or replaced by the new British identity (2004: 6), Britishness proved to be a very powerful concept during this 130-year period. This was aided by the fact that it could be tied to various causes. First, there was a military cause. As Colley (2004: 3–4) points out, Britishness was above all an identity which was created in and by a persistent struggle with France, which time and again united Britons, whether they were English, Welsh, or Scottish, under a common purpose and prompted them to define themselves collectively against a hostile “other.” Second, there was a religious cause. After the Reformation, first the English and later the British identified themselves with Protestantism. Britain was defined as the “Protestant nation,” and the British saw themselves as “God’s elect.”³⁸ Third, there was the cause of empire. As Kumar

38 As Wellings (2002: 98) points out, the different forms of Protestantism extant in England, Scotland, and Wales, i.e., Anglicanism and Presbyterianism, had considerable divisive potential. Nevertheless, in confrontation with Catholicism, commonalities rather than differences prevailed.

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(2000: 588) notes, the English “were an imperial nation in a double sense.” They had first created a land empire out of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland and then formed a vast overseas empire, first in North America and the Caribbean and later in India and South-East Asia, which, at its height just after World War I, included a fifth of the world’s surface as well as a quarter of its population. Even though, as just noted, the Welsh and the Scottish remained in many ways distinct, they had a large, if not disproportionate, share in both the military establishment and the administrative maintenance of the British overseas empire (cf. Colley 2004: 372–373; Kumar 2003: 170–172). There were, of course, outbreaks of popular ethnic sentiment, often against the Catholic Irish; to counter such tendencies, the British authorities took care to foster institutional loyalty above all else. Britain and the British came to be identified with the Crown, with Parliament, with Protestantism, and with the British Empire. All groups in the United Kingdom were exhorted to take part in these achievements, and they all did, at least to a certain extent (cf. Kumar 2000: 589–590). There was yet a fourth cause: the Industrial Revolution, which moved the British economy into the center of the world economy. The Industrial Revolution “was a pan-Britannic achievement. All parts contributed to it” (Kumar 2003: 169). In this process, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland not only provided raw materials and cheap labor but soon also hosted numerous centers of production and provided trade routes from which manufactured goods were distributed in the world. Finally, while it is true that politics, the military, and the economy provided the basis for a common British identity, there were also cultural elements which linked all Britons. Scientific, intellectual, and literary culture increasingly included contributions from all over the Kingdom. Or, as Kumar puts it, “[w]hat […] would eighteenth-century ‘English’ culture be like without the Irishmen Jonathan Swift, George Berkeley and Edmund Burke? […] What is the ‘English Enlightenment’ without the Scottish Enlightenment […]? […] The nineteenth century continued the pattern” (2003: 157). In sum, the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the formation and consolidation of a powerful British identity. While this identity revolved around the institutions of an imperial state, it clearly also contained elements of a common national consciousness. All of these elements, however, are insufficient to explain the emergence of strong nationalist sentiments in the writings of British and American thinkers on language in the second half of the nineteenth century and the occurrence of the English native speaker as a new and distinct linguistic identity. What happened to nationalism in Britain during that time? And what about nationalism in the United States? After all, the term native speaker is first attested in an American text, George Perkins Marsh’s address at Columbia College in New York (1859). The following sections attempt answers to these questions.

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9.3.2 The “moment of Englishness” According to Kumar (2003: 175–225), the second half or last third of the nineteenth century was a period in which nationalism in Britain for the first time became a truly mass force. In doing so it changed its character in significant ways and turned from a civic or political force into an ethnic and cultural one. The focus was on the “soul” of a nation, which was seen to lie essentially in its language, religion, folklore, and history. In addition, whereas for much of the earlier nineteenth century nationalism had been regarded as being relevant mainly to stateless societies such as the Germans or Italians, it now turned into an important issue for established nation states, such as France, Britain, and America, as well (2003: 199). Britishness for a while seems to have absorbed such new nationalist sentiments but, in a “moment of Englishness” (2003: 175), eventually gave in. What most strongly fostered this development was the ubiquitous rise of nationalism as a political principle. By the late nineteenth century, it had become obvious that, despite the continued existence of large multinational empires such as Austria-Hungary, the future world was going to be a world of nation states (cf. Hobsbawm 1990: 23). This was noticed by linguists, too. Max Müller, for example, confidently proclaimed: “‘Nations and languages against dynasties and treaties,’ this is what has remodelled, and will remodel still more, the map of Europe” (1862: 22; cf. above), and, in fact, all over Europe, nationalist movements were creating tremendous difficulties for many old dynasts at the time (cf. Anderson 1991: 83). These movements strengthened the general belief in ethnicity as the supreme form of social organization (cf. Hobsbawm 1987: 144). Nations now generally began to feel the pressure to define themselves along ethnic lines, as self-sufficient, organic entities with their own spirits and individualities, their own “souls” (cf. above). Essential elements in this definition were, first, one’s own history or collective memory; second, a “pure” national language; and third, a great literature expressing the values, beliefs, and aspirations of the group at its best. To lack any of these elements meant not to be a nation in the true sense of the word (cf. Fishman 1989: 276–284). Of course, Britishness did not collapse under these strains. But, as Kumar (2003: 200) explains, they now favored the expression of new forms of nationalism throughout the United Kingdom. The late nineteenth century consequently saw the growth of nationalist movements in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. In England, it saw the “discovery of Englishness” (2003: 202). This discovery was based to a large extent on the so-called “Whig interpretation of history,” which, in turn, was closely related to Anglo-Saxonism as a historical theory and political ideology.

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As outlined above, the Whig interpretation of history had existed before. However, the nineteenth century saw the popularization of this historical myth. Instrumental in this process were, according to Kumar (2003: 203), intellectuals such as William Stubbs or Edward A. Freeman (cf. above), who portrayed the freedom of the English not as a past achievement or static inheritance but as an ongoing, continuous, and cumulative – in other words, evolutionary – development. Later still, the future was brought into the debate; this happened mostly via the theme of England’s destiny as an imperial power. Prime exponent here was J.R. Seeley’s Expansion of England (1914 [1883]). The nineteenth-century version of the Whig myth contained another shift in emphasis: instead of the earlier concentration on the “high politics” of Parliament, writers now saw the origins of English political freedom in the institutions of “the people,” such as the shire or the village community. This new perspective was, of course, part of a general movement towards the “folk spirit” characterizing European Romanticism, and, in fact, the late-nineteenth century version of the Whig interpretation of English history was strongly influenced by the work of German historians and folklorists, such as Justus Möser, Friedrich von Savigny, and Jacob Grimm, and stressed race, language, and culture much more than the formal institutions of the state with their aristocratic and gentry traditions (cf. Kumar 2003: 206). To sum up, the second half of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a strong form of cultural nationalism in Britain. This “moment of Englishenss” involved, on the one hand, the popularization of the Whig interpretation of history, with its stress on the long and continuous inheritance of political institutions protecting both individual and communal freedom, and, on the other, a new emphasis on national language, history, and literature as well as on the institutions of the “folk.” Thus, Britishness, as a predominantly political, imperial form of national identification, obtained a counter-image in the idea of Englishness, which stressed the particular cultural character and destiny of the English people. The following excerpt from the Dictionary of Modern English Usage may serve as a convenient summary of the matter, as it once more highlights the civic, political, or institutional character of Britishness, contrasting it with the defining elements of Englishness: language and history: England, English(man). The incorrect use of these words as equivalents of Great Britain, United Kingdom, British Empire, British, Briton, is often resented by the Scotch, Irish, & Welsh; their susceptibilities are natural, but are not necessarily always to be deferred to. […] How should and could Englishman utter the words Great Britain with the glow of emotion that for him goes with England? he talks the English language; he has been taught English history as one tale from Alfred to George V; he has known in his youth how many Frenchmen are a match for one Englishman […]. The case is not so strong against British, since we

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can speak of the British Empire, the British army or navy or constitution, & British trade, without feeling the word inadequate; yet even it is unfit for many contexts; who speaks of a British gentleman, British home life, British tailoring, or British writers, or condemns with an “unBritish”? […] The attempt to forbid thirty millions of people the use of the only names that for them are in tune with patriotic emotion […] is doomed to failure. (Fowler 1926: 139)

9.3.3 Language and nationalism in the late nineteenth-century U.S.A. American nationalism has often been regarded as an “exception to most of the rules” (Parish 1995: 219), which has led numerous researchers to “avert […] their gaze from the American experience […] concentrating on European or third world examples” (1995: 219). As Parish (1995) shows, however, this is unwarranted. Even more importantly, in the present context it is precisely this exceptionalism which, as in the case of the development of nationalism in Britain, explains the surge in nationalist sentiment evident in the publications of American thinkers on language in the second half of the nineteenth century. What makes American nationalism distinct is, first, its chronology: […] in the Old World the nation came before the state; in America the state came before the nation. In the Old World, nations grew out of well-prepared soil, built upon a foundation of history and traditions; in American the foundations were still to be laid, the seeds still to be planted, the traditions still to be formed. (Commager 1967: 3)

In other words, whereas in nineteenth-century Europe (as well as in many later post-colonial cases) the emergence of a national consciousness seeking to achieve independence preceded the establishment of a political framework, in the American case, things were reversed. Second, Americans lacked, or at least found in short supply, many of the common elements of a nationalist ideology, such as an ancient history, a distinct culture, an autonomous and long-standing linguistic and literary tradition, an established church or a state religion, a strong central government, a menacing neighbor, and recognizable ethnic homogeneity. As Parish (1995: 222) notes, however, late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American thinkers on the subject found many strategies to compensate for these deficits or even turn them to advantage. The lack of ethnic homogeneity, for example, was offset by a voluntaristic definition of nationhood. An American was someone who chose to be so. The notso-distant memories of the first colonists, who had renounced their British past in exchange for an American future, and the even more recent immigrant experience of an increasing part of the population fostered this idea of “nationality by

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choice” (Parish 1995: 223). There is also an important connection between linguistic unification, on the one hand, and the spread of literacy, general access to education, and advances in communication, on the other, which has been noted as crucial in the promotion of national sentiment and commitment. As Anderson (1991: 77) claims, it was the combination of all these factors which often led citizens qua speakers or readers to an awareness of the simultaneous existence of millions of fellow nationals whom they would never actually meet. In the midnineteenth century, the U.S.A. was the most advanced society in this respect: the mail service, popular education, and newspapers all functioned to interlink Americans and thus promote a national attitude across the continent. The quick creation of a national literature, and with it, of a “usable past” (Commager 1967: 27), also played an important role: […] the sentiment of American nationalism was, to an extraordinary degree, a literary creation, and […] the national memory was a literary, and, in a sense, a contrived memory. […]. In America the image of the past was largely the creation of the poets and the storytellers, and chiefly of the New England-New York group who flourished between the War of 1812 and the War for the Union […]: Irving, Cooper, and Bryant; Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Whittier; Emerson, Lowell, and Holmes. These were the Founding Fathers of American literary nationalism, and their achievement was scarcely less remarkable than that of the Founding Fathers of political nationalism. (1967: 26)

Finally, the absence of a strong central government was compensated for in the U.S. by a dense network of non-official institutions and structures including church and civic organizations, charities and philanthropic societies, and other associations based on voluntary membership. The following excerpt from Marsh (1874: 481–483) presents a nineteenth-century view of the matter, which precisely supports the claims made above by identifying all of the factors just named and drawing a connection between them and linguistic and national unity: The geography of the United States presents few localities suited to human habitation that are at the same time inaccessible to modern improved modes of communication. The carriage-road, the railway, the telegraph, the mails, the newspaper, penetrate every secluded nook, address themselves to every free inhabitant, and speak everywhere one and the same dialect. […] Men, though individually less stationary, less attached to locality, are becoming more gregarious in the mass; the social element is more active, the notion of the solidarity and essential unity of particular nations, if not of the race, is more a matter of general consciousness; the interests of different classes and districts are more closely interwoven; and the operations of governments are more comprehensive and diffused than at any former historical epoch. Look, for instance, at the influence of the monetary corporations […]. Add to these our great charities, the crowning glory of this age […]; and further, our political associations […] our Government, acting through its army, its navy, its revenue-service, its post-office, is continually mingling, in all its departments, the separate ingredients of

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our population, communing daily with the remotest corners, everywhere employing, and forcing all alike to employ, one form of syntax, one standard of speech, one medium of thought. […] I believe the art of printing, and especially the periodical press, together with the general diffusion of education, which the press alone has made possible, is the most efficient instrumentality in producing uniformity of language and extirpating distinctions of dialect.

Obviously, the creation of an American national consciousness began immediately after the setting up of the new nation and continued through the War of 1812 and other events (Commager 1967: 25; cf. above). Nevertheless, as Parish (1995: 224) has argued, the mid-nineteenth century saw an intensification of the process, which involved a redefinition and focusing of what being an American implied. This intensification of American nationalism arose in response to a series of dramatic challenges: the expansionism of the 1840s meant that the geographical identity of the United States was up in the air again; the population groups that had joined the nation as a result of the gold rush in California and the Mexican War and the following influx of immigrants, especially of Irish Catholics, caused considerable debate on who was or should qualify to be American; finally, the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857 on the civil rights of black Americans caused a massive intra-national conflict, which eventually resulted in the Civil War. A drastic tightening in language ideologies took place in the U.S. toward the end of the nineteenth century. As Pavlenko (2002: 165, 174) outlines, up to roughly 1880, multilingualism with regard to colonial and immigrant languages was not explicitly promoted but definitely tolerated.³⁹ Many communities were able to maintain their native languages for generations, thanks particularly to educational policies and practices which supported multilingualism (cf. Dicker 2003: 21, 49–50 on German). As Crawford (1992a: 46, quoted in Pavlenko 2002: 174) neatly summarizes, immigrants were criticized “for their Catholicism, intemperate lifestyles, or revolutionary politics, but seldom for their foreign speech.”

39 Of course, as Pavlenko also indicates (2002: 171–172), there were always racial restrictions: up to 1870, for example, naturalization was reserved to “free white persons,” which, of course, excluded African or Native Americans, and, in fact, from the very beginning of colonization, English speakers had shown a desire to assimilate the latter. In order to accomplish this, bilingual mission schools were established; after 1868, the government additionally set up boarding schools, whose goal was the “civilization” of Native American children by means of the replacement of their “barbaric tongues” by English. The report of the “Peace Commission” which had recommended teaching English to Native Americans stated that “through sameness of language is produced sameness of sentiment, and thought […] in the difference of language today lies two-thirds of our trouble” (Crawford 1992b: 48).

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The years between 1880 and 1924, which saw the entry into the country of 24 million new immigrants, mostly of southern European, Jewish, and non-European background (cf. Dicker 2003: 55), were marked by massive concerns about national unity and doubts as to whether all of these newcomers could be “melted” into the dominant society. During this period, monolingualism in English became a constituent feature of American identity, and English emerged as an important symbol of national unity. As Pavlenko (2002: 174–176) notes, hostile feelings toward the new immigrants were motivated by a number of concerns. One was clearly racist, for whereas earlier groups had predominantly had the same northern European ethnic background as the first colonists, the newcomers hailed particularly from southern and eastern Europe. They were seen as very different both culturally and linguistically, but behind such concerns usually lurked the fear of ethnic or racial swamping.⁴⁰ This emerges in quotes such as the following by Ellwood P. Cubberley (1909: 15–16, quoted in Dicker 2003: 56), professor of education: Everywhere these people tend to settle in groups or settlements, and to set up their national manners, customs, and observances. Our task is to break up these groups or settlements, to assimilate and amalgamate these people as a part of our American race, and to implant in their children, so far as can be done, the Anglo-Saxon conception of righteousness, law and order, and popular government, and to awaken in them a reverence for our democratic institutions and those things in our national life which we as a people hold to be of abiding worth.

