The Languages of Nation: Attitudes and Norms

by Carol Percy (Editor), Mary Catherine Davidson (Editor)

Overview

This collection brings together research on linguistic prescriptivism and social identities, in specific contemporary and historical contexts of cross-cultural contact and awareness. Providing multilingual and multidisciplinary perspectives from language studies, lexicography, literature, and cultural studies, our contributors relate language norms to frameworks of identity beyond monolingual citizenship - nativeness, ethnicity, politics, religion, empire. Some chapters focus on traditional instruments of prescriptivism: language academies in Europe; government language planners in southeast Asia; dictionaries and grammars from Early Modern and imperial Britain, republican America, the postcolonial Caribbean, and modern Germany. Other chapters consider the roles of scholars in prescriptivism, as well as the more informal and populist mechanisms of enforcement expressed in newspapers. With a thematic introduction articulating links between its breadth of perspectives, this accessible book should engage everyone concerned with language norms.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781847697820
Publisher:	Multilingual Matters Ltd.
Publication date:	07/25/2012
Series:	Multilingual Matters , #148
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Carol Percy is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her work on eighteenth-century normative linguistics began with Captain Cook and his editors, and women grammarians. Recent articles provide literary and cultural contexts for popular grammars, and consider prescriptive attitudes in the popular press – book reviews and classified advertisements.

Mary Catherine Davidson is Associate Professor of English at Glendon College, York University, Canada. Her book Medievalism, Multilingualism, and Chaucer (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) examined multilingual identity in the writing of Gower, Langland, and Chaucer. Her current book project charts the changing status of American English in the representation and reception of dialects and second languages in Hollywood film in the 1940s and 50s.

Carol Percy is Professor of English at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her main research interests are Late Modern English, standardisation and prescriptivism, history of education, women’s studies, and children’s literature.

Read an Excerpt

The Languages of Nation

Attitudes and Norms

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By Carol Percy, Mary Catherine Davidson

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2012 Carol Percy, Mary Catherine Davidson and the authors of individual chapters
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84769-782-0

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Multidisciplinary and Multilingual Perspectives on 'Patriotic' Prescriptivism

Carol Percy and Mary Catherine Davidson

Research in the area of language prescriptivism is often discussed in a monolingual context and 'has generally focused on prescriptions aimed ... at native speakers' (McLelland, this volume). The Languages of Nation: Attitudes and Norms offers a rich overview of the breadth of approaches currently engaged by established scholars internationally for considering the mechanisms by which language norms more generally emerge, especially in contexts of contact and cross-cultural awareness. Our introduction summarizes the collection's key themes, documenting the historical and geographical persistence of prescriptivisms while revealing their contextual specificity. John Edwards' Foreword further surveys approaches to identity and language norms. By showing that the collective enforcement of norms was as much a key feature of language and belonging in the past as the national maintenance of 'correct' language usage remains today, he (like other authors in this collection) contests scholarly assumptions about nationalism as an exclusively modern phenomenon.

This collection, while contributing to debates over the origins of nationalism and the nature of group identity, introduces readers to approaches from a range of disciplines, periods and languages on the question of what constitute attitudes and norms in many frameworks of collective identity. International in scope and illustratively wide ranging in approach, contributions from scholars both specialist and interdisciplinary explore the roles of cross-cultural contacts in shaping language norms, offer comparisons in language planning across southeast Asian nations and early modern Wales, track popular attitudes toward contact languages in Africa and the Caribbean, and trace the ideological forces at work as much in present-day American bipartisan politics as in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. By drawing on an interdisciplinary range of contemporary anglophone scholarship, this collection aims to introduce its readers to the ways in which linguistic prescriptivism, broadly defined, has reflected multiple identities in a multilingual world. For instance, in 'Susu not Sousou: Nationalism, prescriptivism and etymology in a postcolonial Creole language orthography', lexicographer Lise Winer describes how conflicts among national, anticolonial and ethnic sentiments intensify the dilemmas of standardizing spelling in the Dictionary of the English/Creole of Trinidad & Tobago. The ethnolinguistic diversity of postcolonial nations points up the politics of codifying any standard.

