CHAPTER 2.

MODERN ENGLISH
1. Prereading task.
When did the early modern English period begin?
When did the late modern English period begin?
What does prescriptive grammar mean compared to traditional grammar?
Have you ever heard of a dictionary war?
What famous English and American writers and poets of the 18th and 19th
centuries can you name?
What is the English language?
The English language is an Indo-European language in the West Germanic language
group. Modern English is widely considered to be the lingua franca of the world and is the
standard language in a wide variety of fields, including computer coding, international
business, and higher education.

How many people speak English?

As of 2020 there are 1.27 billion English speakers around the world. This makes it the most
spoken language, ahead of Mandarin Chinese (1.12 billion speakers) and Hindi (637
million speakers). More than 50 countries officially list English as an official language.

Where did English come from?

Having emerged from the dialects and vocabulary of Germanic peoples—Angles, Saxons,
and Jutes—who settled in Britain in the 5th century CE, English today is a constantly
changing language that has been influenced by a plethora of different cultures and
languages, such as Latin, French, Dutch, and Afrikaans. 

Is English the official language of the United States of America?

English is not the official language of the United States of America. The country does not
have an official language on the federal level. Many states, however, have passed legislation
that designates English as their official language.

1. From the History of English

1.1. Early Modern English Period
 There is no doubt that an Early Modern English period needs to be recognized
in the history of English. The jump from Middle English to Modern English would be
too great without it. Between the time of Chaucer and the time of Johnson, roughly
1400 to 1800, the language continues to change in quite noticeable ways, and there
are many points of difference with modern usage. By the end of the 18th century,
however, very few linguistic differences remain. Reading a Jane Austen novel does
not require the same kind of effort or editorial elaboration as is needed to understand
Shakespeare.
There is no consensus about when the Early Modern English period begins.
Some opt for an early date, 1400–50, just after Chaucer and the beginning of the
pronunciation shift which identifies a major intelligibility barrier between Middle and
Modern English. Some opt for a late date, around 1500, after the effects of the
printing revolution had become well established. But it is the advent of printing itself
which many consider to be the key factor, and this section accordingly begins in
1476, when William Caxton set up his press in Westminster.
The new invention gave an unprecedented impetus to the formation of a
standard language and the study of its properties. Apart from its role in fostering
norms of spelling and punctuation, the availability of printing provided more
opportunities for people to write, and gave their works much wider circulation. As a
result, more texts of the period have survived. Within the following 150 years, it is
estimated that nearly 20,000 books appeared. The story of English thus becomes
more definite in the 16th century, with more evidence available about the way the
language was developing, both in the texts themselves, and in a growing number of
observations dealing with such areas as grammar, vocabulary, writing system, and
style. In that century, scholars seriously got down to talking about their language

1.2. Late Modern English Period

By the beginning of the 19th century the spelling, punctuation, and grammar
became very close to what they are today. If we take a novel of Jane Austen (1775–
1817), a famous English writer, for example, we can read for pages before a point of
linguistic difference might make us pause. We would find the vocabulary somewhat
unfamiliar in places, the idiom occasionally unusual or old-fashioned, the style
elegant or quaint, and we might feel that the language was in some indefinable way
characteristic of a previous age; but we do not need to consult a special edition or
historical dictionary at every turn in order to understand the text.

Jane Austen (1775–1817)

And an uninformed modern intuition would achieve only a superficial reading
of the literary texts of the period. In reading a novel of the 2000s, we can make an
immediate linguistic response to the social and stylistic nuances introduced into the
text, because we are part of its age: we recognize the differences between formality
and informality, or educated and uneducated; and we can sense when someone is
being jocular, ironic, risqué, archaic, or insincere. We can easily miss such nuances in
the writing of the early 19th century, especially in those works which take the
manners of contemporary society as their subject. This world is linguistically more
removed from us than at first it may appear.1
Jane Austen would have arrived at school at a time when Lowth’s Grammar
was well established, and a second generation of ‘young ladies’ was having its tenets
instilled into them. That she was much concerned about correctness in grammar is
suggested by the way she often changed her own grammatical usage in later editions
of her novels. That she was also aware of the social role of grammar is evident from
many pieces of her dialogue, where nonstandard usage is seen as a mark of vulgarity,
and good grammar as a sign of good breeding. There are some examples from her
novels:
(1) I am so glad we are got acquainted. So, you are come at last!
(2) What say you to the day? she doubted not…
 (3) It is a nothing of a part… to be taken into the account…
(4) Will not it be a good plan? It would quite shock you …would not it?
(5) he told me in our journey… She was small of her age.

Rules To Be Observed. In 1774, the year before Jane Austen was born, John
Walker published his idea for a Pronouncing Dictionary of English, with the aim of
doing for pronunciation what Samuel Johnson had done for vocabulary and Robert
Lowth for grammar. The book (which appeared in 1791) is a valuable information
source about contemporary sound change, attitudes to pronunciation, and differences
in usage between then and now. It also looks at major regional accents, and provides
‘rules to be observed by the natives of Scotland, Ireland, and London, for avoiding
their respective peculiarities’.

John Walker Robert Lowth Samuel Johnson

(1774-1859) (1710–1787) (1709-1784)
The s in the prefix dis ‘ought always to be pronounced as z, when it is not
under the accent…’, as in dismay and dismiss.
When the letters au ‘are followed by n and another consonant, they change to
the second sound of a, heard in far’, as in haunt and laundry.
‘The aspirate h is often sunk, particularly in the capital, where we do not find
the least distinction of sound between while and wile…’.