In this quote, the “American race” is described as basically “Anglo-Saxon” in character and heritage, the latter composed of the elements of the Whig interpretation of history: “righteousness, law and order, […] popular government, and […] democratic institutions.” The newcomers are to be “assimilate[d] and amalgamate[d],” their children being the prime target of all such efforts. While this quote leaves open the means by which the Americanization of the eastern and southern European immigrants was to be achieved, language certainly rep-

40 Bonfiglio traces the standardization of American pronunciation to precisely the period and causes identified by Pavlenko (2002). In Race and the Rise of Standard American (2002), he outlines how increasing xenophobia and anti-Semitism, triggered by massive immigration from southern and eastern Europe to the eastern metropolises, particularly New York, and the resultant anti-urban impulse, led to the construction of western and midwestern speech as the embodiment of “pure,” “proper” language. The standardization of American pronunciation thus crucially built on racism: “Americans began to emulate the (mid)-westerner; he was the Nordic man, be he of native Anglo-Saxon or immigrant northern European ‘blood’” (2002: 4).

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resented an important element in this process. This was because, as noted above, unity of language represented the most important prerequisite of national unity: The co-existence of two languages in a State, is one of the greatest misfortunes that can befall it. The settlement of townships and counties in our country, by distinct bodies of foreigners, is, therefore, a great evil; and a daily newspaper, with an Irish, German, or French prefix, or in a foreign language, is a perpetual breeder of national animosities, and an effectual bar to the Americanization of our foreign population. (Mathews 1876: 47)

The close links between the racial and linguistic threat that the new immigrants were seen to pose to the unity of the American nation is very clearly expressed in the poem “The unguarded gates” by Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1882, quoted in Pavlenko 2002: 175–176). What we find in this poem is an entire array of well-known xenophobic topoi: faceless people, i.e., members of other races all looking alike to the (white) observer; strange religious beliefs and practices; and incomprehensible languages threatening communication and thus the unity of the community: Wide open and unguarded stand our gates, And through them passes a wild motley throng, Men from the Volga and Tartar steppes, Featureless figures from the Hoang-Ho, Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt and Slav, Flying the Old World’s poverty and scorn; These bringing with them unknown gods and rites, Those tiger passions here to stretch their claws, In street and alley what strange tongues are these, Accents of menace in our ear, Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew.

To sum up, while at first national identity in the U.S. was predominantly predicated upon political and institutional structures, the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a strong nativist reaction to massive immigration which was built, on the one hand, on Anglo-Saxonism as a historical theory and political ideology and, on the other, on English as a symbol of Americanness. As a political figure and linguistic scholar, George Perkins Marsh must have been aware of these developments; the concept of the native speaker thus emerged squarely within a set of discourses which tied it immediately to nativist, Anglo-Saxonist, and nationalist concerns.

10 The language of the world: In praise of English The nineteenth century, and particularly its second half, was a time of immense self-confidence for Britons and Americans, and writing on English abounded with glorifications of the language, its speakers, and its worldwide spread. The latter was described as inevitable, as English was simply fulfilling its destiny, which was to conquer the world; this destiny was owed to both structural features of the language and the many laudable qualities of its speakers. On the one hand, the richness and adaptability of the English vocabulary and the simplicity of its grammar were praised as undeniably superior; on the other, it was suggested that the excellence of the Anglo-Saxon people, institutions, and culture were directly reflected in the language. Finally, the sheer number of native speakers and the language’s geographical spread basically made the realization of universal status a matter of time. The following excerpt, in which Anonymous (1995 [1849]: 104– 106) cites “Mr. Ellis,” i.e., A. J. Ellis (cf. Chapter 6), illustrates all of the above points. The following sections expand on each of them individually: But is it possible that English should become the universal language? Upon this point let Mr. Ellis speak: – “There is, perhaps, no language which is now spoken as their native tongue by a greater number of persons, none which is more generally diffused in all parts of the world; for the sun never sets on the British Empire, and the British language is spoken wherever the British rule predominates. […] above all, in its new country, the United States of America, the British language asserts its claim to be heard; and the commerce of our country and of America will cause it to be heard far and wide. The English are not good linguists; their traders require to be spoken to in their own tongue. It is a matter not of merely national pride in extending a knowledge of our own fine idiom, it is a matter of commercial interest, to facilitate, as far as it lies in our power, the means and appliances for learning it. Our grammar is easy, one of the simplest in existence. We have no inflections and no genders of nouns and adjectives, no conjugational varieties of verbs, and very few and simple alterations in our tenses. […] Our vocabulary is enormous, while its capabilities for receiving or inventing new words, with the resources of the German, Latin, and Greek at our command, are endless […]. If a universal language should ever prevail, we seem to feel that it must be the English, or some descendant of it. Other idioms are spoken by too few, or are too original and straight-laced to admit of the introduction of new terms. […] Our commerce and colonial possessions must, in the course of things, decide for the English, independently of any other consideration; but when it is recollected that the English can appropriate all and every word in the French language, and completely naturalize it when wanted, while it has the further resource of its own German parentage, there can be no doubt as to which language is most likely to answer the requisitions of a universal tongue.” (Anonymous 1995 [1849]: 104–106)

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10.1 English as the greatest language linguistically First, in a purely structural sense, English was indubitably the greatest language on earth. Two key points were forwarded in this context: the size and breadth of its vocabulary and the simplicity of its grammar. They often occurred in conjunction, as shown in the excerpt just quoted. The linguistic characteristics of English also play an important role in Marsh’s (1859) exhortation to his fellow native speakers to study their language at the university level. He insistently draws their attention to “the multifarious etymology of our Babylonish vocabulary, and the composite structure of our syntax” as peculiarities which require “an amount of systematic study not in other cases usually necessary” (1859: 68). The “Babylonish” vocabulary of English is described by Marsh as the result of its history, during which innumerable foreign influences have left their traces in the language. This has caused problems for native speakers, as these now find much in the language that is not “connatural to the Anglican people.” The language itself “has lost its original organic law of progress” and must therefore be taught and learned all the more carefully. What Marsh plays on in this excerpt is the familiar argument of the putatively insoluble link between the character of the language and that of its speakers, which has resulted not only in a worldwide Anglo-Saxon empire but also in a vast but confusing stock of words: English has been so much affected by extraneous, alien, and discordant influences, so much mixed with foreign ingredients, so much overloaded with adventitious appendages, that it is, to most of those who speak it, in a considerable degree, a conventional and arbitrary symbolism. The Anglo-Saxon tongue has a craving appetite, and is as rapacious of words, and as tolerant of forms, as are its children of territory and of religions. But, in spite of its power of assimilation, there is much of the speech of England which has never become connatural to the Anglican people, and it has passively suffered the introduction of many syntactical combinations, which are not merely irregular, but repugnant. It has lost its original organic law of progress, and its present growth is by accretion, not by development. […] It can only be mastered, in all its wealth, in all its power, by conscious, persistent labor; and, therefore, when all the world is awakening to the value of general philological science, it would ill become us to be slow in recognizing the special importance of the study of our tongue. (Marsh 1859: 68–69)

Now contrast the complexity of the English vocabulary with the simplicity of its grammar: “in English, having no grammar – we have till lately possessed no grammars, and we still want a dictionary” (Marsh 1859: 73–74). This is the classic description of the linguistic characteristics of English: it possesses an immense vocabulary but entirely lacks a grammar. While Marsh views these two facts as potentially problematic for the native speaker, the typical nineteenth-century

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view is that they constitute advantages for the English language in the competition for worldwide supremacy. Here is another nineteenth-century quote putting forward the argument that the linguistic structure of the language predestines it for greatness: On every ground we have a right to desire, apart from any natural but narrow-minded preference for our own mother tongue, that English should be more and more widely cultivated by foreigners. To this must be added, that the simplicity of its grammar makes it among the easiest of languages for the foreigner to acquire, and adapts it to simple and energetic oratory; while the fulness of its vocabulary, and the sharp distinctions between words of proximate meaning, give to it a valuable accuracy. (Newman 1995 [1877]: 239)

This argument still surfaces today but is now mostly confined to popular accounts. There, many “[d]ubious claims tend to be made about the supposed inherent benefits of English compared with other […] languages” (Smith 2005: 61). Bryson (1990: 3), for example, reports that “[i]t is often said that what immediately sets English apart from other languages is the richness of its vocabulary.” But sheer numbers are not enough. English is, above all, characterized by its many synonymous expressions, which enable speakers of English to “draw shades of distinction unavailable to non-English speakers. The French, for instance, cannot distinguish between house and home, between mind and brain, between man and gentleman, between ‘I wrote’ and ‘I have written’” (1990: 3). For more on the contrast between English and French, cf. below. Here is another excerpt from a popular twentieth-century book on English: Like the wandering minstrel in The Mikado, with songs for any and every occasion, English has the right word for it – whatever “it” may be. […] It is the enormous and variegated lexicon of English, far more than the mere numbers and geographical spread of its speakers, that truly makes our native tongue marvellous – makes it, in fact, a medium for the precise, vivid and subtle expression of thought and emotion that has no equal, past or present. [...] Can I really be claiming that English is not merely a great language but the greatest? Yes, that is exactly what I’m saying – and I don’t consider myself any sort of chauvinist. (Claiborne 1983: 4)

Even in linguistics, occasional voices of the type just quoted can still be heard. Newmark (2002, 2003), for example, gives fifteen reasons why English is the world’s best language and rightful lingua franca. In his view, “English is superior to other languages” because it has “exceptionally numerous, rich and various lexical, syntactic and phonemic […] components, which can respond and correspond better to psychological and social demands than other languages do” (2002: 187). And Newmark (2002: 188) does not forget to mention the origins of the language’s lexical richness: “Its lexical resources are founded on a combi-

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nation of physical/concrete Germanic, social Romance, and intellectual (Renaissance, Enlightenment and beyond) grecolatin vocabulary.” Finally, the language is described as “freely open to all non-English cultural words” (2002: 188). As this chapter will show, all of these are exceedingly conventional arguments familiar from the nineteenth century. In any case, what such comparisons do is to construct English and its speakers as the best in the world. The English language, with its large and varied vocabulary, enables its users not only to make more distinctions than other languages but also to make the relevant ones. In this sense, English speakers are better equipped to cope with the extralinguistic world of objects and ideas than speakers of other languages. Even though most contemporary linguistic accounts of the history and structure of English no longer explicitly maintain that the language’s large vocabulary and many synonyms make it superior to other languages, these two features are still found in all standard works, the implications being left open.

10.1.1 Vocabulary: Mixed origins A frequently praised quality of the English vocabulary in the nineteenth century consisted in its mixed character, i.e., in the fact that it united a “native” Germanic stock with a borrowed Romance inheritance. This mixed character was seen to endow the language with, on the one hand, Germanic “forest stamina” and masculinity, and, on the other, “the whole opulence of Roman, and, ultimately, of Grecian thought.” One of the first nineteenth-century writers to put forward this idea was De Quincey (1995 [1839]: 81), whose praise of the “collateral wealth” of English still sounds slightly apologetic: It is, say the imbecile, a “bastard” language – a “hybrid” language, and so forth. And thus, for a metaphor, for a name, for a sound, they overlook, as far as depends on their will, they sign away the main prerogative and dowry of their mother tongue. It is time to have done with these follies. Let us open our eyes to our own advantages. Let us recognise with thankfulness that fortunate inheritance of collateral wealth, which, by inoculating our AngloSaxon stem with the mixed dialect of Neustria, laid open an avenue mediately through which the whole opulence of Roman, and, ultimately, of Grecian thought, play freely through the pulses of our native English. […] And this final process it was, making the language at once rich in matter and malleable in form, which created that composite and multiform speech – fitted, like a mirror, to reflect the thoughts of the myriad-minded Shakespeare […], and yet at the same time with enough remaining of its old forest stamina for imparting a masculine depth to the sublimities of Milton […]. (De Quincey 1995 [1839]: 81–82)

Ten years later, Anonymous (1995 [1849]: 106) was more confident in noting that, “when it is recollected that the English can appropriate all and every word in

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the French language, and completely naturalize it when wanted, while it has the further resource of its own German parentage, there can be no doubt as to which language is most likely to answer the requisitions of a universal language.” Here is an excerpt from the 1870s which also accounts for colonial borrowings. Note the metaphors of appetite and food consumption familiar from Marsh (1859: 68; cf. below): The truth is, our language, so far from being harsh or poor and limited in its vocabulary, is the richest and most copious now spoken on the globe. […] Owing to its composite character, it has a choice of terms expressive of every shade of difference in the idea, compared with which the vocabulary of many other modern tongues is poverty itself. […] It is true that the Anglo-Saxon has pillaged largely from the speech of other peoples; that he has a craving desire to annex, not only states and provinces, even whole empires, to his own, but even the best parts of their languages; that there is scarce a tongue on the globe which his absorbing genius has not laid under contribution to enrich the exchequer of his all-conquering speech. […] But while the English has thus borrowed largely from other tongues, and the multifarious etymology of “its Babylonish vocabulary,” as its enemies are pleased to call it, renders it, of all modern languages one of the most difficult to master in all its wealth and power, yet it makes up in eclecticism, vigor, and abundance, far more than it loses in apparent originality. (Mathews 1876: 120–121)

Walt Whitman, finally, epitomizes all of the delusions of grandeur entertained by English speakers about the word stock of their language in the second half of the nineteenth century. He sees the English vocabulary as including not only the entire Germanic and Greco-Roman heritage and colonial borrowings but “the organic Universe” and the language as a whole not only as the rightful world language but as the embodiment of language per se: Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is the culling and composition of all. From this point of view, it stands for Language in the largest sense, and is really the greatest of studies. It involves so much; is indeed a sort of universal absorber, combiner, and conqueror. The scope of its etymologies is the scope not only of man and civilization, but the history of Nature in all departments, and of the organic Universe, brought up to date; for all are comprehended in words, and their backgrounds. This is when words become vitalized, and stand for things, as they unerringly and very soon come to do, in the mind that enters on their study with fitting spirit, grasp, and appreciation. (Whitman 1969 [1885]: 54)

Of course, the nineteenth-century hymns of praise sung of the English language did not fall out of the blue. As Bailey (1991: 37) points out, “[b]y 1600, English writers had begun the conversation that continues to this day concerning the virtues and faults that enhance or sully English.” One of the first to laud The Excellencie of the English Tongue was Richard Carew (1614, quoted in Bailey 1991:

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44), who praised precisely the size and mixed character of the English vocabulary. Borrowings, in his view, had entered English through “either necessitie or convenience”; in conjunction with the many monosyllables native to the language, they had made it harmonious, copious, and therefore excellent. Nevertheless, as De Quincey (1995 [1839]: 84) indicates, even in the early nineteenth century, many native speakers of English were still “ever ready with a dishonourable levity, to undervalue the English language.” This, as we have seen, changed in the course of the century.