Traditional prescriptivism has often centred on codifying texts to explore the means by which writers and readers select and enforce national language norms. This collection is indeed anchored within historical studies of standardization and codification, which such historians as Benedict Anderson have linked with the rise of print culture, nationalism and colonialism in early modern Europe. However, some of our contributors implicitly challenge scholarly notions of the enforcement of language norms through widespread literacy as a characteristic of nationhood. Surveying the 'Mutual preservation of standard language and national identity in early modern Wales', John D. Phillips reminds us that medieval manuscripts could also mediate written standards. His is one of several chapters in this collection demonstrating that religious affiliations complicate simple correspondences between language and nation. As shown by both Phillips and Marina Dossena, in her chapter on diasporic Scots, religious disputes played an important part in the dissemination or maintenance of specific varieties: for instance, the desire to disseminate Protestant doctrine led English politicians like Queen Elizabeth I's Secretary of State William Cecil implicitly to encourage the maintenance of Standard Welsh, and Scottish clerics like John Knox to use English norms for published writings. Reconceptualizing themes from her account of the early modern Grammar Wars, Linda C. Mitchell notes how northern European Protestantism was one criterion of Englishness for the Swiss codifier of English, Guy Miège. Connections between language(s) and identities are often complex.

In his Foreword defining this volume's key concepts of 'Language, prescriptivism, nationalism – and identity', psychologist John Edwards contextualizes the contributions of lexicographers and academicians. In thiscross-linguistic survey, Edwards demonstrates that English is distinctive in not having a state-sponsored language academy. A new piece of this old puzzle is presented by Ian Lancashire in his argument about 'William Cecil and the rectification of English'. Whereas the Italian Accademia della Crusca (founded in 1582–1583) published an Italian Vocabolario in 1612, Cecil – by passively accepting dedications in multilingual dictionaries – thereby let the market regulate the extent to which 'hard' Latinate words elaborated Early Modern English. The dedication to Cecil of multilingual dictionaries exposes the principally mythical status of the 'monolingual' nation.

Monolingual dictionaries create and perpetuate an image of language as uniting a nation and stably conveying its values across time and space, an attitude called 'pastoral' in Lionel Wee's chapter, and analyzed by him in contemporary Southeast Asia. Such myths are historicized in Martin Gill's analysis of linguistic authenticity, and illustrated for English by the patriotic receptions of both Samuel Johnson's dictionary (1755), and of what was originally called the New English Dictionary (1884–1928), set out in Mugglestone's introduction to 'Patriotism, empire and cultural prescriptivism: Images of anglicity in the OED'. In some respects, the spread of empire intensified connections between language and nation: Mugglestone's study of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary explores the ways in which an overt agenda of descriptive empiricism could be undermined by ideologically charged configurations of 'civilization' and 'savagery', as well as by particular images of 'anglicity' which served to influence the representation of global varieties – and colonial discourse – in significant ways.

Opposition to foreigners is one way of forging unity. Many of our contributors confirm the function of the French language in defining the social boundary of who was truly English. Samuel Johnson's gallophobia is reported by both Mugglestone and by Joan C. Beal in her account of 'Linguistic patriotism and Francophobia in 18th-century Britain'. This discourse of opposition was vehemently deployed within national boundaries: the francophobia Beal describes was often directed at francophilic Britons. The role of multilingualism in shaping national attitudes and norms is further underscored by recurrent policing of immigrants' English, here attested to in the present day by Gill and for the 17th and 18th centuries by Mitchell. Interpreting grammarians' high expectations of immigrants, Mitchell shows how language norms are often used to exclude or marginalize non-natives within national boundaries. In contrast, Nicola McLelland's study of grammars of German for learners in Britain reveals that variants stigmatized as errors or provincialisms in texts for native German speakers are more likely to be codified neutrally for speakers 'untroubled by historical loyalties to a nonstandard variety'. Finding a more relaxed and a more accurate treatment of variation in grammars for nonresident learners, McLelland confirms the conventional connections between national boundaries and standard languages.

Similarly prejudicial attitudes – in this case against 'provincial' varieties of English and their speakers – are sketched in Massimo Sturiale's reception history of some 18th-century 'Pronouncing dictionaries between patriotism and prescriptivism'. In the context of England's colonization of its Celtic neighbours, the coexistence of regional and standard norms invited contrast yet provoked conflicting attitudes. Non-native codifiers like the Irish Thomas Sheridan, discussed by both Mitchell and Sturiale, promoted standard English and its unifying function, and (as Mitchell argues of Miège) 'assume[d] a national identity in England' by codifying norms of English. Yet especially for nostalgic commentators, 'provincial' norms had a kind of purity. Dossena documents a typical late modern sentiment that Scots was closer to the 'Saxon original' than standard English, less corrupted by 'Norman invaders and tyrants'.