2. The Rise of Prescriptive Grammar

The second half of the 18th century differs fundamentally from our own age in
its attitudes towards English. The middle of the century had seen the culmination of
the first major effort to impose order on the language, in the form of Johnson’s
Dictionary. With spelling and lexicon now being handled in an increasingly
systematic way, attention turned to grammar, and the first attempts to define this field
in its own right began to appear.
Treatises on aspects of grammar are known from the 16th century. The
dramatist Ben Jonson wrote An English Grammar … for the Benefit of all Strangers,
out of his Observation of the English Language now Spoken, and in Use, published
posthumously in 1640. John Wallis’s Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae (Grammar of
the English Language, 1653) was written ‘because there is clearly a great demand
for it from foreigners, who want to be able to understand the various important
works which are written in our tongue’ (which is why he, as others of his time, wrote
in Latin). And Johnson, largely following Wallis, added a grammatical sketch at the
front of his dictionary.
Over 200 works on grammar and rhetoric appeared between 1750 and 1800.
The most influential was undoubtedly Bishop Robert Lowth’s Short Introduction to
English Grammar (1762) – the inspiration for an even more widely used book,
Lindley Murray’s English Grammar (1794). Both grammars went through many
editions in the years following their publication, and had enormous influence on
school practices, especially in the USA. This is evident even in the comments of
those who disapproved of them. Thomas de Quincey, writing in Blackwood’s
Magazine in April 1839, condemns a number of ‘inferior attempts to illustrate the
language’, and ends his list with Murray’s: This book, full of atrocious blunders …
reigns despotically through the young ladies’ schools, from the Orkneys to the
Cornish Scillys.
It would have taken only a generation for any intellectual despotism to become
firmly entrenched – and it is thus not surprising to see dogmatic attitudes towards
grammar routinely appearing in early 19th-century magazines, newspapers, letters,
and novels, as well as attracting the attention of satirists and cartoonists, such as those
found in the weekly issues of Punch magazine.

3. Traditional Grammar
 The books by R.Lowth and L.Murray, and those which they influenced,
contain the origins of most of the grammatical controversies which continue to attract
attention today. This is the period which gave rise to the concept of ‘traditional
grammar’, and in which the rules of ‘correct’ grammatical usage were first drawn up.
It was a time when the subject was debated at length, with philosophical, logical,
aesthetic, historical, and occasionally linguistic reasons proposed for adopting one
position rather than another. Most fiercely argued was the question of whether
grammars and dictionaries should reflect usage, describing and analysing current
practice, or should evaluate usage, by prescribing certain forms as correct and
proscribing others as incorrect.

Lindley Murray (1745–1826) Joseph Priestley (1733 –1804)

York. In 1784 he retired to England, because
of ill health, and lived near York. Apart from
his Grammar, he wrote other books on
English, as well as religious works.
Joseph Priestley was an English
chemist, natural philosopher, separatist
theologian, grammarian, multi-subject
Lindley Murray was born in Swatara educator, and liberal political theorist who
Creek, Pennsylvania. He trained as a lawyer, published over 150 works.
and had a highly successful practice in New

During the last decades of the 18th century, the latter position was the
influential one. But at all times these rules were as forcefully attacked as they were
authoritatively formulated. Thus, we find Bishop Lowth saying in 1762:
 The principal design of a Grammar of any Language is to teach us to express
ourselves with propriety in that Language; and to enable us to judge of every phrase
and form of construction, whether it be right or not.
And we have the scientist Joseph Priestley saying in The Rudiments of English
Grammar (1761):
Our grammarians appear to me to have acted precipitately … It must be
allowed, that the custom of speaking is the original and only just standard of any
language.
This was the chief controversy in the 1760s, and it remains with us today.
Corruption Everywhere. Lowth’s ‘short introduction’ contained fewer than
200 pages, but in it there are hundreds of examples of what he felt to be corrupt
grammar. It is important to note that these examples are not taken from the speech or
writing of the uneducated, or even of the reasonably well-educated, but from ‘the
politest part of the nation, and … our most approved authors’. Lowth is talking about
Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Swift, all of whom in his opinion ‘offend’.
His procedure has been imitated for over 200 years: ‘to lay down rules, and to
illustrate them by examples’. These examples, moreover, are of two kinds, so that
‘beside shewing what is right, the matter may be further explained by pointing out
what is wrong’.
In illustrating Lowth, we simultaneously illustrate Murray, who copies
extensively from him. An example is the condemnation of the double negative
construction, where Murray uses exactly the same words as Lowth: Two negatives in
English destroy one another, or are equivalent to an affirmative.

4. New Nation, New Themes

The linguistic issues and developments which had preoccupied British scholars
in the first half of the 18th century were to hold the attention of American scholars in
the second. A gap of 33 years separates the grammars of Lowth and Murray, and a
similar period separates Johnson’s Dictionary from Noah Webster’s Dissertations on
the English Language (1789). In this work, Webster proposed the institution of an
‘American standard’.
It was partly a matter of honour ‘as an independent nation … to have a system
of our own, in language as well as government’; it was partly a matter of common
sense, because in England ‘the taste of her writers is already corrupted, and her
language on the decline’; and it was partly a matter of practicality, England being at
‘too great a distance to be our model’. This national or ‘federal’ language was
inevitable, because the exploration of the new continent would bring many new
words into the language, which Britain would not share; but it also needed fostering.
Spelling reform, he concluded, would be a major step in that direction: ‘a difference
between the English orthography and the American … is an object of vast political
consequence’.
Although Webster went through a period in which he advocated radical reform,
the position he finally adopted was a fairly moderate one. In the Preface to his first
lexicographical venture, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806),
he writes:
No great change should be made at once, nor should any change be made
which violates established principles, creates great inconvenience, or obliterates the
radicals of the language. But gradual changes to accommodate the written to the
spoken language, when they occasion none of those evils, and especially when they
purify words from corruptions, improve the regular analogies of a language and
illustrate etymology, are not only proper, but indispensable.
This dictionary was no small achievement: it contained c. 28,000 words, as
well as encyclopedic information (such as population figures). However, it received a
mixed reception: despite its inclusion of new American vocabulary, many were
offended by the way Webster attacked Johnson’s Dictionary (he objected in
particular to its difficult words, its vulgarisms, and its excessive use of quotations)
and by his evident ambition to surpass Johnson’s achievement. His recommended
spellings were also treated with suspicion, as were some of his pronunciations. Critics
pointed to inconsistencies in the way he tried to justify his proposals. If the u in
labour is to be omitted because it is not used in laborious, why not omit the u of
curious because it is not used in curiosity? And why not keep -re, given the links
between centre and central, theatre and theatrical, and many others?