10.1.2 English as the great borrowing language How had all of this vocabulary richness come about? As we have seen, one of the topoi frequently employed to account for it is that of the insatiable appetite of English speakers for colonial conquests and the languages of the conquered for new words. However, English speakers not only plundered other vocabularies but also voluntarily received words willing to enter the language. A frequently adduced characteristic of English speakers was their hospitality: they were described as receiving both words and people with open arms: Modern English, 1603–1900. – The grammar of the language was fixed before this period, most of the accidence having entirely vanished. The vocabulary of the language, however, has gone on increasing, and is still increasing; for the English language, like the English people, is always ready to offer hospitality to all peaceful foreigners – words or human beings – that will land and settle within her coasts. And the tendency at the present time is […] to give a hearty welcome to newcomers from other lands […]. And so eager and willing have we been to welcome foreign words, that it may be said with truth that: The majority of words in the English Tongue are not English. In fact, if we take the Latin language by itself, there are in our language more Latin words than English. (Meiklejohn 1899: 279–281)

This argument had already occurred in mid-century. Marsh (1859: 68), for example, had described English as exceedingly “tolerant of forms.” Trench (1927b [1855]: 45) also comments on the adoption of foreign words by English speakers; again, the character of the language is likened to that of the “English nation” and its institutions; all are open and welcoming, and newcomers are enabled to assume their rightful place in their new home: Looking at this process of the reception of foreign words, with their after-assimilation in feature to our own, we may trace, as was to be expected, a certain conformity between the genius of our institutions and that of our language. It is the very character of our institutions to repel none, but rather to afford a shelter and a refuge to all, from whatever quarter they come; and after a longer or shorter while all the strangers and incomers have been incorpo-

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rated into the English nation, within one or two generations have forgotten that they were ever aught else than members of it, have retained no other reminiscence of their foreign extraction than some slight difference of name […]. Exactly so has it been with the English language. No language has shown itself less exclusive; none has stood less upon niceties; none has thrown open its arms wider, with a fuller confidence, a confidence justified by experience, that it could make truly its own, assimilate and subdue to itself, whatever it received into its bosom; and in none has this experiment in a larger number of instances been successfully carried out. (Trench 1927b [1855]: 45)

To sum up, at least from around 1850 onward, English speakers liked to portray themselves as welcoming and integrationist, whether toward people or toward words. Connected to the idea of English as the great borrowing language is Trench’s (1927a [1851]: 88) claim that different languages possess different absorptive and assimilative powers. The same, in Trench’s view, holds for different stages of the same language, as illustrated by the history of English. What Trench refers to with this claim is not sheer numerical tolerance, where modern English would have reigned superior, but what in modern accounts of the phenomenon would be described as the phonological and morphological integration of borrowed words. In that respect, earlier stages of English had been more successful, a fact which was later praised by Jespersen (1982 [1905]: 44–45) as “a symptom of a healthful condition of a language and a nation”: The Anglo-Saxon principle of adopting only such words as were easily assimilated with the native vocabulary, for the most part names of concrete things, and of turning to the greatest possible account native words and roots, especially for abstract notions – that principle may be taken as a symptom of a healthful condition of a language and a nation: witness Greek, where we have the most flourishing and vigorous growth of abstract and other scientifically serviceable terms on a native basis that the world has ever seen, and where the highest development of intellectual and artistic activity went hand in hand with the most extensive creation of indigenous words and an extremely limited importation of words from abroad. It is not, then, the Old English system of utilizing the vernacular stock of words, but the modern system of neglecting the native and borrowing from a foreign vocabulary that has to be accounted for as something out of the natural state of things.

In general, however, despite its great integrative capacities, Old English was considered inferior to modern English as a means of expression. This had to do mainly with its lack of abstract vocabulary, which, in the opinion of nineteenthcentury writers on language, crucially characterized all “primitive” languages, whether earlier stages of European languages or contemporary forms of speech employed by “savages,” and was put down to these speech communities’ lack of generalizing mental power: “In existing languages the differences of degree are

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great, as in existing states of culture in general” (Whitney 1875: 301). “All men speak, each race in accordance with its gift and culture” (1875: 306). Old English, according to many authors, possessed an excessive variety of terms “for those things that interest[ed] the speakers in their daily doings” (Jespersen 1982 [1905]: 49). Jespersen, for example, mentions thirty expressions for ‘sea’ and close to the same number for ‘boat’ or ‘ship.’ This, of course, is the nineteenth-century equivalent of the “Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax” (Pinker 2000: 53). The gist of the argument just outlined can still be found today. Claiborne (1983: 3), for example, reports that “[f]or centuries, the English-speaking peoples have plundered the world for words, even as their military and industrial empire builders have plundered it for more tangible goods.” Even though theft at first sight does not appear to be a very laudable quality, Claiborne reassures his readers immediately that, at least in the linguistic sphere, there is nothing wrong with it in that “it enriches the perpetrator without impoverishing the victim.” In any case, the end justifies the means, as, after all, this plundering has given English “the largest, most variegated and most expressive vocabulary in the world.” The image of English as the great borrowing language must be supplemented by a number of observations. In the first place, it is doubtful that, as the above quotes suggest, English speakers really entertained such democratic and equitable relations with speakers of other languages during the nineteenth century. After all, most of these languages were spoken either by colonized peoples in the case of the British or by immigrants to the United States, who, at least if they belonged to certain population groups, suffered from nativist movements from the mid-nineteenth century onwards (cf. Parish 1995: 224). Thus, the enrichment of English through the borrowing of words from other languages hardly happened on an equal footing. Moreover, with regard to the colonial relations entertained by English speakers, Bailey (1991: 61) notes that “[t]he dependence on continental European languages for words from remote places and exotic languages has usually been ignored in the ritual celebrations of the excellence of English.” What this means is that words such as caravan, tobacco, or ketchup actually started their life in English as “hand-me-downs” from other European languages such as Spanish, French, or Dutch, which had, in fact, borrowed them directly. The reason for this is to be sought in attitudes of speakers of English toward the societies and cultures they encountered, which ranged from standoffishness to outright contempt. For one, English speakers had a reputation of being bad at learning other languages (which, interestingly, had not always been the case and may have been a concomitant of an increasing linguistic self-confidence, which viewed other languages as inferior); moreover, they “arrived full of confidence in their accomplishments and

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persuaded that their own hierarchies were universal conditions of human community life” (Bailey 1991: 78). In sum, as Bailey (1991: 91) points out, [f]ar from its conventional image as a language congenial to borrowings from remote languages, English displays a tendency to accept exotic loanwords mainly when they first have been adopted by other European languages or when presented with marginal social practices or trivial objects. […] Extensive linguistic borrowing and language mixture arise only when there is some degree of equality between or among languages (and their speakers) in a multilingual setting. For the English abroad, this sense of equality was rare. […] Whether it is a language more “friendly to change than other languages” has hardly been questioned; those who embrace the language are convinced that English is a capacious, cosmopolitan language superior to all others.

10.1.3 English against French As noted above, the foil against which the qualities of English have been measured has often been French. In Words; Their Use and Abuse, Mathews (1876: 63–64), for example, wonders what is to be thought “of the fact that the French language has no word equivalent to ‘listener’” except for “the awkward paraphrase celui qui écoute.” In his view, this is “a noteworthy circumstance, shedding light upon national character,” which shows the French to be chatterboxes. Linguistic rivalry between the two languages did not, of course, begin in the nineteenth century. Rather, it had already formed an important part of what Colley (2004: 1) has termed “the forging of the British nation,” which had taken place against the backdrop of a number of wars with France (cf. above). Nineteenth-century sentiments in favor of English must therefore be viewed in relation to the long struggle between Britain and France and a prolonged process of British self-identification. The following excerpts show English speakers promoting their language in relation to French. What we see in both of them is that the authors of such comparisons attempted to maintain a neutral stance while making it entirely clear that English, eventually, was the best: […] this truth is – that every language, every language at least in a state of culture and development, has its own separate and incommunicable qualities of superiority. The French itself, which, in some weighty respects, is amongst the poorest of languages, had yet its own peculiar merits […] for all the delicacies of social intercourse, and the nuances of manners, no language but the French possesses the requisite vocabulary. […] If even the French has its function of superiority, so, and in a higher sense, have the English and other languages more decidedly northern. But the English, in particular, has a special dowry of power in its double-headed origin. […] In this place we shall content ourselves with drawing the reader’s attention to a general phenomenon which comes forward in all non-poetic languages – viz. that the separation of the two great fields, prose and poetry, or of the mind, impassioned or

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unimpassioned, is never perfectly accomplished. This phenomenon is most striking in the Oriental languages, where the common edicts of governments or provincial regulations of police assume a ridiculous masquerade dress of rhetorical or even of poetic animation. But amongst European languages this capital defect is most noticeable in the French […]. (De Quincey 1995 [1839]: 85–89) Were we, indeed, to indicate such of the existing languages as surpass us in any single department of literature, we should point to the French alone […]. But it has many and grave faults. It wants dignity and strength; it always wants the air of artlessness and sincerity; and in every quality which should fit it for poetic composition, it is more deficient, and has fewer tolerable examples of that class to show, than any other cultivated tongue. For the aggregate, then, of all the purposes which a language should fulfil, we prefer the English to the French; and, à fortiori, to all other languages which are at the same time literary and spoken. For those which are merely literary, or merely spoken, we reject at once. (Anonymous 1995 [1849]: 104)

This position is also clearly found in the excerpt below, which, moreover, features another important motif of nineteenth-century evaluative comparisons of languages: a language is what its speakers have made it; therefore, if a speech community possesses laudable qualities, its language must reflect them. Conversely, the weaknesses distinguishing a particular speaker group may also be found in its language. Thus, apart from the linguistic faults identified by De Quincey (1995 [1839]: 85–89), Anonymous (1995 [1849]: 104), and Mathews (1876: 63–64; cf. above), in the view of English-speaking observers, French obviously also suffered from defects characterizing its speech community. If such defects were described, they often included the qualities reported by Colley (2004: 5–6): “superstitious, militarist, decadent and unfree”: The French made their language in their own image; and it is therefore logical, orderly, and clear. […] As the French are noted rather for their intelligence than for their imagination, they are the acknowledged masters of prose; and their achievement in poetry is more disputable. As they are governed by the social instinct, their language exhibits the varied refinements of a cultivated society where conversation is held in honour as one of the arts. The English speech, like the English-speaking peoples, is bolder, more energetic, more suggestive, and perhaps less precise. From no language could English borrow with more profit to itself than from French; and from no language has it borrowed more abundantly and more persistently. (Matthews 1921b: 4–5)

Again, we still find such arguments today. Thus, Bryson (1990: 130) points out that English has always resisted an agency controlling and regulating the language, such as the Académie Française, an institution which has recently “been associated with an almost ayatollah-like conservatism.” He quotes Joseph Priestly in saying that “such a body” is “unsuitable to the genius of a free nation” and

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Otto Jespersen, who commended English for its lack of rigidity and contrasted it with French, which he likened to the formal gardens of Louis XIV. The consequence: “English […] is a fluid and democratic language in which meanings shift and change in response to the pressures of common usage rather than the dictates of committees” (Bryson 1990: 137). Thus, the common man reigns supreme in the free world of English speakers, rather than absolute monarchs, ayatollahs, or (communist) committees. To sum up, here is a quote by Haines (1935: 55, quoted in Bailey 1991: 119), who, in turn, cites Walter Bagehot (1826–77), a British journalist, political analyst, and economist known for his social Darwinist stance (cf. Chapter 3): Three-quarters of a century ago, that shrewd judge of current topics, Walter Bagehot, put the matter clearly, if somewhat unkindly, into the nutshell phrase, “French is the patois of Europe, while English is the language of the world.”

10.2 The English-speaking community What was also important for the assessment of the English language as the best in the world was that it had the right kind of speech community. The important assumption underlying this argument was that a language’s qualities reflected those of its speakers, and vice versa (cf. above). A theme typical of the mid-nineteenth century onward was the expression of confidence that, sooner or later, the Anglo-Saxons were to be the dominant people in world relations. This dominance was to be achieved by means of economic growth and technological progress, which would pave the way for the spread of the Anglo-Saxon population and its language. In this scenario, the worldly ambitions of Anglo-Saxon writers were often dressed up in the rhetoric of universal progress and the theme of the eternal westward movement of civilization, and the envisaged Anglo-Saxon world dominance was portrayed as a matter of destiny or inevitable, quasi-natural “laws.”

10.2.1 The numerological tradition: Pride in the number of English speakers worldwide It was in the context of the envisaged world mission of the Anglo-Saxons and their language that writers began to speculate about the proportional development of the world population. According to Bailey (1991: 110), calculations concerning future numbers of English speakers first appeared in the 1840s; as early as the 1850s, “[a]ssumptions of overwhelming growth in population and power were a

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commonplace of expansionist writers” (Horsman 1981: 290). Often, such projections were based on the phenomenal growth of the United States. Watts (1991 [1850]: 131), for example, maintained that especially “our […] establishments in America,” where “we need less dread the inundation of barbarians, promise a superior stability and duration to the English language.” As Bailey (1991: 111) notes, “[t]he most extravagant projections were the most satisfying to the anglophone community and, therefore, the most popular.” Here are two examples: English-speaking peoples in England, 31,000,000; in the United States, 40,000,000; in Canada &c., 4,000,000; in Australia and New Zealand, 2,000,000; total, 77,000,000. […] Now, judging by the increase that has taken place in the present century, we may estimate the probable growth of population as follows: In England it doubles in fifty years […]. Probable total of the English-speaking race in 1970, 860,000,000. (Candolle 1875: 241–242, quoted in Bailey 1991: 111) There is now no room for doubt that the great international language of the future will be English. […] in the beginning of this century English-speaking people numbered 21,000,000, while they now exceed 125,000,000. (Leftwich 1995 [1897]: 376)

Even today, the debate about the status of English in the world often revolves around numbers, and the question of “How many speakers of the language are there?” is treated in every contemporary review of global English, whether scholarly or popular (cf. Bryson 1990: 174–175; Crystal 1997: 57–60; Graddol 1997: 10–11). What has changed, however, is that, whereas in the nineteenth century, the growth of English was viewed mainly in absolute terms and provided an opportunity for the expression of confidence and optimism, it is relative numbers now, and they often cause anxiety among native speakers of the language. This is because, as Graddol (1999: 61) notes, “[d]espite the continued gradual growth in absolute numbers of native speakers, the proportion of the world’s population who speak English as their first language has, in fact, declined sharply,” owing to much larger rates of population growth in non-Western parts of the world. He predicts (2004: 1329) that the rate of native English speakers will decrease from nearly 9% in the mid-twentieth century to about 5% by 2050. Commonly, however, native speakers are no longer asked to carry the numerical burden on their own today. The global spread of English occasions pride even in the huge communities that are now counted as “English speakers,” whether speakers of English as a second language or as a foreign language. However, as some observers have pointed out, the numbers advanced to demonstrate the global pre-eminence of English can hardly be accepted as reliable (Tripathi 1992: 6). For one, it is difficult to collect dependable information on speakers of English worldwide, given that, as Crystal (1997: 55) points out, “[t]here is no single source

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of statistical information on language totals,” and censuses often do not provide any information in this respect, either. In estimating the number and status of speakers of English in any particular country, various problems occur. Often, for “native-speaking countries,” such as the Britain or the U.S., population totals are simply assumed to represent the number of native speakers of English in the country. But “[t]he mainland USA itself is not all that homogenous, and does the total population include the overseas territories like Puerto Rico” (Tripathi 1992: 6)? Moreover, the limited range of functions for which English is used by particular speaker groups must be reckoned with as well as the “quality and the identity of the language used” (1992: 6). Should speakers be counted as speakers of English if they only occasionally read service manuals or internet sources? And what about their own productions once they evidence a certain quantity of “errors”? And what varieties of English are to be counted? What about pidgins and creoles, of which only some lie on a continuum with standard English and are mutually intelligible with it? As Crystal (1997: 56) points out, “it could be argued that we need to keep standard English totals separate from pidgin/creole English totals: if this view is adopted, then some 5–6 million L1 speakers and some 50–60 million L2 speakers should be subtracted from the grand totals.” What all of this goes to show is that, just as in the nineteenth century, the numbers advanced to demonstrate the prominence of English in the world often rest on shaky ground and may be far too high. It appears that few speakers of English are yet prepared to accept what Graddol (2004: 1329) has called a “new linguistic world order,” in which English will have to share its privileged position not only with Chinese, but also with Arabic, Spanish, and Hindi or Urdu (cf. also Fishman 1998–99). In any case, the fascination with numbers in demonstrating the power of English is clearly a nineteenth-century legacy (cf. Graddol 2004: 1330). This nineteenth-century fascination with numbers has been traced to the expansion of the colonial bureaucracy in the second half of the nineteenth century. Whereas up to that time, colonial authorities had often drawn up enumerations of the population simply in the form of tax-rolls and levy-lists, i.e., for financial and military purposes, and, for precisely that reason, often ignored women and children or, at most, listed them as dependents, from the mid-nineteenth century onward, such quantifications became more systematic and comprehensive. As an instrument of exercising power, the colonial census created new social and institutional realities as the colonial state multiplied its size and functions. The census was one means of organizing the educational, juridical, and political spheres of the new state along ethnic or linguistic lines (cf. Anderson 1991: 163–70). In this sense, “numbers gradually became more importantly part of the illusion of bureaucratic control and a key to a colonial imaginaire in

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which countable abstractions, both of people and of resources, […] created the sense of a controllable indigenous reality,” despite the fact that “the significance of these numbers was either non-existent or self-fulfilling, rather than principally referential to a complex reality external to the activities of the colonial state” (Appadurai 1993: 317).

