The Language Wars: A History of Proper English

by Henry Hitchings

Change happens. All living human languages alter: meanings shift, and so do pronunciations and grammatical structures. We may feel that the language we use is stable, but this is an illusion. For all that it may unnerve us, there is nothing weird or wrong about change; it would be much weirder if change did not happen. Language is form, not substance; not communication, but a system of communication

At the same time it reveals our aversion to disorder. We fear not being able to make ourselves understood, and fear also that the essentials of our world-view are not shared by others. When we practise what the linguist Deborah Cameron has designated ‘verbal hygiene’, we expose our anxieties about otherness and difference.9 It can seem as though we positively want to feel that our language is coming unstuck. Even if other aspects of our existence appear beyond our control, language feels as if it can be rescued from the chaos of modernity. If we can arrest language change, the thinking goes, we can hold off other kinds of change.

In 1657 Cave Beck set out a system in which all words were replaced by minutely organized combinations of letters and numerals – a fly was r1941, a firefly r1944, a butterfly r1945, and the verb ‘to fly’ was 1940.

In fact, it was probably not Shaw who first came up with the example of ghoti, and in any case there are reasons why the suggestion is flawed – the i sound in women is unique, and gh is only pronounced f when it appears at the end of a morpheme, while for ti to be pronounced sh it needs to be followed by a vowel.

We need make no doubt but that the best forms of speech will, in time, establish themselves by their own superior excellence: and, in all controversies, it is better to wait the decisions of Time, which are slow and sure,

An attractive story, popularized by the historian Shelby Foote, is that before the Civil War one said, ‘The United States are flourishing’, whereas after it this changed to ‘The United States is flourishing’. The reality is a little less neat. Only in 1902 did the House of Representatives’ commission looking into legal revisions assert that in all official documentation the United States should be treated as singular. But the story nicely presents the role of language in reintegration. Grammar, as well as vocabulary, can mark changes in ideology.

Today we would be startled to be told that it is ‘harsh’ to use the relative pronoun who when speaking of a child – as in ‘A child who likes swimming’ – for the reason that ‘We hardly consider children as persons, because that term gives us the idea of reason and reflection’.14

French is an interesting case in point, for until the nineteenth century people from one part of France typically had difficulty understanding those from another.

Other languages thrived: Lyon was ‘a hive of micro-dialects’.

But our ideas of languages as formally constituted entities are not very old, and it is nationalism that has created these ideas.

Flemish

In World War II, American soldiers used the word lollapalooza as a means of catching out Japanese spies who were posing as Filipinos or indeed as Americans. Its l sounds were difficult even for Japanese who were confident in English.

We can use words to force unpleasant thoughts on other people. It is with good reason that in the metaphysics of many religions the holiest of believers retreat into speechless solitude and the soul ultimately ascends from the material world into silence.

those who knew grammar and those who did not was a mainstay of the class system: the poor were taught no grammar and as a result were condemned to lives of unlettered servility. He wrote A Grammar of the English Language in the hope of enabling the working classes to protect themselves from abuse.

years before it became a term of contempt. C. S. Lewis neatly summed up this phenomenon as ‘the moralization of status words’. It began long before the age of Dickens and Disraeli, but the emotive use of status words was exaggerated as an increasingly urban population advertised its distance from rustic living and its less affluent forebears.

‘Do you notice my language? I inherit correct English from my mother – a cultivated person, who married beneath her. My maternal grandfather was a gentleman.’ And in the more celebrated The Woman in White (1859–60) there is Pesca, an Italian professor who ‘prided himself on being a perfect Englishman in his language, as well as in his dress, manners, and amusements’.

‘The speaker and writer who is always spick and span in his verbal dress … may perhaps be an “educated” man; but his education is, in all probability, a very superficial one, for he is not sufficiently educated to be on easy terms with his education.’23

Purists exult in their resistance to change not because they have a rigorous understanding of the relationship between language and time, but because they are heavily invested in the status quo – or, more often, in a fantasy of the status quo. References to the ‘mother tongue’ are telling: for language as for women, purity has traditionally been represented as the ideal.

ampersand (&)

In the public sphere, dialects are routinely demonized. It is common to treat ‘dialect’ as though it is somehow opposed to ‘language’ – as an enemy of language rather than as a part of it. The negative connotations of the word are bound up with false notions: that dialect, like hell, ‘is other people’; that dialects are the result of people’s failed attempts to govern their language properly; that they are deviant forms of correct speech and writing, rather than having their own distinct patterns and features; and that they are only used by the socially disadvantaged. This is not something uniquely English.

William Labov, who founded the discipline of sociolinguistics, published in 1963 a study of the different styles of speech he had heard in Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the Massachusetts coast.

the native form used by an elite comprising perhaps a tenth of the population, is itself a (social) dialect. Its ‘standard’ nature is hard to define and is not regulated by an official body. In reality, a language is a parcel of dialects. When I talk about the ‘regional’, it is with a heavy awareness that this is a fiction. All usage is regional; it is just that some regions are less readily identified, and others are more assertively stigmatized.

Do you lay the table or set the table, speak of someone being cross-eyed or boss-eyed, refer to an armpit or an armhole, curse or cuss, pronounce Tuesday as if there were a j in it or not? Very likely, you know which you do but have not examined how this relates to where you were brought up or where you now live.

There is a story (apocryphal?) about a Yorkshireman who, drawing up at a level crossing in his car, saw the sign ‘Wait while the red light flashes’ and, when the light flashed, crossed and was crushed by an oncoming train. In Yorkshire while can mean ‘until’.4

Frimpo illustrates the principle that isolated societies have languages fraught with archaism and oddity, whereas those societies that can be described as developed or sophisticated have languages that are comparatively simple in their mechanics.

is certainly the case that literacy is exploited by those who possess it. This may seem obvious, but it explains why the gap between written and spoken usage has been insisted on so earnestly: a punctilious, formal, systematic written language supports the mechanisms of officialdom and allows the educated to further their particular interests.

One problem, he felt sure, was the poor quality of teacher training: ‘Too often our elementary teachers at any rate, instead of being missionaries of linguistic purity, are centres of diffusion for blurred and vicious perversions of our speech.’

Dutch fuck is the act of lighting one cigarette from another.