5. Webster’s Dictionary
In 1828 appeared An American Dictionary of the English Language, in two
volumes, containing some 70,000 words. The work greatly improved the coverage of
scientific and technical terms, as well as terms to do with American culture and
institutions (such as congress and plantation), and added a great deal of encyclopedic
information. A new feature was the introduction of Webster’s own etymologies –
though the speculative nature of many of these was an early source of unwelcome
criticism. The spellings were somewhat more conservative than those used in the
1806 book. Its pronunciations were generally provincial in character – those of
Webster’s own New England. The label ‘American’ in the title is more a reflection of
the works of American authors referred to than of its uniquely American lexicon.
Indeed, at one point Webster observed (though not with any great accuracy) that
‘there were not fifty words in all which were used in America and not in England’.
On the other hand, nearly half of the words he did include are not to be found in
Johnson’s Dictionary, which added considerable force to his claim that he was giving
lexicography a fresh direction.
Despite its weaknesses and its critics, the American Dictionary made Webster a
household name in the USA. It was fiercely attacked in Britain for its Americanism,
especially in matters of spelling and usage; but the work was crucial in giving to US
English an identity and status comparable to that given to the British English lexicon
by Dr Johnson. Indeed, it is difficult to appreciate today the impact which
‘Webster’s’ made at the time, and just how authoritative the book was perceived to
be.

6. Joseph E. Worcester & Dictionary War

Joseph Emerson Worcester (August 24, 1784 – October 27, 1865) was an
American lexicographer who was the chief competitor to Noah Webster of Webster's
Dictionary in the mid-nineteenth-century. Their rivalry became known as the
"dictionary wars". Worcester's dictionaries focused on traditional pronunciation and
spelling, unlike Noah Webster's attempts to Americanize words. Worcester was
respected by American writers and his dictionary maintained a strong hold on the
American marketplace until a later, posthumous version of Webster's book appeared
in 1864. After Worcester's death in 1865, their war ended.
 Joseph Emerson Worcester (1784–1865)
Joseph Emerson Worcester, American lexicographer whose dictionaries rivaled those
of Noah Webster in popularity and critical esteem from about 1830 to 1865. His introduction of
synonyms to definitions, as well as other innovations, was assimilated by later lexicographers.
Webster’s American Dictionary was not a commercial success. Webster
actually had to borrow money to help pay the printer’s bill. A single-volume abridged
version was therefore proposed, and Joseph Worcester widely known as a textbook
writer, was employed to edit it. The new edition appeared in 1829.
A year later, Worcester published a dictionary of his own, A Comprehensive
Pronouncing and Explanatory Dictionary of the English Language – a work
which was more conservative in spelling than Webster’s, contained no etymologies,
and presented a more cultivated level of pronunciation. Although Worcester had
planned his dictionary before working for Webster, its appearance brought criticisms
of plagiarism, and antagonism grew after the publication of a larger edition in 1846
under the title of A Universal and Critical Dictionary of the English Language,
whose English edition had on its title-page ‘Compiled from the Materials of Noah
Webster, LL.D., by Joseph E. Worcester’. As a new edition of Webster’s
Dictionary had appeared in 1841, this fuelled the opposition between the two
lexicographers and their supporters. It was not just a marketing battle between rival
publishers; different lexicographical principles were at stake. Webster’s unequivocal
Americanism was in marked contrast with Worcester’s lexical conservatism, with his
choice of a more refined pronunciation, and with his preference for established
(British) usage in spellings. The war of the dictionaries lasted until the 1860s, long
after Webster’s death (1843), and is now remembered more for the antagonistic
pamphleteering and general unpleasantness of its rival marketing campaigns than for
its contribution to lexicographical thought. The last engagement of the war took place
when Worcester’s major work, A Dictionary of the English Language (1860)
appeared, with 104,000 entries, many illustrative quotations, synonym essays, and
traditional spellings. The work was very well received, but it was overtaken by the
1864 edition of Webster, which introduced some of Worcester’s innovatory features,
and contained a total revision of the etymologies by a German scholar, C. A. F. Mahn
(1802–1887). This revision, now called A Dictionary of the English Language (and
known in lexicography as the Webster-Mahn), won the day. The US Government
Printing Office adopted it the same year, and Webster’s spellings were used in its first
Style Manual of 1887. The dictionary war was over.