10.2.2 The three C’s: Civilization, commerce, and Christianity When, in the nineteenth century, writers seriously began to debate when and in what way English was going to acquire a worldwide speech community, they linked this debate to the success of the British Empire and the U.S. expansion across the continent and later into the Caribbean and the Pacific. From the beginning, enthusiasts about the worldwide spread of English saw a connection between the language, on the one hand, and a network of civilization, commerce, and Christianity, on the other. The following excerpt presents a famous quote from the beginning of the century. It highlights the significance of education in aiding English speakers in promoting “their commerce, their opinions, their religion.” To “conquer the heart and its affections,” according to this writer, “is a far more effectual conquest than that obtained by swords and cannons”: However, my idea is, that, if the English language be cultivated as it ought to be […], it will ultimately supersede the French. It is already the most general in America. Its progress in the East is considerable; and if many schools were established in different parts of Asia and Africa to instruct the natives, free of all expence [sic], with various premiums of British manufacture to the most meritorious pupils, this would be the best preparatory step that Englishmen could adopt for the general admission of their commerce, their opinions, their religion. This would tend to conquer the heart and its affections; which is a far more effectual conquest than that obtained by swords and cannons: and a thousand pounds expended for tutors, books, and premiums, would do more to subdue a nation of savages than forty thousand expended for artillery-men, bullets, and gunpowder. (Russel 1801: 93–95, quoted in Bailey 1991: 106–107)

A mid-century quote comes from Marsh (1859: 87–88): Hence, English is emphatically the language of commerce, of civilization, of social and religious freedom, of progressive intelligence, and of active catholic philanthropy; and, therefore, beyond any tongue ever used by man, it is of right the cosmopolite speech.

Even toward the end of the century, the network of civilization, commerce, and Christianity and its role as the driving force behind the global spread of English had not lost any of its fascination to expansionist writers:

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If […] we speculate on the future, our language will hardly sink in our estimate of its importance. Before another century has gone by, it will, at the present rate of increase, be spoken by hundreds of millions! Of the five great temperate regions, three – North America, South Africa, and Australia – are fast peopling with our race; and some now living, will see them overspread with a population, claiming in our language the same interest as ourselves. That language, too, is rapidly becoming the great medium of civilisation, the language of law and literature to the Hindoo, of commerce to the African, of religion to the scattered islanders of the Pacific. The range of its influence, even at the present day, is greater than ever was that of the Greek, the Latin, or the Arabic; and the circle widens daily. Though it were not our mother tongue, it would still, of all living languages, be the most worthy of our study and our cultivation, as bearing most directly on the happiness of mankind. (Guest 1882: 703)

What lay behind the idea that English as a language embodied certain “institutions and principles of civil and religious liberty” and functioned as “the language of the arts and sciences, of trade and commerce, of civilization and religious liberty […] of Protestantism” (Read 1849: 48, quoted in Bailey 1991: 116) was, of course, one of the basic premises of Anglo-Saxonism, i.e., the notion that the characteristics of the English-speaking people were generally thought to be expressed and conveyed by Anglo-Saxon blood. Probably the most important criterion in this respect was the love of political and individual freedom that had allegedly always characterized the Germanic peoples and found its perfection and institutionalization in the Anglo-Saxon race (cf. above). The following excerpt illustrates how easily this love of freedom and other positive Anglo-Saxon attributes were transferred to the English language: It is the glory of the English speech that its idioms speak for truth and freedom, and law and religion. It grew up in the midst of struggles for religion, – in the midst of the contests of freemen, – in the midst of a people fond of nature and home. Its idioms have been dyed in the blood of martyrs, or taken their festive colors in the heart of patriots or poets; they are tinted less in the colors of fancy than in the veritable hue of sky and cloud, wood and field, and ocean, wrought into unity of meaning under the solemn and earnest gaze of imagination. (March 1861: 15)

The worldwide spread of the English-speaking population was often linked with the theme of the eternal westward movement of civilization, which, in turn, was viewed in destinarian terms. As Kentucky politician Presley Ewing put it in 1852 (quoted in Horsman 1981: 288), “[t]he march of civilization, like the march of christianity has been, from the days of the wise men of Chaldea down to the present time, from East to West. You might as well attempt to turn back the natural sun in its course, as to revert the sun of civilization in its westward way.” Civilization was portrayed as having progressed from Asia Minor to Greece to Rome and from

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there on to the Germanic tribes, which had then passed it on to their Anglo-Saxon descendants, who were now about to return it to Asia. The idea of eternal westward movement was not a new one. All through European history, the west had been imagined as the land of eternal youth and happiness and the region in which the destiny of nations was to be fulfilled (cf. Horsman 1981: 83). In the nineteenth century, however, a shift in emphasis occurred: rather than the transfer of civilization it was now its ever wider dissemination that constituted the focus of attention. A writer in the North American Review in 1846 maintained, for example, that “with every stage of progress, civilization embraces more and more individuals, extends to a larger and larger portion of the community, and of course it is less liable to be exterminated or transferred” (quoted in Horsman 1981: 288). The Anglo-Saxon expansion had, of course, begun in 449 with the landing of Hengest and Horsa in Kent. For many writers in the mid-nineteenth century, there was a direct line from that historical event to the contemporary spread of English speakers. For Thomas Carlyle, for example, the Anglo-Saxons had two great tasks in world history: the first was to conquer “some half or more” of the world “for the use of man”; the second consisted in “showing all people how it might be done” that personal and political liberty prevailed (quoted in Horsman 1981: 64): Of a truth […], whomsoever had, with the bodily eye, seen Hengst and Horsa mooring on the mud-beach of Thanet, on that spring morning of the year 449; and then, with the spiritual eye, looked forward to New York, Calcutta, Sidney Cove, across the ages and oceans; and thought what Wellingtons, Washingtons, Shakespeares, Miltons […] had to issue from that business, and do their several taskworks so, – he would have said, those leatherboats of Hengst’s had a kind of cargo in them! (Carlyle, quoted in Horsman 1981: 64–65)

This would one day even include what were now still “inferior” peoples. In his famous “Occasional discourse on the negro question,” Carlyle asserted that the entire black population of the West Indies now equaled “in number of heads one of the ridings of Yorkshire,” but “in worth (in quantity of intellect, faculty, docility, energy, and available human valor and value) perhaps one of the streets of seven dials” (Carlyle 1850 [1849]: 528). The West Indies were now suitable for growing exotic fruits and spices, but it was to be hoped that, in the context of the Anglo-Saxon world mission, they would eventually grow “beautiful, heroic human lives, too, which is surely the ultimate object they were made for: beautiful souls and brave; sages, poets, what not; making the earth nobler round them, as their kindred from of old have been doing; true ‘splinters of the old Harz Rock’; heroic white men, worthy to be called old Saxons” (1850 [1849]: 534). As Horsman (1981: 66) notes, Arnold’s views were best known in the 1840s, “when they greatly influenced the next generation of Saxonists, including E.A. Freeman.” Freeman’s

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racial theories and his connection with nineteenth-century linguistics have been outlined in Chapter 8 above. Comparative-historical philology as practiced by Freeman’s colleagues and friends Müller or Sayce was, of course, the key to the Indo-Europeans’ westward migrations, as, with its exact methods resembling those of the natural sciences, it had discovered the bonds which united the Indo-European languages. Linguistic affinities thus constituted proof of the history of races. For more on the idea of original congruence, cf. above.

10.2.3 Of superior and inferior races and the “great law of contact” English-speaking commentators saw both population numbers and the success of British and American civilization, commerce, and Christianity as decisive in the worldwide spread of English. The underlying mechanism was often described by nineteenth-century authors as one of competition – competition that took place between nations and therefore also, by way of the close association between nations and languages, between languages. Thus, according to Watts (1991 [1850]), the status of universal language was actually to be the preserve of the nation which gained geographical, demographic, and military-industrial supremacy in the world, and it was, in fact, imperialism or, as Watts (1991 [1850]: 131–132) called it, “fashion, […] emigration, and […] conquest,” which had led to the fact that “the world is circled by the accents of Milton and Shakespeare”: At present the prospects of the English language are the most splendid that the world has ever seen. It is spreading in each of the quarters of the globe by fashion, by emigration, and by conquest. The increase of population alone in the two great states of Europe and America in which it is spoken, adds to the number of its speakers in every year that passes, a greater amount than the whole number of those who speak some of the literary languages of Europe, either Swedish, or Danish, or Dutch. […] What will be the state of Christendom at the time that this vast preponderance of one language will be brought to bear on all its relations, – at the time when a leading nation in Europe and a gigantic nation in America use the same idiom, – when in Africa and Australasia the same language is in use by rising and influential communities, and the world is circled by the accents of Milton and Shakespeare? At that time such of the other languages of Europe as do not extend their empire beyond this quarter of the globe will be reduced to this same degree of insignificance in comparison with English, as the subordinate languages of modern Europe to those of the state they belong to, – the Welsh to the English, the Basque to the Spanish, the Finnish to the Russian. (Watts 1991 [1850]: 131–132)

The logic of the imperial struggle between nations and thus between languages was clear: if other nations did not succeed in extending “their empire beyond this

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quarter of the globe,” they would not only lose out to Britain and the U.S. in terms of territory, resources, and power, but their languages would also be “reduced to this same degree of insignificance in comparison with English, as the subordinate languages of modern Europe to those of the state they belong to, – the Welsh to the English” (1991 [1850]: 131–132), for example. But the competition between nations and languages that characterized the imperial struggle involved another level as well: that between colonizer and colonized, or European and “native” peoples, or “superior” and “inferior” races and cultures. At this level of national and linguistic competition, English was seen to enter into hierarchical relations with the languages of the people subjected by English speakers; just as “inferior” peoples would eventually and necessarily be overcome by “superior” ones, so, too, languages could be classed into “superior” and “inferior” ones, with the latter bound for subjugation and/ or extirpation: […] the dominions of England now stretch from the Ganges to the Indus, […] the whole space of India is dotted with the regimental libraries of its European conquerors, and […] Rasselas has been translated into Bengalee! […] It will be a single and novel experiment in modern society, if a single language becomes so predominant over all others as to reduce them in comparison to the proportion of provincial dialects. To have this experiment fairly tried is a great object. […] this consummation […] must be the wish not only of every Englishman and of every Anglo-American, but of every sincere friend of the advancement of literature and civilization. (Watts 1991 [1850]: 131–135) I said, in the outset, that there were circumstances in the position and the external relations of the English language which recommended its earnest study and cultivation. I refer, of course, to the commanding political influence, the widespread territory, and the commercial importance of the two great mother-countries whose vernacular it is. […] The language of England is spoken by greater numbers than any other Christian speech, and it is the vehicle of a wider, purer, more beneficient moral action than any other existing tongue […]; and it is remarkable that, while some younger languages and younger races are decaying and gradually disappearing from their natal soil, the English speech and the descendants of those who first employed it, are making hourly conquests of new territory, and have already established their posts within hailing distance throughout the circuit of the habitable globe. […] That it [i.e., the English language] will ever become, as some dream, literally universal in its empire, I am, indeed, far from believing; nor do I suppose that the period will ever arrive, when our many-sided humanity will content itself with a single tongue. […] Languages adhere so tenaciously to their native soil, that, in general, they can be eradicated only by the extirpation of the races that speak them. […] the prospect of the final triumph of any one tongue is as distant, as improbable, I may add, as undesirable, as the subjection of universal man to one monarchy, or the conformity of his multitudinous races to one standard of color, one physical type. […] But yet, though English will not supersede, still less extirpate, the thousand languages now spoken, it is not unreasonable to expect for it a wider diffusion, a more commanding influence, a more universally-acknowledged beneficient action,

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than has yet been reached, or can hereafter be acquired, by any ancient or now-existent tongue. (Marsh 1859: 86–90)

As the preceding two passages illustrate, the results envisaged for the struggle between languages varied with the position of the analyst. Some, like Watts, hoped for the ultimate and sweeping victory of English; others, like Marsh, were a bit more hesitant in assessing the desirability of such a scenario. Nevertheless, no Anglo-Saxon observer doubted that the preeminent language in the world eventually was to be English; if the Anglo-Saxons were to rule the world, as seemed clear by the mid-nineteenth century, their language was, too. Such an outcome was viewed as the inevitable consequence of quasi-natural “laws” governing encounters between “superior” and “inferior” peoples. A writer in De Bow’s Review (1852) described the process as follows: “Wherever they go, this inferior native population, as a result of amalgamation, and that great law of contact between a higher and a lower race, by which the latter gives way to the former, must be gradually supplanted, and its place occupied by this highest of races.” Wars of conquest were no longer needed; it would simply be the “great law of contact” between superior and inferior races that would enable the United States, as the best of the superior, to eventually “occupy the entire extent of America, the rich and fertile plains of Asia, together with the intermediate isles of the sea, in fulfilment of the great purpose of heaven, of the ultimate enlightenment of the whole earth, and the gradual elevation of man to the dignity and glory of the promised millenial [sic] day” (quoted in Horsman 1981: 291). It is an interesting detail in this context that it was also assumed that, once these “inferior” races had been obliterated, their memory would have to be kept alive, and even if it were only in name: “As early as 1843 a writer in the Merchant’s Magazine suggested that the name Hawaii should be retained – ‘the indigenous population, after they may have disappeared before, or become absorbed in, the tide of western civilization, should still yield a trace of their former existence, though it be but a name’” (Horsman 1981: 291). What exactly the “great law of contact” involved often remained unclear. Some mid-century writers were specific in this regard, however. Among them was American racial theorist Josiah C. Nott, whose views were published by the Southern Quarterly Review and De Bow’s Review; these magazines made him immensely popular and influential in the American South (Horsman 1981: 151). Nott’s basic position was that there existed an immense gulf between the different races which could be bridged neither by changes in the environment nor by education. Whereas the Native Americans had resisted domination by whites and were now being exterminated, blacks were destined to be slaves “because of natural, unalterable, and eternal inferiority” (quoted in Horsman 1981: 152). The

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white race, and particularly the Germanic branch of the white race, was destined to rule the world by replacing such inferior races. This was, as some writers argued, because God had given the white race, for their own preservation and purity, an instinct of racial “antagonism” (De Bow’s Review 1852, quoted in Horsman 1981: 155). In sum, in the view of many midnineteenth century theorists on race, to encounter a “superior” people was fatal for an “inferior” one in that the “great law of contact” predicted either serfdom or extinction for the latter. But, as noted above, the competition between races took place not only between “higher” and “lower.” A writer in the Southern Quarterly Review, for example, said that within a hundred or two hundred years the Indians in America would be extinct and the Spanish, French, and German settlements “swallowed up in the Anglo-Saxon tongue and type” (quoted in Horsman 1981: 156). Thus, at least according to this writer, competition between the races also involved the various European peoples; moreover, it was portrayed as taking place not only at the physical but also at the linguistic level. The link between superior and inferior races and their languages is also found in the writings of W. D. Whitney. In Whitney’s view, because language was part of the culture of a race, superior civilizations had superior languages, which would extinguish inferior ones. If two races met, the inferior one was bound to be “deteriorated and wasted” rather than elevated, because its abilities were simply insufficient to deal with the achievements of the more developed race: There is yet another important corollary from our established view of language as a constituent element of human civilization. […] Its province was to raise man from a savage state to the plane which he was capable of reaching. […] The descendant of a cultivated race is more cultivable than the descendant of a wild one. The capacity of a yet higher cultivation grows with the slow increase of cultivation; and if a people is suddenly brought into contact with a civilization too far in advance of it, it is rather deteriorated and wasted than elevated. […] All men speak, each race in accordance with its gift and culture; but all together are only one species. (Whitney 1875: 306)