Many of our contributors show how both languages and codifying texts have crossed borders – from Europe to England, from Scotland to England and America, from Britain to India. Stable borders can change in nature, as former nations become colonies or provinces. And provincial norms can change in status beyond national boundaries, as Dossena and Sturiale confirm in their studies of Scots in America. Researching the reception in America of William Perry's pronouncing dictionaries, Sturiale explains how 'provincial' language could be interpreted as either corrupting or pure. Dossena shows how for nostalgic emigrants, the non-standard language of Scots poetry might index such qualities as purity or freedom. As a former national language, Scots in the 19th century had perhaps more perceived poetical potential than such 'barbarous' dialects as Devon or Yorkshire.

From Sturiale's account of the American reception of British codifying works, we see that in a postcolonial world the connections between language(s) and identity are particularly complex. In newly independent America, not everyone repudiated the idea of British linguistic standards. A London-based linguistic standard was upheld by the lexicographer Joseph Worcester, although his competitor Noah Webster's linguistic reforms and professedly democratic attitude to the Scottish codifier Perry influentially expressed the new nation's political self-definition in opposition to Britain. Standard English was no longer just a national language, and new Englishes indigenized in colonial contexts. Winer reminds us that, in the often multilingual contexts of former colonial countries, languages like Trinidad & Tobago English Creole can still gain status through 'alliance' with standard English or other languages as well as through 'distance' from English. These strategies are in particular tension when standardizing spelling.

These examples cumulatively show that 'foreign' norms can acquire identity functions beyond their original contexts. Codifying the English/Creole orthography of the former British colony Trinidad & Tobago, Winer observes that French spellings here convey both prestige and resistance to English. For descendants of slaves or indentured labourers in the postcolonial Caribbean, African languages or Hindi can positively index ethnic affiliations. Yet in postcolonial contexts, indigenized varieties of English can also acquire identity functions that are said to transcend ethnic differences. For the anglophone Cameroonians surveyed by Kouega, Pidgin English signals group solidarity and patriotism, transcending ethnic boundaries. In multiracial Singapore, as an unintended consequence of that nation's language policy, English is not only the intended 'inter-ethnic lingua franca and ... a language for engaging with the global economy', but seems to be serving identity and cultural functions. In his contrastive account of language policies in Singapore, Malaysia and South Korea, Lionel Wee has explored the consequences of 'the perceived importance [of English] as a language of modernization and economic success'. In South Korea, the connection of English with socio-economic mobility has led 'Koreans who are perceived to be too enthusiastic in their pursuit of English [to have] their "Korean-ness" questioned'.

When foreign norms index an individual's education and/or class, they can mark or even create group divisions. South Korea is, in Wee's words, 'a relatively monolingual society', but as a consequence of the international prestige of English 'there may well emerge a class divide amongst Koreans themselves: those who speak English well and those who don't or not at all'. In contemporary Cameroon, access to standard English marks similar internal boundaries, as Jean-Paul Kouega acknowledges in his account of 'English and Pidgin in Cameroon'. In 16th-century England, Ian Lancashire argues that the influx of Latinate loanwords created two Englishes, one similarly inaccessible to the un(der)educated. Eighteenth-century Britons' use of French (as described by Beal) or Scots' use of Standard English might have asserted a similar educated status, in addition to being a political act. Considering the stereotype of Scots as spoken by porters and ploughmen, Dossena indeed notes that the opposition between regionally marked and standard varieties of English has become increasingly associated with class.

Of course, since language use is an index of a person's social identity, even educated speakers may sometimes choose to use variants or varieties that convey a more covert prestige. As Dossena demonstrates, the Scottish poet Robert Burns chose to pose as an unlettered peasant, despite his 'thorough grounding in English'. Sometimes such a choice has pragmatically political motives. In his account of 'Popular prescriptivism in the politics of the United States', Don Chapman argues that the deployment of the 'uneducated style' by some Republican politicians is one cause of the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon of left-wing prescriptivism. Analyzing perceived connections between education and language, Chapman explains why some professedly liberal citizens claim that other individuals' use of language indexes their inability to govern a nation.

Different norms are often context dependent: surveying the attitudes of anglophone Cameroonians to Pidgin and Standard English and analyzing the results, Kouega argues that standard and vernacular norms coexist peaceably because their distribution is complementary. Yet conflicts between norms – written and oral, for instance – are attested throughout our collection. Considering popular proscriptions of American politicians' public language, Chapman observes that it is difficult to impose the rules for written usage on extempore speech. This tension is particularly tricky for authors of codifying texts. McLelland notes the difficulties for the authors of any language textbook attempting to codify variable speech for foreign learners. Winer demonstrates the difficulty of lemmatizing dictionary headwords from a primarily (though by no means exclusively) oral language with input from many cultures. In postcolonial contexts, more 'oral' norms of writing may signal symbolic distance from Standard English and thus from Britain. Winer describes how such publicly popular symbolic spellings do not accurately reflect the etymologies revealed by scholarly research.