7. American Identities
Around the turn of the 19th century in America there was fierce intellectual
debate about the direction the new country. Of particular concern was the slow
emergence of American literature compared with what was seen to be happening in
Europe (the age of Scott, and Goethe). Despite the well-established genres of
sermons, journals, letters, histories, practical manuals, descriptions of America, and
political pamphlets, from a literary point of view the post-revolutionary period was
singularly ‘barren’. Britain’s population of 18 million was producing up to a thousand
new books a year, whereas America’s six million could manage only 20.
And in 1823 there was continuing intellectual dependence of America on
Britain, the way American presses were printing a flood of editions of British books
and magazines. The lack of works by recognized literary figures is one reason for the
limited lexical growth suggested by Webster and others. Thousands of new words
were being coined all over America, of course, but they were not reaching a wide
public through large book sales, and domestic sources of usage did not appeal to
those lexicographers who wished to emulate Johnson by using prestigious literary
quotations.
By the middle of the century Walt Whitman calls for a literature free from
European influence, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the best-
selling novel of the 19th century. And in this later work would appear the results of
the vast tide of lexical innovation which was already, in those early decades,
transforming the linguistic identity of the new nation.
America Talking. The new American vocabulary of the 19th century came
from a mixture of sources. Spanish and Native American words were especially
influential, but also many older English words came to be used with new senses or in
new phrases. The opening up of the West was one major factor in lexical expansion;
the arrival of waves of immigrants, towards the end of the century, was another.
bronco (1850), cattle town (1881), chaps (1870), corral (1829), cowpoke (1880),
dogie (1888), dude (1883), lariat (1831), lasso (1819), maverick (1867), ranch (1808),
range (1835), roundup (1876), rustler (1882), six shooter (1844), stampede (1843),
tenderfoot (1849), trail boss (1890).

8. Breaking the Rules

By the 1860s, the American spelling system had become so established
that writers dared to play about with it. Artemus Ward and Josh Billings were
leading proponents of a comic-spelling genre which was extremely popular in
the later decades of the century. Its homespun wit and down-to-earth
sentiments were expressed in a style which seemed to reflect the sounds and
rhythms of local speech. Both writers used an intuitive semiphonetic system.
Neither of them bothered much about consistency (e.g. to is spelled tew, tu, or
2; fun appears as both fun and phun), but the simple combination of informal
nonstandard forms with a subject-matter normally associated with formal
Standard English was evidently enough to guarantee success.
It is perhaps not surprising that people who had only recently come to
recognize their own literary standards should begin to laugh at those who had
not. But these writers should not be seen in isolation. They were capitalizing
on an important genre of dialect writing which had emerged in American
literature during the 1840s, seen at its most successful in Uncle Tom’s Cabin
(1851–2), and on a trend in comic writing where southern speakers, especially
 blacks, were portrayed as uneducated or as figures of fun. Dialect vocabulary
and grammar (hain’t, saw for seen, etc.) were used as well as mis-spelling,
though it was the spelling which created the impact.

Josh Billings (1818–1885) Artemus Ward (1834–1867)

Josh Billings was the pen name
of 19th-century American humorist Charles Farrar Browne was an
Henry Wheeler Shaw. He was a American humor writer, better known under
famous humor writer and lecturer in his nom de plume, Artemus Ward, which as a
the United States during the latter half character, an illiterate rube with "Yankee
of the 19th century. He is often common sense", Browne also played in public
compared to Mark Twain. performances. He is considered to be
America's first stand-up comedian. His birth
name was Brown but he added the "e" after he
became famous.

(Crystal 2019, p.88)

(Crystal 2019, p.89)

 Appealing to a national audience, these authors forsook the sectional
characterizations of earlier humorists and assumed the roles of less individualized
literary comedians. The nature of the humour thus shifted from character portrayal to
verbal devices such as poor grammar, bad spelling, and slang, incongruously
combined with Latinate words and learned allusions. Most that they wrote wore
badly, but thousands of Americans in their time and some in later times found these
authors vastly amusing.
The American comic writers were writing for an audience who by the 1860s
were well used to seeing a written representation of nonstandard speech. In particular,
most of those who laughed at Billings or Ward would have read Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, published in 1851–52. The linguistic conventions used
by Stowe in many ways presage the essays of Billings and Ward, and these in turn
anticipate the style of dialect writing which reached its peak in the novels of Mark
Twain. His use of orthography is sophisticated, consistently distinguishing several
speech varieties. Nonetheless, throughout all these literary representations there is an
inevitable shaping, selectivity, and simplification, resulting in a stereotype which, for
many, has replaced reality.

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) Mark Twain (1835–1910)

Harriet Elisabeth Beecher Stowe was
an American author and abolitionist. She
came from the Beecher family, a religious Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known
family, and became best known for her novel by his pen name Mark Twain, was an
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), which depicts the American writer, humorist, entrepreneur,
harsh conditions experienced by enslaved publisher, and lecturer. He was lauded as the
African Americans.  "greatest humorist the United States has
produced", and William Faulkner called him
"the father of American literature". His novels Huckleberry Finn (1884), the latter of which
include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer has often been called the "Great American
(1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Novel".
These Twain’s books are the best works, which re-created the life of
the Mississippi valley in the past, were closest to the work of older humorists and
local colourists. Despite his flaws, he was one of America’s greatest writers. He was
a very funny man. He had more skill than his teachers in selecting evocative details,
and he had a genius for characterization.

9. Variety Awareness
One of the most interesting features of the 19th century is the way
consciousness was raised about the nature and use of language. The compilation of
dictionaries, grammars, spelling books, and pronunciation manuals in the second half
of the 18th century had focused attention on standard forms in an unprecedented
manner. With widespread standardization came an increased sensitivity on the part of
‘ordinary’ users of the language to the range of varieties which existed, and to the
social nuances attached to different usages. There was also an increased readiness on
the part of authors to experiment with the language, and in particular to find new
techniques of expression for the range of diverse ‘voices’ which the emerging genre
of the novel permitted. As Charles Dickens put it, in an essay on ‘Saxon English’ in
Household Words (1858): ‘if a man wishes to write for all, he must know how to use
the speech of all’.
Also important were the discoveries at the end of the 18th century about the
historical relationship between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, which ushered in the age
of comparative philology. This subject brought fresh perspectives to the study of
language, especially in relation to questions of etymology and the role of classical
models. It stimulated arguments about the nature of language change, correctness in
usage, and methods of teaching. Innumerable societies and journals were founded to
study such subjects as local dialects, the history of language, vocabulary reform,
spelling reform, and shorthand, or to debate the future of English. The Romantic
movement in particular promoted a special interest in the way ordinary people spoke,
and there was a growing sense of the distance between linguistic scholarship and
language reality.
The poet of American Renaissance Walt Whitman, in an essay on American
slang for The North American Review (1885), summed it up like this:
Language, be it remembered, is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary-
makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long
generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground. Its final decisions are
made by the masses, people nearest the concrete, having most to do with actual land and sea. It
impermeates all, the past as well as the present, and is the grandest triumph of the human intellect.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