If dialects were still multiplying, this was because the “darkness of barbarism” which had prevailed in the dark ages of mankind still operated in the “congeries of jarring tribes.” These “divaricating forces in linguistic growth” were opposed by the forces of “civilization” in evidence in “centres of culture.” Only civilized and cultured nations could have unified languages, which was, of course, the desired state. If uncivilized races persisted, this was because the “great nations” tolerated them, but eventually, cultivated, civilized, national languages like English would prevail. The following excerpt may thus be read as a justification for the impending dominance of English as the world language and the concomitant extinction of “lesser” languages as a quasi-natural process:

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At the earliest historical period, too, the darkness of barbarism covers the earth in general; the centres of culture are but two or three, and their light spreads but a very little way, and is even in constant danger of being extinguished by the greatly superior brute force of the uncultivated masses around. Hence the divaricating forces in linguistic growth are also in the ascendant; dialects go on multiplying, by the action of the same causes that had already produced them. But wherever civilization is at work, an opposite influence, in linguistic as in political affairs, is powerfully operating. Out of the congeries of jarring tribes are growing great nations; out of the Babel of discordant dialects are growing languages of wider and constantly extending unity. The two kinds of change go hand in hand, simply because the one of them is dependent on the other: nothing can make wide unity of speech except extended community; nothing but civilization can make extended community. As, through the ages of recorded history, the power as well as the degree of civilization has been constantly growing, till now it is the predominant force, and the uncivilized races subsist only by the toleration of the civilized – if even that; so, by external forces, every act and influence of which is clearly definable, the cultivated languages have been and are extending their sway, crowding out of existence the patois which had grown up under the old order of things, gaining such advantage that men are beginning to dream of a time when one language may be spoken all over the earth. (Whitney 1875: 176–177)

To summarize, here is a quote from the 1860s which once more brings out the assumptions outlined in this section and links them with the idea of progress: the “strong, the intellectual, supersede the barbarous and the weak,” and this holds for languages as much as for races. It is owed to the “law of progress”; as a consequence, the elimination of the “ruder idioms” worldwide is only a matter of time. Note also the topos of the size and variety of the English vocabulary as an argument for the superiority of the language: In languages, as in races, the law of progress prevails. What is imperfect perishes. The strong, the intellectual, supersede the barbarous and the weak. No dialectic of antiquity can compare in strength and variety with those which represent modern civilization. The English probably contains twenty thousand words for which no synonymes [sic] could be found in the classical tongues; and it may be doubted whether an inhabitant of ancient Athens or Rome would understand many of the adaptations from Greek and Latin, of which modern science has availed itself. […] The disappearance of the ruder idioms from the face of the earth, the invasions of the more perfect forms of speech into the territories of the less perfect, the numerous additions made to the vocabularies of civilized nations, the influence of commerce, of travel, of the study of other tongues, upon spoken and written languages, are questions every one of which affords materials for volumes of inquiry. (Bowring 1995 [1863]: 389, 392)

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10.3 Threats to the language One final important discourse revolved around the idea that English was threatened from various sources. While this idea had had a long history (cf. Bailey 1991: 237–266), the nineteenth century endowed it with new and increased urgency, as the worldwide spread of the language clearly demonstrated to English native speakers that their “mother tongue” was undergoing massive changes. The sources from which English was seen to be threatened were manifold. They can be assigned to two categories, however. First, there were internal “foes,” i.e., the language itself and particular groups of its speakers. There were, for example, journalists (e.g., Freeman 1995 [1885]: 336) and politicians (e.g., Müller 1995 [1888]: 341–342), who were corrupting English with their imprecise use of terminology, but also, and perhaps predominantly, the “lower classes,” who were employing “the mother tongue” in a “loose” or “careless” way: Now of course the full development of this sort of style [i.e., “the vulgar slang”] is only to be found in productions of a very low order. The conversation of a waiter, the writings of a provincial reporter, show it in its fullest beauty. But the poison gradually works upward; traces of it reach the highest places. (Freeman 1995 [1860]: 290)

Sometimes the character of the English language itself and of the English-speaking community was blamed in that the former’s copious vocabulary and simple structure prevented it from being used “with accuracy and care,” and the latter’s love of freedom at times turned into linguistic “lawlessness.” Americans as the vanguard of the contemporary Anglo-Saxon community went even further than their British cousins in that respect: The same proud, independent spirit which made the Saxons of old rebel against the servitude of punctuality, prompts their descendants to spurn the yoke of grammar and purism. In America this scorn of obedience, whether to political authority or philological, is fostered and intensified by the very genius of our institutions. (Mathews 1876: 327–328)

Second, its global spread meant that the English language and its speakers were coming into contact with all kinds of “other-speaking races,” which was bringing about not only racial but also linguistic “miscegenation”: Two primary considerations called our Society into being. […] we are inheritors of what may claim to be the finest living literature in the world. Now the history of languages shows that there is danger lest our speech should grow out of touch with that literature, and losing, as it were, its capital, and living from hand to mouth, fall from its nobility and gradually dissociated itself from apparent continuity with its great legacy […]. This danger is much increased by the widespread and haphazard distribution of English speakers all over the

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world exposed to all manner of unrelated environments. It would seem that no other language can ever have had its central force so dissipated – and even this does not exhaust the description of our special peril, because there is furthermore this most obnoxious condition, namely, that wherever our countrymen are settled abroad there are alongside of them communities of other-speaking races, who, maintaining among themselves their native speech, learn yet enough of ours to mutilate it, and establishing among themselves all kinds of blundering corruptions, through habitual intercourse infect therewith the neighbouring English. We can see this menace without any guess as to what may come of it, and in the United States, where it is most evident, it is natural that despair should encourage a blind optimism. (Bridges 1969 [1925]: 87–88)

The consequences that were feared can be summarized under the heading of “the three I’s.” What was seen to be at stake were intelligibility, the common inheritance of all “Anglican” people, and the integrity of the language itself. The discourse of English under threat is a particularly good example of the sometimes contradictory nature of the arguments surrounding the emergence of the native speaker and of the diverse prejudices and incompatible presuppositions upon which they were founded. On the one hand, English was the great borrowing language; on the other, its “Babylonish” vocabulary presented problems to native speakers. On the one hand, the global spread of the language was an occasion for self-congratulation among English speakers; on the other, contact with other languages and peoples was feared. On the one hand, the purity and Anglo-Saxon character of the language and its speech community were praised; on the other, it was pointed out that strict linguistic and racial purity were only found among less significant nations and in the backwaters of history and were thus not actually desirable at all. The following sections trace some of these contradictory arguments in more detail. The first interesting point is the distinction made by a number of authors between language changes and corruptions. According to Marsh (1874: 458), for example, genuine linguistic changes, which are part of the nature of language itself as “a living semi-organism connatural with man or constitutive of him, and so participating in his mutations,” must be clearly separated from “positive corruptions, which tend to the deterioration of a tongue in expressiveness or moral elevation of vocabulary, in distinctness of articulation, in logical precision, or in clearness of structure.” The former allow a language to adapt to the changing conditions of “the race to which it is vernacular” and thus indicate “progress” and “natural” evolution (1874: 459–460); the latter “arise from extraneous or accidental causes” and, if unchecked, “infect […] a whole nation,” as “purity of speech, like personal cleanliness, is allied with purity of thought.” Once more, we see the insoluble connection made by nineteenth-century scholars between (national) language and (national) thought.

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Similar arguments are put forward by Graham (1991 [1869]: 162). One of Graham’s concerns is with processes of “internal corruption,” by means of which “a letter or syllable is cut off from the beginning of a word” or “is taken from the middle or the end.” Such processes arise, in his view, “either by a vicious or slovenly pronunciation, or from a mistaken notion of” this word’s derivation. At the same time, Graham acknowledges that “as a rule […] words, as they grow older, degenerate in meaning and contract in form” and that such processes are “all produced by the operation of a natural law of language which no human power will ever be able to prevent.” Thus, even more clearly than in Marsh (1874: 458), a tension emerges between what nineteenth-century writers on language viewed as “natural” and hence desirable and what they considered to be against the nature of language. One of the most commonly expressed topoi in the late nineteenth century was that its worldwide spread was seriously threatening the integrity of the English language. Even though native speakers reveled in pride about the fact that English was “the language of commerce, of civilization, of social and religious freedom, of progressive intelligence, and of active catholic philanthropy; and, therefore, beyond any tongue ever used by man, […] of right the cosmopolite speech” (Marsh 1859: 87–88; cf. above), at the same time they feared the impending break-up of a language so widely disseminated and thus subject to so many uncontrollable influences. The expression of this fear often took place in terms of what has been labeled the “Latin analogy” (McArthur 1987: 9), i.e., the idea that if the varieties of a language were allowed to diverge beyond mutual intelligibility, the original language itself would lose its unity and thus eventually its language status as such, the prime example of such a process having been provided by Latin. Hence, in the late nineteenth century English native speakers were torn between pride in their language as a potential universal language and the fear that this status contained the seeds of the language’s very destruction. The idea of a common language for all of mankind had first appeared in Western thought during the Renaissance (Al-Dabbagh 2005: 3). Nevertheless, in Renaissance Britain, it would have been considered absurd to imagine that English would one day enjoy the status of a global language. This was partly because Latin still functioned as the pan-European language of learning and the church, but also because English itself was believed to be tarnished by so many faults that it would not be able to withstand competition even among European vernaculars, much less replace Latin. It was only in the eighteenth century that the spread of English outside Britain was deemed to be an issue to be taken seriously (Bailey 1991: 98). Many eighteenth-century writers on English saw in French (cf. above) the model for the expansion of their language, as it had become the dominant language of interna-

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tional diplomacy (and even of domestic politics in Germany and Russia), of aristocratic life, and of intellectual activity. English nationalists exhorted their countrymen to challenge French linguistic supremacy; in their view, the fact that English still took second place internationally no longer had anything to do with defects inherent in the language but with the attitude of its native speakers. Particularly toward the end of the century, writers became increasingly optimistic that great international fame for the language was ahead. In a letter in which he counseled his countryman Edward Gibbon to abandon the plan of writing a history of Switzerland in French, David Hume, for example, quoting Horace, asked why Gibbon intended to “compose in French and carry faggots into the woods”: Why do you compose in French and carry faggots into the woods, as Horace says with regard to the Romans who wrote in Greek? I grant that you have a like motive to those Romans, and adopt a language much more generally diffused than your native tongue, but have you not remarked the fate of those two ancient languages in the following ages? The Latin, though then less celebrated and confined to more narrow limits, has in some measure outlived the Greek, and is now more generally understood by men of letters. Let the French therefore triumph in the present diffusion of their tongue. Our solid and increasing establishments in America, where we need less dread the inundation of barbarians, promise a superior stability and duration to the English language. (Hume 1932 [1767]: 170–171, quoted in Bailey 1991: 100)

Three of Hume’s arguments deserve mention in this context: first, he sees an analogy between the past and present of Latin and the present and future of English, foreshadowing the so-called “Latin analogy”; second, he maintains that “inundation” by “barbarians” threatens the integrity of any language, which anticipates nineteenth- and early twentieth-century arguments about the menacing “other-speaking races” endangering the purity of English in its worldwide spread; and third, he sees wide “diffusion” and large speaker numbers as a guarantee of the “duration” and “stability” of the language, an argument which also figures prominently in the writings of Watts (1991 [1850]: 125–130; cf. above), who explicitly quotes Hume, and other nineteenth-century expansionists. In the nineteenth-century debate about English as a future world language, it was not necessarily French against which it was measured but mainly Latin. Whereas French had always played the role of a rival or competitor, Latin now served as a model or historical example. As Bailey puts it (1991: 113), “[t]he past of Rome seemed a powerful predictor of the future of English.” This future seemed dangerous to many observers, who feared that English would eventually evolve into several mutually unintelligible dialects and thus cease to exist as a unitary language – a fear which can still be heard today (cf. McArthur 1987: 9–10).

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One of the first to express the notion that English would break up into separate languages appears to have been Noah Webster, who, in his Dissertations on the English Language (1951 [1789]: 22–23), anticipated a linguistic schism between the old mother-country and the new American republic. Whereas wishful thinking may have animated Webster’s famous prediction at least in part, by the midnineteenth century this prediction seems to have become a commonplace in the linguistic literature. An anonymous reviewer of Marsh’s Lectures on the English Language (1860: 507, quoted in Bailey 1991: 114) described the situation thus: “It has for some time been the fashion, among a certain class of semi-political critics, to favor the impression that the language of the two great branches of the AngloSaxon family is gradually diverging into two appreciably distinct dialects.” That its worldwide spread was seen as a grave danger to the English language is evident throughout the literature. In “Can the English tongue be preserved?” Lloyd, for example, first (1995 [1897]: 369) muses about the link between the political and linguistic union of “all Anglian (i.e., English-speaking) men,” among which he counts the “Englishman of Liverpool, […] an educated Northern Englishman, or Virginian, or Upper Canadian” as well was “a born Londoner or Bostonian” (1995 [1897]: 370). What we are looking at here is, of course, the community of Anglo-Saxons as defined by nineteenth-century writers: Britons and Americans, and possibly the inhabitants of other white settlement colonies; other English speakers were not part of the great “Anglian” community. According to Lloyd (1995 [1897]: 369), the “growing destinies of the English language have been viewed with pride by all who speak it and know it”; entirely in line with the nineteenth-century numerological tradition (cf. above), he predicts that by the year 2000, “the vast majority of highly civilised men will speak English as their mother-tongue.” Nevertheless, English speakers must be watchful and active, as the “story of Babel” threatens the fulfillment of the language’s destiny as a universal language (1995 [1897]: 370). The gravest danger is pronunciation; if the difficulties in comprehension already affecting the speakers of different dialects turn into mutual unintelligibility, then such dialects will be “no longer one language but two” or more. Such a loss of unity affecting “widely extended” languages has happened so regularly in the past, Latin being just the most prominent example, that the fragmentation of languages appears to be describable as a universal law (1995 [1897]: 371). Luckily, there are opposing forces, or centripetal factors, as well: a “common literature” and a “common standard” will preserve the unity of the English language and thus ultimately ensure its continued worldwide significance (1995 [1897]: 375). Even though the most “unruly” speakers are the Americans (“America […] follows at a much greater distance, if it can be now said to follow at all,” 1995 [1897]: 373), in both American and British English, the corruption of the language

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generally originates with the “lower orders,” particularly those of the large urban areas, and their ever-changing vulgar speech. This is why, in the United States, the southern dialects must be regarded as the worthiest: they are stable because they have preserved a historic past and because there are no cities but a “compact” ruling class well separated from the lower classes (1995 [1897]: 373–374). London is also no longer immune to vulgar speech, and, according to Lloyd, may soon become the most corrupt of all English-speaking cities, as born Londoners are continually exposed to “the infection of Cockneyism” and its mispronunciation of the “letter h.” “Good English” at the end of the nineteenth century is thus no longer simply metropolitan but national or even international; it is that of the “best speakers” not only of London, but “throughout the kingdom,” and those “best speakers” are, of course, the educated (1995 [1897]: 374; cf. Part II). Lloyd was not, of course, the only writer to voice doubts about American English. As is well known, throughout the nineteenth century and way into the twentieth, Americans constituted the preferred target for charges of linguistic corruption. Against “American solecisms and vulgarisms” which “threaten[ed] deterioration,” the “sheet-anchors” of the great writers of the past (the King James Bible, “our Prayer-book,” and the works of Shakespeare) had to be dropped lest “the strength of the British tongue may […] be lost among the nations” (Huntley 1999 [1868]: 207). An early example of anti-American rhetoric is provided by Pickering (1991 [1816]: 113–122). Pickering argues that American usage may one day threaten the possibility of communication between Americans and Britons, i.e., the international intelligibility of the English language. The loss of a common language, however, will not only be a linguistic problem but also endanger the common inheritance, because “our religion and our laws are studied in the language of the nation, from which we are descended” (1991 [1816]: 114). To prevent the further departure of “the language of the United States” from “the English standard” (1991 [1816]: 119), Pickering recommends what was to become a staple: the study of the “standard authors,” i.e., the great writers of the past, supplemented by “those authors of our own time, who have made the older writers their models” (1991 [1816]: 122). A similar argument is forwarded by Graham (1991 [1869]: 166–169). Even though Graham (1991 [1869]: 166) mentions the possibility, “as the Americans themselves sometimes declare, that some of the words and phrases which are now called American, are, in reality, genuine English words which have become obsolete,” he flatly denies that American usage is part of the “mother tongue,” which, in his view, is English as spoken in England only: “The fountain-head of the English language is in England, and in no other country; and all departures from the English use of English words must be looked upon as faults against

