Edited by
Lynda Mugglestone
Lynda Mugglestone
How can there be a true History, when we see no Man living is able to write truly the History of the last Week?
T. Shadwell, The Squire of Alsatia (1688)
SIR William Belford’s words, spoken in Act II of Thomas Shadwell’s late seventeenth-century play, The Squire of Alsatia, articulate the problems of history with conspicuous ease. As Belford comments to his brother, no history can be complete. Instead, all historical description is based on acts of interpretation, leading to accounts which may, or may not, conXict with those oVered by other tellers and other tales. In this sense, gaps and absences necessarily beset the historian; not all can be known, and a change of perspective inevitably brings new, and diVerent, considerations to the fore. A single true—and all-encompassing—history is an illusion.
These problems are equally pertinent for historians of language for whom the subject is the many-voiced past. Gaps and absences here may be particularly tantalizing; for the remote past of language—the pre-history of English (discussed in the opening chapter of this volume)—not a single record remains and history must be reconstructed, deduced from the patterns of languages which share the same ancestry. Even later, the historical record may be fragmentary;
if the primary form of language is speech, only with the advent of sound recording (and the invention of the phonograph in 1877) do we begin to have a record of the actual voices of the past—and even this evidence is necessarily partial and selective. The majority of speakers through the history of English have left not a single trace to document the words they spoke, or the conversations in which they participated. Even for those who had access to the written word, not all has been preserved (and only in the more recent historical past has access to the written word been extended to all, irrespective of class and gender). The passage of historical time has enacted its own selectivities, to which historians have often added others. In many histories of the language, regional voices rarely feature once a standard variety begins to emerge in the Wfteenth century. Likewise, the history of the language is often mapped through a progression of canonical landmarks—Chaucer, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson—that marginalize the range of other voices which co-existed (and which, in a variety of ways, might themselves be seen as more rather than less representative of what ‘ordinary’ English speakers were doing at a given point in time).
For these and other reasons, the emphasis throughout the following volume is placed on the construction of ‘a history’ rather than ‘the history’, recognizing that many other pathways could be navigated through the past—and present—ofthe English language. The wider emphasis throughout is, however, placed on the twin images of pluralism and diversity, and on the complex patterns of usage which have served to make up English. While the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Johnson does therefore appear (if perhaps more brieXy than in other histories of English), then so too does the language of footmen, mining butties, and missionaries, of telegrams and emails, of trade, exploration, and colonization. The language of thieves and the underworld appears in Chapter 8 on Renaissance English; that of, say, eighteenth-century Jamaican English in Chapter 12. The English of ordinary letters, of diaries, and of private testimony—as in Chapters 7, 9, and 10—frequently takes its place in the attempt to engage with what it was like to use English, in a variety of circumstances, in previous centuries. Examples of usage from Scotland, Norfolk, or from Dorset, Spain, Singapore, and America (amongst others) emphasize the diversity of the speakers who make up ‘the English language’.
Rather than a seamless synecdoche of the history of English with the history of the standard variety, the image of the past that is explored over the course of this volume is therefore one characterized by its heterogeneity, and by the ebb and Xow of a language (and language-varieties) continually on the move. As David Crystal has recently pointed out, ‘For every one person who speaks Standard English, there must be a hundred who do not, and another hundred who speak other varieties as well as the standard. Where is their >>>>
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