Walt Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of
the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works.
Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free
verse.[1] His work was controversial in its time, particularly his 1855 poetry collection Leaves of
Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sensuality.
This autobiography in verse was intended to show the ideas, beliefs, emotions,
and experiences of the common man in a great period of American individualism.
Whitman had a hard time winning a following because he was frank and
unconventional in his Transcendental thinking, because he used free verse rather than
rhymed or regularly metred verse, and because his poems were not conventionally
organized. Nevertheless, he steadily gained the approval of critics and in time came
to be recognized as one of the great poets of America.

10. The Language of Science

English scientific and technical vocabulary had been growing steadily since the
Renaissance, but the 19th century saw an unprecedented growth in this domain, while
the lexicon incorporated the consequences of the Industrial Revolution and the
accompanying period of scientific exploration. Significant discoveries and theories,
such as Faraday’s on electricity, or Darwin’s on evolution, achieved widespread
publicity, and introduced new nomenclatures and styles of expression to an ever-
curious public. By the end of the century, there was a recognizable variety of
scientific English, shaped by the observations of grammarians, the expectations of the
burgeoning scientific societies, and the style guides of the new academic journals.
Both ‘scientific’ and ‘technical’ are recognized as major lexical dimensions in the
1888 Preface to the New English Dictionary.
Scientific Discourse. Michael Faraday giving a Friday Evening Discourse at
the Royal Institution in London (founded in 1799). The Prince Consort is in the
audience. These discourses, along with a series of Christmas lectures for children,
were begun in 1826 as part of a concern to make science accessible.

Michael Faraday (1791– 1867)

Michael Faraday was an English scientist who contributed to the study of electromagnetism
and electrochemistry. His main discoveries include the principles underlying electromagnetic
induction, diamagnetism and electrolysis. Although Faraday received little formal education, he was
one of the most influential scientists in history.
These discourses, along with a series of Christmas lectures for children, were
begun in 1826 as part of a concern to make science accessible. In the 2000s the
Institution continues to provide a forum where, as its annual Proceedings state, ‘non-
specialists may meet the leading scientists of our time and hear their latest discoveries
explained in everyday language’. Keeping pace with the growth in scientific societies
must have been difficult, in Faraday’s time. The 1830s, for example, began in Britain
with the formation of the Geographical Society of London (1830), the British
Association for the Advancement of Science (1831), and the Provincial Medical and
Surgical Association (1832).
In the USA, the following decade saw the American Statistical Association
(1839), the American Medical Association (1847), and the American Association for
the Advancement of Science (1848). By the end of the century, in America alone,
over 50 national councils, societies, or associations had been founded, dealing with
scientific subjects as diverse as entomology, dentistry, and engineering.
Nomenclature. Any examination of the growth of scientific vocabulary in the
19th century would find that some sciences are conspicuously under-represented, for
the simple reason that their foundations had been laid much earlier. Most of the basic
terms of anatomy, for example, had been introduced by the end of the 17th century,
as had a great deal of mathematical terminology. On the other hand, from the end of
the 18th century rapid progress in chemistry, physics, and biology led to such major
lexical developments as the nomenclature of chemical elements and compounds, and
the Linnaean system of classification in natural history.

11. Literary Voices

11.1. William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor

Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint
publication Lyrical Ballads (1798).
Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semi-
autobiographical poem of his early years that he revised and expanded a number of
times. It was posthumously titled and published by his wife in the year of his death,
before which it was generally known as ‘the poem to Coleridge’.
W. Wordsworth was Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death from pleurisy on
23 April 1850.
William Wordsworth (1770 –1850)
William Wordsworth was the central figure in the English Romantic revolution
in poetry. His contribution to it was threefold. First, he formulated in his poems and
his essays a new attitude toward nature. This was more than a matter of introducing
nature imagery into his verse: it amounted to a fresh view of the organic relation
between man and the natural world, and it culminated in metaphors of a wedding
between nature and the human mind and, beyond that, in the sweeping metaphor of
nature as emblematic of the mind of God, a mind that ‘feeds upon infinity’ and
‘broods over the dark abyss.’ Second, Wordsworth probed deeply into his own
sensibility as he traced, in his finest poem, The Prelude, the ‘growth of a poet’s
mind.’ The Prelude was in fact the first long autobiographical poem. Writing it in a
drawn-out process of self-exploration, Wordsworth worked his way toward a modern
psychological understanding of his own nature and, thus, more broadly, of human
nature. Third, Wordsworth placed poetry at the centre of human experience; in
impassioned rhetoric he pronounced poetry to be nothing less than ‘the first and last
of all knowledge — it is as immortal as the heart of man,’ and he then went on to
create some of the greatest English poetry of his century. It is probably safe to say
that by the late 20th century he stood in critical estimation where Coleridge and
Arnold had originally placed him, next to John Milton—who stands, of course, next
to William Shakespeare.