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purity of style” (1991 [1869]: 167). The metaphors by which Graham describes such “faults” are the commonly employed ones: they are “abortions,” “deformations,” and “monstrosities” (1991 [1869]: 169) which constitute “a pest to society,” an “epidemic,” or “infectious disease” (1991 [1869]: 166). In his protest against an American’s account of the English language, i.e., Fitzedward Hall’s Modern English (1873), Baynes (1995 [1874]: 182–183) pits the “Anglo-American tongue” against “the standard and accepted English of the old country,” and American English is seen as “a separate type of English.” The causes of this American linguistic deviance must be searched for in the contact situation which English has met with in the United States; this contact situation brought not only “intermixing with other races” but also language mixing, i.e., both “blood and speech” inherited from Britain were adulterated by contact with “other races and other tongues.” Against this, the “thoughtful and cultivated American look[s] […] towards the old country,” seeking to re-establish the links with his own past, and conservative American linguists have sought to arrest language change by appealing to “the established principles of linguistic science” as they were formulated in Europe. One of these “thoughtful and cultivated” Americans was precisely George Perkins Marsh, who attempted to reconcile the claim to American national and linguistic self-sufficiency with his conviction that only due respect to the AngloSaxon heritage of the language guaranteed its and its speakers’ continued worldwide success. In his Columbia address, Marsh (1859) does not consider the issue of the divergence of British and American English, but he looks at it in his Lectures. Other than Webster, however, Marsh does not welcome a separate development for English in America; rather, he insistently admonishes his countrymen not to let linguistic differences between themselves and Englishmen grow too large, lest they “denaturalize” the language and thus threaten the unity of the race by separating “the stock and the offshoot” (1874: 478–479). In other words, according to Marsh, the preservation of the common linguistic inheritance is an important component of the continued success of the Anglo-Saxon race. Marsh (1874: 473–474) sees differences primarily at the phonetic-phonological level; according to him, lexicon and grammar still unite Americans with their British cousins. This is still the standard analysis (cf., e.g., Leisi and Mair 1999: 186). Marsh’s position on the pronunciation of American English is interesting insofar as it employs an argument later found in the description of RP by Henry Cecil Wyld. According to both Marsh (1874: 475–476) and Wyld (1991 [1934]: 212; cf. Chapter 6), clarity and distinctness of articulation were the two crucial features distinguishing the pronunciation of superior forms of English, but whereas in the view of Marsh it was American English which most clearly evidenced these two traits, Wyld later applied the very same argument in order to show how edu-

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cated British English was superior to other forms of speech not just socially but linguistically as well. In any case, according to Marsh (1874: 475–476), the clarity and distinctness of articulation characterizing American English were a result of the more widespread ability to read and the resulting tendency by American speakers to assimilate their speech to writing. Marsh also, however, identified “climatic influences,” which had produced “a change in our bodily constitution” including “the delicate organs of articulation” and had resulted in “a distinct national Anglo-American type” in terms of physiognomy. This argument is interesting, as it betrays Marsh as an early environmentalist, in whose view “man must and can function in harmony with nature” only (Garraty and Carnes 1999: 536–537) and is crucially influenced by his surroundings. It would also have played into the hands of American nationalists, who were renouncing Anglo-Saxonism in favor of a distinctly American identity based on northwestern European extraction. As shown above, however, Marsh otherwise also strictly denied that there could be anything but a single “Anglo-Saxon race” (1859: 79) or “Anglican people” (1859: 80) comprising both “the Englishman and the American” (1859: 78). Of course, if Americans were corrupting the language, other peoples, which were not even consanguine, were doing so to an even larger extent. Marsden (1859: 376, quoted in Dowling 1986: 86–87) presents a convenient summary of the matter. If vernacular English as spoken in the white settlement colonies already differed as much as it did from “the standard of the mother country,” it was clear that “in the extremities” of the British Empire, the “purity and precision of the language itself” were likely to be lost. Note, once more, how “the language itself” is equated to “the standard of the mother country” (cf. Chapter 5). The main problem affecting the English language in all of the far-flung lands to which it had spread was, according to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century authors, that it was subject to contact with the languages of all kinds of “otherspeaking races” (Bridges 1969 [1925]: 87–88; cf. above). Even though the outcomes of such contact were occasionally described in endearing terms, such as by Whitworth (1982 [1907]: 5), who admires the “wonderful command which Indians […] have obtained over the English language” and aims, with his book, to free their “compositions” from the remaining “little errors of idiom which jar upon the ear of the native Englishman,” in general, it was viewed as a problem. Apart from the fact that it was considered “unnatural” for non-Europeans to be speaking a European language (cf. above), contact between colonizers and the colonized often led to an “amalgamation of totally different races” and, concomitantly, “the formation of a new language” (Rogers 1995 [1850]: 144–147). This process, however, usually did not consist in “the deliberate blending together of two totally different tongues, in equal proportions and as co-ordinate elements” (1995 [1850]: 147)

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but resulted in the emergence of “a different grammar,” which was based on the grammar of one of the languages in contact (1995 [1850]: 145). This new grammar was often a simplified version of the original one – but why would “a nation speaking a homogenous language […] willingly exchange that more elaborate, and, abstractedly, more perfect type of language, for another and inferior system of grammatical forms”? Such an exchange amounted to the “degradation and disintegration,” in short, the “violation” of the original grammar (1995 [1850]: 145). The result was a “broken” language (Craik 1995 [1857–58]: 186), which, in the case of the “negroes in the West Indies,” actually amounted to a “new English”: In the illiterate English which alone was spoken after the Norman Conquest, the inflexional system of the language was in great part either perverted or neglected altogether. […] It is the way in which children always begin to speak their own language, whatever it may be, and in which uninstructed persons for the most part speak any foreign language. So the negroes in the West Indies speak English; they have, in fact, made in this way a new English of their own, in which a translation of the New Testament was some years ago printed by the Bible Society. […] It may be called Broken English, or Semi-English. (Craik 1995 [1857–58]: 186)

This was because its grammar, i.e., morphosyntax, constituted the basis of any language: “The grammar may be regarded as being the mould or matrix in which the language is formed, or the shape which it thence receives” (1995 [1857-58]: 188). This view not only provided a way out of the dilemma of mixed languages, where positions had clashed head-on, with Müller (1862: 80) claiming that “languages are never mixed” and Whitney (1875: 9) that “[t]here are few unmixed languages in the world,” but also salvaged the status of English, as even though its vocabulary was so greatly mixed, “not a single drop of foreign blood has entered into the organic system of the English language. The grammar, the blood and soul of the language, is […] pure and unmixed in English” (Müller 1862: 81) und “nothing but Teutonic” in heritage and character (1862: 80). But language contact had other, disadvantageous results as well, not the least of them being the complications that arose for the linguist. If, as outlined by Whitney (1875: 270–277), one of the main tasks of the new science of language was to verify or falsify “the ethnologist’s classification of races” (1875: 271), then all cases in which original congruence (cf. above) no longer obtained were problematic in that they complicated the reconstruction of former racial or national affiliations. Nevertheless, even if a language could be “exchanged” by its speakers, it still often reliably indicated “race-history,” because “upon the whole, language is determined by race, since each human being usually learns to speak from his parents and others of the same blood” (1875: 274; cf. above). In the view of a number of present-day authors, it is not just the tradition of haughty, arrogant comments pertaining to overseas varieties of English but also

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the distinction between “natural” language change and external “corruptions” and the strong emphasis on “intact” grammars which has led to the comparative neglect of and problems in accounting for “mixed” languages such as pidgins and creoles or, for that matter, New Englishes. The question of how contactinduced change affects the “genetic” affiliation of languages is still highly controversial today. While contact linguists have argued that all languages are mixed to some extent and the processes of change found in highly mixed languages such as creoles occur to at least some extent in all languages, traditional historical linguistics still relegates language contact and its outcomes to a secondary place. The nineteenth-century heritage just described has also been alleged to have had repercussions in contemporary linguistic terminology, ranging from the distinction between “normal” and “imperfect” transmission (Thomason and Kaufman 1988: 10–11) to precisely the labels used to name New Englishes, i.e., “indigenized,” “nativized,” or “non-native” (cf., e.g., Winford 2003: 7; Mufwene 1994: 21).

10.4 Summary of Part III Part III has investigated the link between the native speaker, linguistic nationalism, and racism. A surge of nationalist feeling pervades not only Marsh (1859) but much of the linguistic literature between the mid-nineteenth century and World War I. The link between language and nation with regard to English and its speakers could be made from two points of view. Watts (1991 [1850]), for example, approached the topic from the perspective of world politics and tied the fate of English speakers and their quest for world dominance to the rise of English to world language status. Another perspective, taken, for example, by Trench (1927a [1851], 1927b [1855]), focused less on the external development of the language, but linked language and nation from a historical point of view. Underlying both perspectives was Anglo-Saxonism, a powerful historical ideology and political theory which, during the second half of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries, enveloped the British Empire and the U.S. in a logic of racial exceptionalism based on both descent and culture. In that framework, language played a crucial role, as the traits of the English-speaking people – an expansionist drive, a youthful and manly character, and an emphasis on political liberties – were seen to be traveling along lines of Anglo-Saxon blood. Developments in nationalism were also significant as they took place in Britain and the U.S. in the second half of the nineteenth century: whereas the former experienced a “moment of Englishness” (Kumar 2003: 175), which focused nationalist sentiment less on the civic and political institutions of Britain than

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on the ethnic and cultural characteristics of England and the English, the U.S. saw a redefinition and focusing of what being American implied, a strong nativist movement being part of this. The second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth abounded with glorifications of the English language, its speakers, and its worldwide spread. English was seen as being on a global mission, which was due not only to the language’s qualities but also to those of its speakers. That mission was being threatened by “corruptions,” which were often traced back to the influence of “other-speaking races.” If, as outlined in Part II, languages are ideally uniform or homogenous, language contact obviously constitutes a problem, and, in fact, nineteenth-century writers on language often condemned the former, in analogy to the mixing of peoples or races, as a form of “miscegenation.” The resulting varieties were seen as “illegitimate offspring” of the native language – a position which might have had repercussions in modern linguistics not just conceptually but also terminologically. Of course, many of the discourses outlined in Part III have diminished in significance or been discontinued altogether. Anglo-Saxon racial superiority, for example, is no longer propounded publicly. Nevertheless, as Bailey (1991: 121) notes, “[f]or the most part […], the linguistic ideas that evolved at the acme of empires led by Britain and the United States have not changed.” And the native speaker is a product of these discourses.

11 Conclusion […] the discourse of the native speaker […] is a product of modernity. Since the European Renaissance, identities have been constructed according to a particular model of perfection: unified, singular, well-ordered. Language has played a major role in the construction of modern European identities – from the level of nation states and standard languages, to the subjectivities of individual speakers. (Graddol 1999: 68)

While the native speaker still constitutes one of the foci of modern linguistics both theoretically and methodologically, the distinction between native and non-native speakers has been increasingly called into question, particularly in connection with the study of World Englishes, where it has become clear that “[t]he more English becomes an international language, the more the division of its speakers into ‘native’ and ‘nonnative’ becomes inconsistent” (Brutt-Griffler and Samimy 2001: 105). The problems inherent particularly in accounting for the so-called “New Englishes,” i.e., the increasingly autonomous forms of the language spoken in postcolonial countries such as India or Singapore, in terms of the native/non-native dichotomy have led a number of researchers to criticize the concept’s application to such sociolinguistic situations (e.g., Rampton 2003: 107). Others have even called for its abandonment altogether (e.g., Ferguson 1982: vii; Paikeday 1985: 87; Piller 2001: 121; Acevedo Butcher 2005: 13). The present study has taken a different approach and attempted to reconstruct the coming-into-being of the English native speaker via historical discourse analysis in order to see how such a concept could be “imagined” (cf. Anderson 1991) in the first place, thereby shedding some light on the historical implications of the term and when, how, and why it might have become problematic. Its basic aim has been to fill a gap evident in the literature, where numerous authors have described the English native speaker as an “imaginary construct” (Kramsch 1997: 363) or as “discursively constituted and created” (Kandiah 1998: 83) without providing any further details. Among the questions that have guided the present study are the following: – What ideology of language and its speakers does the discursive construction of the English native speaker involve, and what are the elements that constitute that ideology? – What are its origins, i.e., when do we first find the elements making up the native-speaker ideology? – Have all of these elements remained the same, or have any of them significantly altered their structure or function or even been inverted? – How has the discursive construction of the English native speaker been affected by sociohistorical developments such as the growth of the British

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Empire and the expansion of the U.S., industrialization and urbanization, or the rise of nationalism as a political principle? In order to tap into the discourses surrounding the emergence of the English native speaker, I first focused on a speech delivered by George Perkins Marsh at Columbia College in New York in 1858 and published in 1859, as this is the text in which the phrase native speaker is attested for the first time. In a close reading, I identified and interpreted the discourse strategies employed by Marsh in promoting the introduction of “native,” i.e., English, philology at American universities. I then moved from the micro-level of the individual text and the focus on discourse strategies to the macro-level of the text corpus and the delimitation and explanation of lines of argumentation. Even though the phrase native speaker itself occurs rather infrequently in the corpus, the linguistic literature of the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth clearly produced a very peculiar way of thinking about languages and their speakers, pitting the “more native speakers” (Whitney 1875: 156) against the rest. This dichotomy was embedded in a number of other issues. For one, there was the issue of standards for English, which increasingly turned from one of cultural politics within Britain into a global one, as the language spread to all four corners of the world and acquired more and more vocabulary, speakers, and varieties. Setting standards for English in the nineteenth century involved not only the equation of the written standard with the great literature of past ages, but also, and perhaps primarily, the equation of standard spoken English with the speech of educated speakers. Often, standard English was simply equated with the language as a whole. Usage which deviated from the standard was described as a threat to the language in three ways: it threatened international intelligibility, it threatened the integrity of the language, and it threatened the common inheritance of the Anglo-Saxon speech community. Initially, it was primarily American English which was seen as a massive threat of this kind, but the new urban varieties and the varieties spoken by colonized peoples attracted criticism and scorn as well. The standardization of English also, and perhaps primarily, resulted in the firm establishment of the “standard ideology” (Milroy 2001: 533), i.e., the belief that any language must possess some uniform and authoritative form. This standard ideology has had repercussions all through modern linguistics, from the classic definition of the native speaker as “the ideal speaker-hearer in a completely homogenous speech community” (Chomsky 1965: 3) to the reliance of dialectology and sociolinguistics on the most “authentic” native speakers as providers of data.