Many of the chapters in our collection contrast the linguistic attitudes of professional academics and the public. Edwards charts the changing roles of scholars and exposes their assumptions in both forming and challenging language norms: for instance, while Mugglestone shows that even descriptive icons such as the Oxford English Dictionary can reveal the consequences of cultural prescriptivism (and naturalized ideologies) in a range of ways, it is clear that modern scholars are far more likely now to champion 'descriptive' norms of usage. Contextualizing conceptions of linguistic authenticity, Gill explains how linguists have shifted from privileging the standardized writing of native speakers to the natural and variable speech of learners. Yet prescriptive norms remain popular with the public: as both Gill and Chapman demonstrate, the internet is a very popular medium for their expression of prescriptive attitudes.

In his Foreword, Edwards makes the disconcerting observation that, while linguists distance themselves from prescriptivism, they often engage in language planning: both activities, he observes, involve managing language in an ideological framework. Our collection, by widening the topic of prescriptivism to include different disciplinary perspectives and language norms more generally, demonstrates the ongoing presence of norms in work and at work in disciplines in ways which their various fields typically do not or cannot question. Representing such disciplines as language studies, historical linguistics, psychology and literary studies, our contributors find norms across languages, periods and continents. However, more than illustrating a seemingly universal enforcement of norms, these papers, we also argue, constitute a significant scholarly contribution: by juxtaposing disciplinary perspectives, our collection's structure uniquely reveals historical, political, cultural and disciplinary contexts and mechanisms of prescriptivism.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Multidisciplinary and Multilingual Perspectives on National Language Norms - Carol Percy and Mary Catherine Davidson
2. Preface: Language, Prescriptivism, Nationalism and Identity - John Edwards
Section 1. Managing Language Policies
3. William Cecil and the Rectification of English - Ian Lancashire
4. Prescribing Pastoral and Pragmatic Orientations: Challenges for Language Policy - Lionel Wee
Section 2. Colonialism and Literary Canons
5. Mutual Preservation of Standard Language and National Identity in Early Modern Wales - John D. Phillips
6. “A Highly Poetical Language”? Scots, Burns, Patriotism and Evaluative Language in 19th Century Literary Reviews and Articles - Marina Dossena
Section 3. Transmarine and Transatlantic Allegiances
7. Language and National Identity in 17th and 18th century England - Linda C. Mitchell
8. “À la mode de Paris”: Linguistic Patriotism and Francophobia in 18th century Britain - Joan C. Beal
9. Pronouncing Dictionaries between Patriotism and Prescriptivism: Perspectives on Provincialism in Webster’s America - Massimo Sturiale
Section 4. Re-defining Boundaries: Ideology and Language Norms
10. Patriotism, Empire, and Cultural Prescriptivism: Images of Anglicity in the OED - Lynda Mugglestone
11. You Say Nucular, I Say Yourstupid: Popular Prescriptivism in the Politics of the United States - Don Chapman
Section 5. Identifying Norms and Attitudes in Postcolonial Contexts
12. English and Pidgin in Cameroon: Peaceful or Conflicting Co-existence? - Jean-Paul Kouega
13. “Susu” not “Sousou”: Nationalism, Prescriptivism, and Etymology in a Post-colonial Creole Language Orthography - Lise Winer
Section 6. Prescribing Norms beyond Borders: Foreign Language Teaching
14. Rules for the Neighbours: Prescriptions of the German Language for British Learners - Nicola McLelland
15. Nativeness, Authority, Authenticity: The Construction of Belonging and Exclusion in Debates about English Language Proficiency and Immigration in Britain - Martin Gill

Editorial Reviews

A fascinating and significant collection of essays which offers both historical range and geographic scope. Taken as a whole this is a text which provides the latest thinking in relation to the most important questions related to language and the creation of nationhood. Students and researchers of all levels will find much to discuss and reflect upon in this invaluable collection.

Tony Crowley

This volume is a timely and fitting contribution to the issue of norms, prescriptivism and language attitudes and the role of language in the formation of nations. It is broad in range, covering all facets of the overall topic. In its organisation it is well structured and is well presented by its editors.

Raymond Hickey