11.2. Walter Scott

Walter Scott was a Scottish writer, often considered both the inventor and the
greatest practitioner of the historical novel. From childhood Scott was familiar with
stories of the Border region of Scotland. Apprenticed to his father, a lawyer, in 1786,
he later became sheriff depute of Selkirk and clerk to the Court of Session in
Edinburgh. His interest in border ballads led to the collection Minstrelsy of the
Scottish Border (1802–03). His first original poetic romance, The Lay of the Last
Minstrel (1805), established his reputation; The Lady of the Lake (1810) was his
most successful contribution to the genre. He produced editions of the works of John
Dryden, 18 vol. (1808), and Jonathan Swift, 19 vol. (1814). Troubled with debt, from
1813 he wrote in part to make money. He tired of narrative poetry and turned to prose
romances. The extremely popular series now known as the Waverley novels consists
of more than two dozen works dealing with Scottish history, including the
masterpieces Old Mortality (1816), Rob Roy (1817), and The Heart of Midlothian
(1818). He drew on English history and other themes for Ivanhoe (1819), Kenilworth
(1821), and Quentin Durward (1823). All his novels were published anonymously
until 1827.

Sir Walter Scott (1771 – 1832)

W. Scott gathered the disparate strands of contemporary novel-writing
techniques into his own hands and harnessed them to his deep interest in Scottish
history and his knowledge of antiquarian lore. The technique of the omniscient
narrator and the use of regional speech, localized settings, sophisticated character
delineation, and romantic themes treated in a realistic manner were all combined by
him into virtually a new literary form, the historical novel. His influence on other
European and American novelists was immediate and profound, and though interest
in some of his books declined somewhat in the 20th century, his reputation remains
secure. Scott wrote articles on ‘Chivalry’, ‘Romance’, and ‘Drama’ for Encyclopædia
Britannica’s fourth edition (1801–09).

11.3. William Makepeace Thackeray

William Makepeace Thackeray was an English novelist. He studied law and art
but soon became a prolific writer for periodicals, using a variety of pen names. His
early writings appear in such volumes as The Book of Snobs (1848), a collection of
his articles from Punch; and Miscellanies (1855–57), which includes the historical
novel Barry Lyndon (1844). His fame rests chiefly on the novels Vanity Fair (1847–
48), a panoramic survey of English manners and human frailties set in the Napoleonic
era, and Henry Esmond (1852), set in the early 18th century. Pendennis (1848–50) is
a partly fictionalized autobiography. In his time he was regarded as the only possible
rival of Charles Dickens for his pictures of contemporary life, but his popularity
declined in the 20th century.

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811- 1863)

On his own time Thackeray was regarded as the only possible rival to Dickens.
His pictures of contemporary life were obviously real and were accepted as such by
the middle classes. A great professional, he provided novels, stories, essays, and
verses for his audience, and he toured as a nationally known lecturer. He wrote to be
read aloud in the long Victorian family evenings, and his prose has the lucidity,
spontaneity, and pace of good reading material. Throughout his works, Thackeray
analyzed and deplored snobbery and frequently gave his opinions on human
behaviour and the shortcomings of society, though usually prompted by his narrative
to do so. He examined such subjects as hypocrisy, secret emotions, the sorrows
sometimes attendant on love, remembrance of things past, and the vanity of much of
life—such moralizing being, in his opinion, an important function of the novelist. He
had little time for such favourite devices of Victorian novelists as exaggerated
characterization and melodramatic plots, preferring in his own work to be more true
to life, subtly depicting various moods and plunging the reader into a stream of
entertaining narrative, description, dialogue, and comment.
Thackeray’s high reputation as a novelist continued unchallenged to the end of
the 19th century but then began to decline. Vanity Fair is still his most interesting and
readable work and has retained its place among the great historical novels in the
English language.

11.4. Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy – an English novelist and poet who set much of his work in
Wessex, his name for the counties of southwestern England. Many of his novels,
beginning with his second, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), are set in the
imaginary county of Wessex. Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), his first success,
was followed by The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of
Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895),
all expressing his stoical pessimism and his sense of the inevitable tragedy of life.
Their continuing popularity (many have been filmed) owes much to their richly
varied yet accessible style and their combination of romantic plots with convincingly
presented characters. Hardy’s works were increasingly at odds with Victorian
morality, and public indignation at Jude so disgusted him that he wrote no more
novels. He returned to poetry with Wessex Poems (1898), Poems of the Past and the
Present (1901), and The Dynasts (1910), a huge poetic drama of the Napoleonic
Wars.
 Thomas Hardy (1840- 1928)
The continuing popularity of Hardy’s novels owes much to their richly varied
yet always accessible style and their combination of romantic plots with convincingly
presented characters. Equally important—particularly in terms of their suitability to
film and television adaptation—is their nostalgic evocation of a vanished rural world
through the creation of highly particularized regional settings. Hardy’s verse has been
slower to win full acceptance, but his unique status as a major 20th-century poet as
well as a major 19th-century novelist is now universally recognized.

11.5. Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens was a British novelist. The defining moment
of Dickens’s life occurred when he was 12 years old. With his father in debtors’
prison, he was withdrawn from school and forced to work in a factory. This deeply
affected the sensitive boy. Though he returned to school at 13, his formal education
ended at 15. As a young man, he worked as a reporter. His fiction career began with
short pieces reprinted as Sketches by “Boz” (1836).

Charles Dickens (1812 – 1870)

He exhibited a great ability to spin a story in an entertaining manner and this
quality, combined with the serialization of his comic novel The Pickwick
Papers (1837), made him the most popular English author of his time. The
serialization of such works as Oliver Twist (1838) and The Old Curiosity Shop (1841)
followed. After a trip to America, he wrote A Christmas Carol (1843) in a few weeks.
With Dombey and Son (1848), his novels began to express a heightened uneasiness
about the evils of Victorian industrial society, which intensified in the
semiautobiographical David Copperfield (1850), as well as in Bleak
House (1853), Little Dorrit (1857), Great Expectations (1861), and others. A Tale of
Two Cities (1859) appeared in the period when he achieved great popularity for his
public readings. Dickens’s works are characterized by an encyclopaedic knowledge
of London, pathos, a vein of the macabre, a pervasive spirit of benevolence and
geniality, inexhaustible powers of character creation, an acute ear for characteristic
speech, and a highly individual and inventive prose style.
Nowhere is the range of 19th-century social, regional, occupational, and
personal variation in the use of language more fully illustrated than in the novels and
sketches of Charles Dickens (1812–70). His characters not only speak for themselves:
Dickens often explicitly draws our attention to their speech, identifying the stylistic
basis of the comic effect.