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A further issue connected with the coming-into-being of the native speaker as a concept was the nineteenth-century emphasis on the difference between spoken and written language and the postulate of the primacy of speech over writing. In eighteenth-century descriptions of language or languages, letters and sounds were still often not differentiated, and the study of language was based exclusively on written documents. Two developments in nineteenth-century linguistics shifted the focus onto spoken language: first, the insight of comparativehistorical philology into sound laws, and second, the rapid progress of phonetics and phonology in the description and classification of speech sounds. Again, the phonocentric view of language has pervaded not only theoretical linguistics, with its strong emphasis on the “ideal speaker-hearer,” but also applied linguistics and second-language teaching and research, where an almost exclusive focus on spoken language, oral interaction, and “authentic” models has strongly privileged monolingual native speakers from Inner-Circle countries as teachers, administrators, and textbook writers. Another discursive field which needs to be mentioned is linguistic nationalism. A look at Marsh (1859) shows that the link between linguistic nativeness and the ideology of nationalism has burdened the concept of the native speaker from its inception. A surge of nationalist feeling pervades not only Marsh (1859) but much of the linguistic literature between the mid-nineteenth century and World War I. The connection between language and nation with regard to English and its speakers could be made from two points of view. Watts (1991 [1850]), for example, approached the topic from the perspective of world politics and tied the fate of English speakers and their quest for world dominance to the rise of English to world language status. Another perspective, taken, for example, by Trench (1927a [1851]), focused less on the external development of the language but linked language and nation from a historical point of view. Historicizing English in the nineteenth century involved endowing the language with a long, uninterrupted, and respectable past, which is where the study of Old English literature, as advocated by, e.g., Marsh (1859), comes into play. Of course, “New” Englishes do not possess such long histories, as, for example, urban varieties of the language do not, in contrast to the traditional folk dialects  – an issue which underlies all debates about the legitimacy of “younger languages.” Connected to both perspectives on language and nation with regard to English was Anglo-Saxonism, a powerful historical theory and political ideology which, during the second half of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries, encompassed the British Empire and the U.S. in a logic of racial exceptionalism based on both descent and culture. Even though it had been around for quite some time, in the nineteenth century, Anglo-Saxonism took on a distinctly

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racial cast, which made it square well with the more comprehensive racial theories that were being developed in the emerging sciences of man as well as by the theorists and practitioners of colonialism. Developments in nationalism were also significant as they took place in Britain and the U.S. in the second half of the nineteenth century: whereas the former experienced a “moment of Englishness” (Kumar 2003: 175), which focused nationalist sentiment less on the civic and political institutions of Britain than on the ethnic and cultural characteristics of England and the English, the U.S. saw a redefinition and focusing of what being American implied, a strong nativist movement being part of this. One final question is, of course, what this book means for the contemporary native speaker in the World Englishes context. Obviously, many of the discourses outlined in the main chapters have either lost some of their force, changed considerably, or been abandoned altogether. Anglo-Saxonism, for example, went out of fashion around World War I, and explicit racial ideologies are no longer publicly accepted. So shall we get rid of the native speaker, too? Apart from the fact that it appears at least difficult, if not downright impossible, to do away with a term not only deeply entrenched in scientific usage but also common in everyday speech, an important question in this context is what would be gained by such a move. As numerous authors have pointed out (e.g., Mukherjee 2005: 20), the native speaker remains a useful reference point in both linguistics and language pedagogy, provided a usage-based approach is adopted. Moreover, as noted by Kandiah (1998: 90) from a post-colonial perspective, “the fact is that large numbers of ordinary people, even those who do not explicitly use the term ‘native user’, consciously or unconsciously assume the notion in many of their ordinary interactions, so that there is no way we can pretend it has no reality.” And Kandiah continues: “The real question then is what the nature of that reality is.” Based on the analyses presented in the main chapters of this book, a tentative answer might be that the native speaker is an ideograph connecting contemporary linguistics with some of its nineteenth-century roots. The term ideograph⁴¹ was coined by McGee, who sees in it the crucial link between discourse and ideology (1980: 4–5). Much rhetorical scholarship views the rhetoric of ideology as a type of argumentation, thereby assuming that the

41 The resemblance of the term to that denoting the basic unit of writing systems such as the Chinese is not accidental. As McGee (1980: 7) notes, “‘ideographs’ […], like Chinese symbols, […] presumptuously suggest that each member of a community will see as a gestalt every complex nuance in them.”

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fundamental unit of analysis is “an integrated set-series of propositions” (1980: 6). According to McGee (1980: 6–7), however, ideographs rather than arguments function as the central meaning-creating elements of, for example, political rhetoric: “Though words [or phrases] only (and not claims), such terms as ‘property,’ ‘religion,’ ‘right of privacy,’ ‘freedom of speech,’ ‘rule of law,’ and ‘liberty’ are more pregnant than propositions ever could be. They are the basic structural elements, the building blocks, of ideology.” This is because they summarize arguments; they “are one-term sums of an orientation, the species of ‘God’ or ‘Ultimate’ term that will be used to symbolize the line of argument” (1980: 7). An important characteristic of ideographs is that they are socially determined, i.e., each member of a particular community is socialized into a specific ideographic vocabulary, which will then guide his or her thought or behavior and thus constitute a prerequisite for “belonging” to the society (1980: 8, 15). And even though they may employ formally similar or identical ideographs, different societies will disagree with regard to their meanings. Ideographs such as liberty or equality thus define a community, i.e., the outer parameters of a society, because they either do not exist in other societies or do not have precisely the same meanings. On the other hand, there will always be disagreement as to the identity, legitimacy, or definition of specific ideographs within a single society, too, so that there is always a certain variability in ideographic usage, which, in turn, is a prerequisite for change. Ideographs are thus by no means static phenomena; their meaning and usage is subject to constant contestation and renegotiation. If one of the basic characteristics of an ideograph, however, is the fact that its meaning is socially rather than rationally determined, then ideographs cannot be subjected to logical analysis in terms of truth values. What terms like liberty or equality might mean abstractly, metaphysically, or in “pure thought” (1980: 9) is not only irrelevant but also inaccessible. But how is it precisely that ideographs acquire their meaning? In what way does the social embeddedness of an ideograph determine its use? The meaning-making process of ideographs has two dimensions: a vertical one and a horizontal one. The vertical dimension is historical, or diachronic: in order to endow an ideograph with meaning, an analog for its proposed present usage must be found in an earlier, precedent usage. Making the case for a specific ideographic usage thus involves making reference to its history by explicitly or implicitly referring to previous situations in which the term has worked as an appropriate description. But an ideograph’s meaning also has a synchronic dimension, i.e., every ideograph is defined by the relations which it entertains with other ideographs. According to McGee (1980: 14), “[b]oth of these structures must be understood and described before one can claim to have constructed a theoretically precise explanation” of any ideology.

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The present book has attempted to reconstruct the historical dimension of one particularly powerful linguistic ideograph, i.e., the native speaker. The social realities upon which earlier uses and meanings of this ideograph were predicated have changed drastically with the post-colonial changes in the status and function of English worldwide. New affiliations and loyalties with regard to English have developed and have caused confusion as to the ethnic and sociocultural identity of the language and its speakers. This, in the view of many scholars, makes the application of the native/non-native dichotomy problematic and calls for terminological and conceptual revision (cf., e.g., Sayeed 2007: 103–108). Such revision should take the following points into account: – Obviously, native speakers exist. In both lay usage and linguistic terminology, the term native language is commonly understood to refer to the first language learned in childhood. In other words, an individual is a native speaker of the language he or she learned first. Children learning two languages simultaneously from birth onward thus possess two native languages. This has been labeled the “bio-developmental” definition by Davies (1996: 156). Nevertheless, definitions of the native speaker often involve other elements as well, such as, for example, intuitions about the standard language, the ability to produce “fluent spontaneous discourse,” a “huge memory stock of complete lexical items,” a “unique capacity to write creatively,” and “a unique capacity to interpret and translate into the L1 of which s/he is a native speaker” (Davies 2003: 210). Many of these abilities are debatable, as there are not only numerous native speakers who do not possess them but also many non-native speakers who do. All of them are thus independent of native-speaker status in the bio-developmental sense, even though there is, of course, often a close correlation between a speaker’s first language and his or her competence in it. Still, all the above are incidental characteristics which indicate how well an individual uses a language, which might be captured under the headings of “proficiency” (Paikeday 1985: 5) or “expertise” (Rampton 2003: 109). – If we abide by the bio-developmental definition, this implies that “adults could never become native speakers without being reborn” (Cook 1999: 187). Put less provocatively, an individual will never become a native speaker of a language learned later in life, no matter how great his or her proficiency in that language may eventually turn out to be. Second-language learning does, in fact, occasionally produce speakers who are all but indistinguishable from native speakers in terms of phonology (Piller 2002) or syntax (Birdsong 1992); this in no way, however, contradicts the bio-developmental definition of native-speaker status and should be treated separately from it.

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All of what has been said so far is in no way, of course, meant to detract from the problems inherent in descriptions of second-language speakers and/or their performance by means of yardsticks based on the competence of monolingual native speakers. Apart from the fact that, as argued by, for example, Backus (2007: 49), it is necessary for SLA research “to stop comparing native competence and non-native performance,” even the administration of exactly the same grammaticality judgments to the two speaker groups is bound to produce skewed results, since second-language speakers possess what has been termed “multicompetence” (Cook 1999: 190). A multi-competent speaker’s competence in his or her second language is, by definition, different from the competence that a monolingual speaker of the same language has, because first and second language co-exist in the brain of such a speaker and influence each other. A number of researchers (e.g., Cook 2002: 20; Piller 2002: 183–184; Backus 2007: 52; Bhatt 2007: 59; Singh 2007a: 35) have therefore argued vehemently that the competence of the proficient second-language speaker be described on its own terms, by means of research instruments developed specifically for that purpose. Moving on from theoretical linguistics to language pedagogy and Englishlanguage teaching, it has been recognized that while there may still be a sizeable demand for teachers with a British or American accent in many parts of the world, the monopoly of monolingual English-language experts from the Inner Circle must be seriously questioned. First, there is a growing awareness of the fact that the first language may be a resource rather than a problem in second-language acquisition, as it may be able to build a cognitive bridge to the target language, apart from concerns relating to language maintenance, linguistic identity, and cultural conflicts (cf. Canagarajah 1999a: 80). Second, as Auerbach (1993) and others have shown, insistence on monolingual native-speaking teachers may prove counterproductive in the ESL classroom. Bilingual teachers may be at an advantage not just because of their insider status in the community, which makes them aware of possible linguistic difficulties, different learning styles, and problematic language attitudes of their students, but also because their role as “more advanced learners” turns them into more credible role models for their students. Third, the focus on oral interaction in situations involving “authentic” elements from the target culture may be entirely inappropriate in post-colonial contexts, in which interactions typically involve non-native speakers among each other rather than a non-native speaker and a native one and often take place in the written mode. Moreover, in such contexts, it is often misleading to assume an integrative motivation and native-like com-

280 

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petence as the target of SLA, the latter often regarded as pedantic, affected, or even snobbish (Sridhar and Sridhar 1994: 44–49). To turn to the so-called “New Englishes,” the concepts of speaker and variety or language must be clearly separated. While, as just outlined, there can be no doubt that native speakers exist, it seems questionable to speak of “non-native” varieties or languages other than in the sense of ‘variety or language not possessing native speakers.’ While this may be appropriate in the case of rudimentary pidgins (cf. Winford 2003: 268–270), to label Indian or Singaporean English “non-native” is unjustified, even if the latter possess only a minority of native speakers. Often, the label “non-native” as applied to varieties or languages appears to imply instability, owed to a lack of native speakers. As Mufwene (1998: 116) points out, however, “the native speaker is not the critical nor necessary factor in the development of the norm itself or for its preservation. Although in most communities native speakers have assumed this role, more for preserving than developing the norm, several linguistic communities have done well, communication-wise, without them.” In other words, New Englishes cannot be “non-native” varieties or languages, neither if the label is meant to refer to the lack of native speakers, nor with reference to the absence of stable norms. Structurally and genetically, too, it appears as if the distinction between “native” and “non-native” Englishes is unjustified. As numerous researchers have pointed out (e.g., Singh et al. 1998: 46–48; Backus 2007: 48), there do not seem to be features found exclusively in “non-native” Englishes. This may be because Indian or Singaporean English, just like other varieties of English, are products of language contact. As Mufwene (e.g., 2001) and others have repeatedly argued, all contact phenomena (including New Englishes and creoles but also “native” varieties such as Hiberno English, African American Vernacular English, and even mainstream American English) may ultimately be accounted for by similar principles and processes, with differences in outcome attributable to differences in the original contact setting pertaining to demographics and patterns of interaction as well as to the languages in contact. Finally, the standard issue must be separated from that of the native speaker. In this respect, the classic sociolinguistic definition of vernacular comes in handy: the vernacular is the form of speech that is acquired “in pre-adolescent years” and without formal instruction; it stands in contrast to the “more formal ‘super-posed’ styles that are acquired later in life,” mostly in a school setting (Labov 1984: 29). As Labov also notes, each speaker “has a vernacular form, in at least one language; this may be the prestige dialect […] or a non-standard variety.” Transferred to the

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World Englishes context, this means that every native speaker will be a native speaker of his or her variety of English. In this context it is irrelevant whether a speaker of Indian or Singaporean English is also a speaker of standard English, just as it is irrelevant whether a speaker of Cockney or African American Vernacular English is a speaker of standard English. To sum up, the present study does not argue against the concept of the native speaker in general but against its application or usefulness in certain situations. It appears unrealistic, however, to think that we could break out of the traditional, institutionalized ideology of the native speaker without trying to understand, as best we can, the history of this ideology and how it came to be as powerful as it is. The present study has attempted to make a start in this direction, not without the hope that it might inspire further research into the historiography of language ideologies.

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Author index Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 227, 240 Alford, Henry, 3, 41–42, 60, 148–149 Arnold, Thomas, 86–87, 216, 256 Bagehot, Walter, 40–42, 251 Bopp, Franz, 69–70, 164–165 Chomsky, Noam, 5, 9–10, 57, 71, 78, 91, 103–105, 154, 180, 274 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 40, 78, 80, 161–164, 166, 168, 170 Combe, George, 220–221 Craik, George L., 59, 107–108, 173, 191, 217, 270 Darwin, Charles, 42, 58, 194, 251 De Quincey, Thomas, 40, 58, 205, 244, 246, 250 Dilke, Charles, 40–42 Ellis, A. J., 40, 115–116, 129–130, 136–137, 140–141, 144, 176–177, 179, 241 Foucault, Michel, 35–36, 38, 46 Franklin, Benjamin, 222 Freeman, Edward A., 40, 42–43, 191, 193, 198–204, 235, 256–257, 262 Grimm, Jacob, 52, 162–165, 206–208, 235 Hegel, Friedrich, 69–70 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 83, 160–162, 192 Heyse, Karl Wilhelm Ludwig, 69–70, 169 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 69–70, 162–163, 190 Ingram, James, 80, 213–214 Jespersen, Otto, 31, 45, 59–60, 141, 158, 211, 247–248, 250 Johnson, Samuel, 109, 158–159, 190, 205 Jones, Daniel, 126 Jones, William, 52, 164, 190, 220 Kachru, Braj B., 15, 17–21, 95–98, 179, 188, 231 Kemble, John Mitchell, 215 Labov, William, 11, 14, 97, 122, 146, 176, 178, 280 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, 40, 202, 229–230 Marsh, George Perkins, 4–5, 31, 51, 59, 63–88, 108, 128, 161, 164, 169–170, 179, 186, 189–192, 195–198, 200–201, 203, 208, 210, 213–216, 218–219, 221, 226, 229, 233, 237, 240, 242, 245–246,

254, 259, 263–264, 266, 268–269, 271, 274–275 Mathews, William, 42–43, 60, 64, 161, 186, 189, 195, 210, 240, 245, 249–250, 262 Matthews, Brander, 40–42, 60, 82, 227–228, 250 Meiklejohn, J. M. D., 59, 173–174, 231, 246 Mencken, Henry Louis, 59, 227–228 Müller, Max, 42, 53–56, 58–59, 64, 70, 132, 134, 137–139, 143, 159, 166–170, 172, 174, 189–190, 198, 201–203, 212, 234, 257, 262, 270 Murray, James, 108, 137–138, 177 Nicol, Henry, 142, 171–172, 179 Paul, Hermann, 119–120 Quirk, Randolph, 16, 60, 92–93, 95–98, 124, 126, 142–143, 179 Rask, Rasmus, 52, 164–165 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 29, 56–57, 69, 71, 103–105, 122, 138 Sayce, A. H., 42, 44, 73, 198, 220, 257 Schlegel, Friedrich, 162–163, 206 Seeley, John, 225, 235 Shakespeare, William, 79, 85, 111, 138–139, 159, 161, 166, 168, 170, 244, 256–257, 267 Smart, B. H., 117 Steinthal, Heymann, 70, 169 Sweet, Henry, 3, 45, 60, 66, 118, 129, 132, 142–143, 149, 158, 177 Tooke, John Horne, 52, 209 Trench, Richard Chenevix, 4–5, 43–44, 53, 59, 66, 73, 107, 186, 202, 205, 208–212, 246–247, 271, 275 Watts, Thomas, 186, 205, 251, 257–259, 265, 271, 275 Webster, Noah, 55, 64, 85, 205, 266, 268 Whitman, Walt, 245 Whitney, William Dwight, 4, 31, 55–56, 58, 60, 64, 106–107, 121–122, 170, 180–181, 201–202, 247, 260–261, 270, 274 Wordsworth, William, 161–164 Wyld, Henry Cecil, 4, 31, 60, 66, 113–114, 116–119, 122, 124–125, 127–128, 131, 133–135, 140, 149–150, 180, 268

Subject index accent, 13, 15, 98, 109, 119, 126–127, 149, 156, 240, 257, 279 African American Vernacular English, 97, 280–281 American English, 1, 11, 79, 84–85, 94–96, 99, 121–122, 125, 181, 228, 267–269, 274, 280 Americanism, 40–42, 121–122, 221 “Anglo-Saxon controversy,” 52, 172, 207, 215 Anglo-Saxonism, 4–5, 42, 66–67, 81–82, 87–88, 111, 186, 195, 212–231, 234, 240, 255, 269, 271, 275–276 anthropology, 33, 193–194, 201 applied linguistics, 96, 98, 156–158, 275 artificiality, 125, 129, 131–132, 134–135, 137–138, 143, 166–167, 170, 172–175, 199–200 authenticity, 9, 14, 130, 143, 146–147, 150, 157, 161, 163, 179, 192, 201, 274–275, 279 “bad” English, 123, 127, 144, 150, 181 “best” speakers, the, 102, 116, 120–125, 128, 153, 181, 267 Bible, the, 79, 161, 166, 170, 270 bidialectal, 142 bilingual, 94, 156, 238, 279 borrowing, 31, 41, 202, 211–212, 244–250, 263 Briticism, 40–41 British Empire, 81, 83, 136, 185, 206, 208, 216, 225, 228, 230–236, 241–242, 248, 254, 257–258, 269, 271–272, 273–275 British English, 1, 11, 28, 49, 84–85, 92, 94–96, 99, 102, 153, 181–182, 228, 266, 269 Britishness, 232, 234–235 Celtic, 197, 218–219, 221, 227, 229 Chinese, 167, 203–204, 253, 276 civilization, 31, 41, 75–76, 78–80, 85–87, 114, 140, 155, 160–164, 166, 168, 170, 172–173, 197. 203–204, 206–207, 209,

219, 221, 224, 228–229, 238, 245, 251, 254–261, 264 Cockney, 95, 147, 159, 267, 281 codification, 4, 18, 120, 150, 159, 161, 180 colloquial English, 40, 132, 134–135, 143 colonialism, 11, 29–30, 193, 203, 204, 224, 276 common language, 119–120, 141, 199, 264, 267 comparative-historical linguistics, 3, 5, 52–54, 58, 70, 109, 132, 137, 143, 150, 159, 164–165, 168, 180, 186, 199, 205–206, 215, 218, 257 copiousness, 128, 147, 211, 245–246, 262 creole, 9, 16, 144, 253, 271, 280 culture, 10, 23, 26, 31, 51, 79, 81, 83, 85–86, 94, 116, 122, 125, 137, 147, 156, 160, 163–164, 166, 168, 170, 185, 188, 192, 195–196, 202–203, 206–208, 214, 216, 226–236, 241, 247–249, 258–261, 271, 275, 279 descriptivism, 10, 19, 102, 116, 124, 130–133, 135, 158, 166, 185 determinacy fallacy, 71, 140, 173–174 dialectology, 14, 144–145, 166, 179, 274 discourse, 2–5, 30, 34–38 discourse analysis, 37–50 – Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), 3, 37, 45–50, 63, 69 – historical discourse analysis, 2–3, 26, 37–38, 50 discourse community, 39–45, 210 discourse corpus, 37, 39, 40, 45, 50, 57, 59–60 discourse strategy, 47–48 – argumentation, 38, 47–49, 63 – metaphor, 21, 38, 48–49, 67, 75–76, 178, 185, 244–245, 268 – metonymy, 38, 48–49, 118 – predication, 48–49, 63, 65, 67 – reference, 48–49, 63–70, 72, 74, 77–82, 85–88

304 

 Subject index

– topos, 49, 63, 70, 72–74, 85–86, 88, 121, 240, 246, 261, 264 – voice, 49, 69 educated speaker, 4, 93, 102, 118–120, 122, 127, 153, 177–178, 180–181, 274 English as a Second Language (ESL), 10, 15–17, 27–28, 33, 97–98, 133, 156–157, 188, 252, 275, 278–279 English Dialect Dictionary (EDD), 136, 139 English Language Teaching (ELT), 9, 13, 95, 97 Englishness, 198, 234–235, 271, 276 ethnicity, 11, 22, 25, 49, 188–189, 216, 222, 224, 226–229, 232–234, 236, 239, 253, 272, 276, 278 ethnology, 194, 198, 202, 216, 221, 270 etymology, 52–53, 72, 74, 78, 116, 139, 164, 188, 212, 242, 245 evolution, 42, 58, 141, 194, 235, 263 first language, 10, 128, 157, 196 folk language, 125, 139, 144–145, 147–148, 150, 159, 161–163, 166, 180, 185, 235, 275 French, 26–27, 40–41, 63, 74, 79, 148, 162, 191, 214, 240–241, 243, 245, 248–251, 254, 260, 264–265 Germanic, 58, 60, 86–88, 110, 200, 202, 210, 214, 218, 230, 244–245, 255–256, 260 “good” English, 4, 40, 42, 113, 119–120, 123, 127–128, 133, 135, 149, 180–181, 267 Gothic, 86–87, 138, 218–219 grammar, 10, 18, 21, 26, 39, 43, 52, 54, 57, 59, 73–74, 79, 84, 92, 96, 107 grammaticality judgment, 1, 10, 12, 21, 27–28, 30, 279 Greek, 31, 66, 69, 80, 86, 101, 110, 132, 138, 148, 164, 199, 213–241, 241, 247, 255, 261, 265 hypercorrection, 122 ideograph, 276–278 idiolect, 13, 91, 103, 106 imagined community, 162 immigration, 239–240

imperialism, 11, 30, 66, 83, 98, 185, 207, 217, 224–225, 228, 233, 235, 257–258 Indian English, 21, 28, 94, 96, 99 Indo-European, 58, 86, 110, 164–166, 168, 203–204, 218, 257 Inner Circle, 17–18, 23, 94–97, 231, 275, 279 institutionalization, 17, 18, 35, 47, 95–96, 98, 115 intelligibility, 24, 94–95, 99, 123–124, 141, 154, 174, 179, 263–264, 266–267, 274 intertextuality, 39, 40, 44–45, 69–70, 195 Irish English, 99, 121–122, 125, 175, 181, language change, 3–4, 104, 167, 207, 263, 268, 271 language contact, 9, 17, 20, 95, 127, 136, 257, 260, 262–163, 268–272, 280 language mixing, 31, 138, 172, 242, 244–249, 268, 270–272 Latin, 24, 41, 49, 54, 65–66, 69, 85–86, 132, 137–138, 142, 148, 162, 164, 174, 187, 214, 227, 241, 244, 246, 255, 261, 264–266 Latin analogy, 24, 67, 85, 95, 141, 264–265 letter (vs. sound), 160, 163–166, 171, 175–176, 264, 267, 275 “liberation linguistics,” 96, 98 lingua communis, 161–164, 170 linguistic attitude, 2, 26, 30, 38, 68, 80, 98, 248, 265, 279 linguistic competence, 1, 10–11, 14, 22–23, 26–28, 30, 57, 91, 103–105, 153–154, 157, 187, 278–279 linguistic “corruption,” 42, 75–77, 79, 82, 84, 132, 138, 158, 167, 175, 210, 263–264, 266–267, 271–272 linguistic determinism, 73–74 linguistic identity, 2, 5, 25–27, 29–30, 32–33, 48, 65, 68–69, 96, 98, 109, 176, 187, 191, 201, 203, 232–233, 278–279 linguistic ideology, 33–34 linguistic norm, 3, 14, 176, 178 – endocentric, 95–96, 98–99 – exocentric, 95–96 – local, 95–96, 98 – native, 100 – non-native, 100

Other references 

linguistic ownership, 21–25, 93, 102, 176, 187 linguistic system, 5, 14, 21, 27, 31, 56, 69–70, 74, 79, 91, 99, 103, 105, 114, 138, 140, 146–147, 154–155, 158, 164, 176, 180, 185, 191, 207, 247, 270, 276 linguistic uniformity, 54, 76, 85, 93, 100–103, 105–106, 109, 111, 113, 115–117, 121, 128–132, 143, 145–146, 153, 180, 238, 272, 274 linguistic variation, 4, 15–16, 24, 58, 68, 71, 94–95, 103, 105–109, 112, 114, 129–131, 141, 146, 158, 165, 178, 180, 214 literary language, 68, 80, 82, 108, 111, 113, 125, 129, 132–138, 142–143, 148, 153, 163–164,166–168, 170, 175, 257 monogenesis, 203, 219, 221 monolingual, 1, 10, 13, 27–29, 68, 98, 146, 239, 275, 279 mother tongue, 1, 9–12, 16–17, 19, 22, 29, 31, 41, 60, 64–65, 74, 77, 82, 85, 127–128, 187, 191–192, 196, 198, 200–201, 207, 213, 243–244, 255, 262, 266–267 multilingual, 3, 17, 19, 27, 68, 238, 249 national community, 28, 168, 192, 198–199, 202, 211 national language, 16, 18, 57, 107, 139, 185, 189, 191–192, 196, 202, 206, 211, 234–235, 260, 263 national character, 64, 108, 190, 192, 198, 201, 206, 211–212, 249 nationalism, 5, 30, 81–82, 185–212, 215, 224–228, 231–240, 271, 274–276 Native American, 223–224, 238, 259 native language, 1, 10, 14, 16, 27, 43–44, 52, 63, 65–68, 70, 72–73, 75, 78–79, 81, 84, 88, 93, 97, 114, 119, 133, 157, 161, 169, 186, 196, 198, 200, 231, 238, 272, 278 native speaker, 1–5, 9–12, 19, 27, 29, 31–32, 39, 50–51, 63, 87–88, 100, 121–122, 187, 196, 233, 274 native-speaker teacher, 128, 157, 279 nativization, 9, 20 naturalness, 4, 25, 31, 51, 67, 73–74, 84–85, 125, 127–129, 132–135, 137–138,

 305

141, 143, 146, 150, 157, 163, 167–168, 172–175, 177–178, 180–181, 185, 187, 191–192, 199–203, 216, 242, 247, 263–264, 268–269, 271 Neogrammarians, 165–167 New English, 1–2, 10–11, 23, 92, 99, 188, 200, 203, 270–271, 273, 275, 280 Newbolt Report, 66, 128, 141–142, 149, 213 non-standard language, 25, 28, 34, 91, 97, 109, 113, 140, 143, 145, 280 NORM, 14, 143–146, 178 Norman, 86, 217, 270 observer’s paradox, 147, 176–177 Old English, 31, 52, 80–81, 84, 121, 186, 207, 212–213, 215, 247–248, 275 original congruence, 201, 257, 270 orthography, 115, 142, 144, 176, 179–180 Outer Circle, 10, 17–19, 23, 94, 96–97, 156 Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 30–31, 52–53, 63, 100–101, 107–111, 130–131, 136–137, 139, 150, 209 phonetic alphabet, 115, 176 phonetics/phonology, 13, 68, 78, 142, 158–159, 166, 171, 180, 275 phonocentrism, 68, 78, 88, 156, 158, 170, 176, 179, 275 phrenology, 194, 220–221 pidgin, 9, 16, 23, 253, 271, 280 pluricentricity, 15, 41, 96–97 “polite” English, 133 polygenesis, 220 prescriptivism, 14, 28, 54–55, 76, 116–117, 135, 155 prestige, linguistic, 18, 94–95, 122–124, 127, 280 “primitive” languages, 44–45, 73, 77, 80, 138–140, 147, 150–151, 168, 180, 185, 207, 212, 215, 218, 220, 247 pronunciation, 13, 18, 79, 84, 94, 102, 106, 109, 113–118, 121–122, 126–130, 134–135, 140–141, 144, 149, 153–154, 159, 166, 171, 176–177, 179, 239, 264, 266–268 public school, 65, 126–127, 132

306 

 Subject index

Queen’s English, the, 40–42, 60, 175 Quirk–Kachru debate, 98, 179 racism, 185, 189, 193–194, 239 Received Pronunciation (RP), 94, 98, 115, 126–127, 129–131, 268 Romance languages, 85, 132, 138, 200, 211, 244 Romantic, 54, 60, 70, 76, 138, 145, 159–163, 166, 191, 235 Sanskrit, 20, 52–53, 55, 132, 138, 164, 166, 190 Scottish English, 99, 181 second-language acquisition (SLA), 9, 153, 156–158, 279–280 Singaporean English, 28, 99–100, 280–281 social class, 25–26, 28–30, 46, 51, 92, 102, 106–107, 117, 119–122, 128, 131–135, 140, 144, 147–149, 168, 170, 206, 225, 237, 261, 266–267 sociolinguistics, 98, 106, 122, 146–147, 176–178, 180, 274 sound change, 159, 163, 165–166, 207 sound law, 68, 78, 165, 175, 275 speaker numbers, 17–19, 241, 251–254, 265 speech community, 1, 9–10, 13–14, 23, 57, 96, 104, 107, 109, 115, 117, 118, 120, 122. 123, 137, 141, 146, 154, 173, 181, 185, 187, 191, 210–211, 250–251, 254, 263, 274 spoken language, 55, 68, 78–79, 102–103, 113–182, 275 spelling reform, 176–179 standard ideology, 4, 30, 91, 100, 109–110, 143, 145–146, 150, 180, 185, 274 standard language, 17, 25, 89–151, 180, 273, 278

standardization, 5, 18, 99, 109–110, 120, 129, 136, 145, 180, 239, 274 Survey of English Usage, 93, 142 synonymy, 133, 174, 243–244, 261 telementational fallacy, 71, 88, 173–174 Teutonic, 42, 72, 74, 80, 86–87, 197–198, 203, 213, 215, 218, 221, 227–229, 240, 270 vernacular, 14, 31, 83, 97, 122, 138–139, 146–147, 162, 178, 185, 217, 247, 258, 263–264, 269, 280 Victorian, 3, 51–52, 60, 78, 80, 108, 141, 160–162, 166, 168, 170, 179, 223 vocabulary, 14, 31, 43–44, 64, 73, 75, 78–79, 84, 88, 106–107, 128, 133, 138–139, 148, 168, 172, 174–176, 192, 209, 211–212, 241–249, 261–263, 270, 274, 277 Volksgeist, 192, 201 Volksstimme, 160–163 vulgar language, 40, 75, 114, 119, 122, 125, 131, 133–134, 144, 147–150, 262, 267 Whig history, 214, 217, 234–235, 239 World Englishes, 1, 3–5, 9, 13–15, 17, 19, 20–25, 94–97, 99–101, 126, 174, 273, 276, 281 world language, 3, 14–15, 94, 179, 185, 201, 205, 208, 245, 260, 264–265, 271, 275 written language, 4, 14, 68, 78–80, 84, 88, 107–111, 113–114, 117, 120, 129, 131–134, 137–138, 142, 148, 153–164, 166, 170–176, 180, 261, 274–275, 279