12. In Living Memory

The overwhelming impression is certainly one of continuity. Any differences
we may notice in pronunciation, grammar, or vocabulary seem to be occasional and
superficial, and tend to be described as ‘old-fashioned’ rather than (somewhat more
distantly) as ‘archaic’. There is even an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu about the
issues which were being discussed two or three generations ago. A glance at
newspapers or government reports after the turn of the century shows that the same
concerns about language were being expressed then as now: standards of English had
evidently reached an unprecedented low point in schools, and adult usage was
deteriorating so rapidly that there was little hope for the future of the language.
Ongoing Change. At the same time, we should not underestimate the
linguistic differences between grandchild and grandparent – and indeed, many a
domestic argument between the generations must have been fuelled by changes
which have taken place in the language during the past 75 years.
Vocabulary, as always, has been the chief index of change. Apart from the
rapid growth in standard English vocabulary, associated with such areas as
technological development and the emergence of the ‘permissive society’, there are
many differences between the slang of previous decades and that of today, and the
dialect surveys have drawn our attention to the speed at which the regional
vocabulary known to older generations has disappeared.
Earlier pronunciation norms can be heard in the ‘broader’ regional accents of
many older people, or the more open vowel qualities of the early BBC presenters,
several of whom are accessible through archive recordings. An example of change in
the educated standard can be deduced from Daniel Jones’s ‘The Pronunciation of
English’ (1919), where he describes the British pronunciation of the vowel in such
words as lord /ɔ: / as ‘intermediate between open back rounded and half-open back
rounded’. This is rather different from the present-day quality of this vowel, which is
articulated higher in the mouth. According to Jones’s description, lord must have
sounded similar to the way lard is pronounced now.
There are major differences in language awareness and attitude. A century of
prescriptive grammar, rigorously taught in schools, inevitably left its mark on
linguistic sensibilities then in a way that is not found now. Indeed, prescriptivism left
its mark in other ways too. The reason why the older generation feel so strongly
about English grammar is that they were severely punished if they didn’t obey the
rules.
Most of the grammatical controversies which come from the prescriptive
tradition have to do with making a choice between alternative usages already in the
language, and do not reflect any real issues of language change. However, English
grammar did not stand still, during the 20th century. It continued to change, in
numerous small ways, sometimes attracting attention, sometimes not.
There have been significant changes in the pragmatics of the language– in
particular, in what counts as acceptable public linguistic behaviour. The norms of
interaction have altered, as shown by differences in such diverse areas as the use of
first names, personal titles, taboo words, greeting formulae, and the conventions of
letter-writing. A vast gulf separates the generations in their expectations about
conversational etiquette.
The most important developments in the language during the 20th century were
the emergence of new varieties, both national and international. Some, such as
computing and broadcasting, were completely novel; others, such as religious English
and journalese, were affected by social change. Above all, there were the new
regional varieties of English which came into prominence throughout the world.
Their place in
any future history of the language is assured, and only a separate section can do
justice to them now.

13. Current Trends

Vocabulary is alwaysthe most noticeable manifestation of language change,
simply because there is so much of it; but it is difficult to arrive at any accurate
quantification of the loss of old words and senses and the arrival of new ones.
Whether a period has been a particularly significant one for lexical change only
becomes apparent after it has happened. We never know which of the new words we
hear around us are going to be permanent features of English, and which are transient
– the slang and fashionable usage of the moment. Studies of the new items which
were being used in English during the 1970s suggest that as many as 75 per cent of
them are no longer in use.
Collections of ‘new words’ made by the dictionary-providers, based on print,
indicate that hundreds of new expressions appear each year. For example, the Oxford
University Press publication, Twentieth Century Words, contains a selection of about
5,000 items, such as:
•  from the 1990s: applet, Blairism, Britpop, cool Britannia, Dianamania,
docusoap;
 •  from the 1980s: AIDS, backslash, bogstandard, BSE, cellphone, designer
drug;
•  from the 1970s: action replay, Betamax, biotechnology, cashpoint, club
class, detox.
The average is 500 items a decade - roughly one a week – and this is only from
the written language.
That there should be so many new words and phrases should come as no
surprise when we consider the many walks of life which motivate them. But it is
important to note: words and phrases. A listing of neologisms on a dictionary blog
from Cambridge University Press at the beginning of 2016 included such items as
kicks (trainers), wavy (stylish), manel (an exclusively male panel), and slashkini (a
one-piece swimsuit with lots of cut-outs), but these were far outnumbered by the
phrases, such as:
dude food – food that is said to be favoured by men, often including meat;
Skype family – a family in which one parent is living overseas and contact is
maintained through Skype;
grey gapper – a person of retirement age who takes a year out of normal life to
go travelling;
pocket dial – to call someone by accident with a phone that is in your pocket.
When we talk about ‘new words’ entering the language, we mean multi-word
expressions as well as single words.

13.1. New Progress

The progressive (or continuous) aspect is on the increase, continuing a trend
that can be traced back to the 19th century. The McDonald’s slogan is probably the
most frequently quoted example: in the 1960s, this would much more likely have
been I love it. Verbs expressing states of mind that once would only have been heard
or seen in simple form have begun to be used dynamically. People seem to be
thinking of the time frame expressed by these verbs as part of a wider, ongoing
situation: one is 'lovin' it' not just at the moment of eating, but always.
 The change hasn't affected all stative verbs at the same rate. Each of the cases
below will today be encountered in the progressive, but the usage is more likely to be
found with the examples in group A than with those in group B. There is also a great
deal of variation among genres – the progressive is more frequent in speech than in
writing, and in fiction than in journalism, and uncommon in academic prose.
A I’m loving my new job B I’m needing a new coat
I’m wanting a new fridge It’s concerning me a lot
I’m intending to apply It’s mattering to me greatly
I’m hating this weather I’m knowing the answer
Know is an example of a verb that has largely resisted the change so far, though
knowing is normal usage in some parts of the English-speaking world, such as India,
and corpus studies are showing its increased presence. It seems likely that all stative
verbs will develop dynamic uses in due course (After B. Aarts, J. Close & S. Wallis,
2010).

13.2. New Relative Values

There has been variation in the use of the relative pronouns since late Middle
English, but since the 1960s we have seen a striking trend in formal written English
in such constructions as: the book which I bought / the book that I bought. ‘That’ has
come to be used much more than which, in these restrictive relative clauses, and the
use of which is noticeably diminishing. (The zero form, as in the book I bought,
which is very frequent in informal speech, shows much less change, especially in
American English.) In one study of American academic texts, the use of ‘that’
jumped from 32.75 per cent in the Brown corpus of 1961 to 80.34 per cent in the
Frown corpus of 1992.
Why is the change taking place? One factor is antagonism towards the use of
‘which’ by the prescriptive grammatical tradition. Many 20th-century style guides
recommend that it should be avoided, and the trend has been reinforced by online
grammar checkers, especially those reflecting American English, where the change
from which to that appeared earlier. A typical example is Ernest Gowers in The
Complete Plain Words.
On the whole it makes for smoothness of writing not to use the relative which
where that would do as well.
But the change has also been influenced by what has been called the increasing
‘colloquialization’ of written English in recent decades. Constructions that a
generation ago would have been thought inappropriate in a formal setting (such as the
contracted forms of verbs) are now often seen. The association of which with more
formal styles of expression, accordingly, has been another factor promoting its
demise, and replacement by the less formal that. It is an unusual outcome, to find
prescriptive editorial practice reinforcing a general trend towards informality in
language use. (After L. Hinrichs, B. Szmrecsanyi & A. Bohmann, 2015.).

13.3. New Moods

Some of the modal verbs are changing their pattern of use. Shall, must, and
may have all shown major declines in recent decades, especially in American
English, in both speech and writing. In one study, using the Diachronic Corpus of
Present-Day Spoken English, between 1960 and 1990 the use of must reduced by 51
per cent, shall by 45 per cent, and may by 36 per cent in all text categories
represented. They have been replaced by semi-modal constructions, such as have to,
be going to, and want to – in colloquial speech hafta, gonna, and wanna. Intuitively,
we feel the changes, once they have been pointed out. Here are three examples of the
replacement of must by have to.
Expressing an obligation: You must be more careful [authoritarian: ‘I’m telling
you’] You have to be more careful [more sympathetic: ‘I’m worried about you’].
Expressing confidence in an event: The calculation must be right [= ‘I’m
totally confident it is’]. The calculation has to be right [= ‘I have a lurking doubt it
might not be’].
 Expressing an affirmation: I must say you’re wrong [= ‘You need to know I
hold this view’] I have to say you’re wrong [= ‘I’m rather reluctant to tell you’].
In each case what we see is a lessening of the strength of a commitment. There
seems to be a social and psychological change taking place towards equality and
seeing the other point of view – a less egocentric view of the world. (After J. Close &
B. Aarts, 2010.)

14. Linguistic Memes

The word meme was introduced in 1976 by evolutionary biologist Richard
Dawkins in ‘The Selfish Gene’ as a shortened form of mimeme, from a Greek word
meaning ‘that which is imitated’. As Dawkins put it: ‘I want a monosyllable that
sounds a bit like “gene”. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate
mimeme to meme.’ The word echoes the -eme suffix used in linguistics (phoneme,
morpheme, etc), but lacks its notion of minimal contrastivity.
A meme is a unit of cultural transmission which spreads throughout a
population and which can persist for a considerable time. Dawkins illustrated from
tunes, ideas, fashions in clothing, ways of making pots or of building arches, and – of
relevance to this book – catch phrases.
The notion has achieved great prominence as a result of the Internet, which
promotes the rapid spread of images and text, while at the same time allowing a
potentially infinite number of variations. Most are photos with superimposed captions
(similar to speech bubbles) that have humorous or satirical intent, though many
convey messages of political or social seriousness, and some try to express notions of
philosophical import. For a meme to work, it has to be unique, distinctive, and
consistent – something that is easily achievable using language. The chief linguistic
feature is the use of nonstandard forms – in early chat developments such as
textmessaging, chiefly deviant spelling; in more recent varieties, deviant grammar.
Among the most successful inventions are Leetspeak, LOLcats, Doge, and
Doggolingo. But standard English can also be a fruitful memic source, as the
examples below illustrate.
 No language domain is sacrosanct, and political correctness is conspicuous by
its absence. Y U No uses upper-case textese to parody the simplified speech of
foreign learners, using a sketch of a character from a Japanese manga series: its
memic origin began with I TXT U / Y U NO TXT BAK!? Ermahgerd shows a young
woman holding several books from the children’s horror fiction series Goosebumps;
the name is a version of ‘Oh my God’, as spoken by someone with a speech
impediment; it is also known as Gersberms and Berks (books). There are hundreds of
meme wannabes on the Internet now, all hoping (but few achieving) a permanent
place in language history. Some sites provide instruction in ‘how to create your own
meme’. We must expect a significant increase in the amount of linguistic
idiosyncrasy both on and off the web now, srsly.
 References
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construction in English. In Cappelle, Bert and Naoaki Wada (Eds.) Distinctions
in English Grammar. Offered to Renaat Declerck. Japan: Kaitakushu, 2010.
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 -writings
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