4 The Growth of ‘Standard English’

I

The importance of speech as an indicator of social class is not likely to be underestimated by anyone who has lived in England. Our reactions to speech are in any case fundamentally important, for certain sounds, certain words, certain rhythms carry for most of us a very deep charge of feeling and memory. The feeling that we should speak as other members of our group speak is also very strong. Indeed it is in just this imitative desire and capacity that the possibility of language, with its vital communication of our humanity, is centred. At the same time, this imitative process is dynamic, for no living language is ever fixed. There are variations of speech habit within the simplest group, and the complication of experience and of contacts with other groups is constantly modifying the very thing that we are imitating. Since it is both a confirmation and a discovery of our changing experience of reality, language must change if it is to live. Yet within any human lifetime, and within any society, our attachment to known ways will remain significant, and our important sense of belonging, to a family, to a group, to a people, will be vitally interwoven with the making and hearing of certain sounds – the making and hearing being a very large part of our social sense.

There is then a necessary tension in language, between powerful impulses to imitation and to change. This tension is part of our basic processes of growth and learning. In the general history of language, we can see two quite opposite tendencies: an extraordinary evolution of separate languages, and a remarkable growth, in certain conditions, of common languages. Almost all modern European languages, from Welsh and English to Italian and Russian, together with such Asian languages as Hindustani and Persian, have developed and separated, through history, from a common root. And still, in simple societies, there is an almost incredible variation, within tiny regions, so that villages six or eight miles apart can often hardly understand one another, or on an island of 100,000 people there can be as many as forty dialects, often mutually incomprehensible. As a group develops its own way of life, which may extend over a few miles or over half a continent, it will, as part of this development, create its own forms of language. The very factor which gives the group its social cohesion can become the factor cutting it off, to an important extent, from similar groups elsewhere. But, on the other hand, and especially now as communities become larger and develop greatly improved communication systems, certain languages (of which English is notably one) expand and flourish, serving as a common basis for many different groups. Even within these common languages, however, and alongside the powerful tendencies to expanded community of speech, the processes of growth and variation will continue, in different ways in different groups speaking the common tongue. The variations may be of a regional or of a class kind, and the case of class speech is particularly important, for here the tension between community and variation may be seen at its most sensitive.

A class is a group within a geographical community, and not a community in its own right. In certain extreme cases, a class will so emphasise its distinction from the community of which it is a part that it will in fact use a separate language: either one of the various hieratic languages, such as Sanskrit, or, as in nineteenth-century Russia, a foreign language, French, which is thought of as a mark of cultural superiority. More usually, however, class speech will be a form of the ordinary speech of the region, and the relations between this class dialect and the ordinary speech of the region (which will usually itself be further sub-regionally varied) form a complex of great importance in the development of a language. In the case of English, the sensitivity of this complex is very high: a very large number of Englishmen have become tense and anxious about the way in which they speak their own language. This problem has a deep bearing on the development of English society, but it is still not very clearly understood. There is commonly a lack of historical perspective, and there are also many prejudices, both theoretic and practical. Yet English has been served by many fine scholars and historians, and, with certain notable gaps, the material for a better understanding is available. I propose to review the historical material, as a way of gaining perspective, and to suggest, from this review, certain necessary clarifications. The period in which we are now living is of exceptional importance in English, and behind the history and the theory we can surely all feel the pressures of a complex social experience.

II

In England, after the Norman Conquest, two different languages were spoken – French and English – and a third, Latin, was not only the international language of learning, but was spoken and developed by scholars. The division between French and English was on class lines; it is best described by the chronicler known as Robert of Gloucester, writing in about 1300, and here translated:

Thus England came into Normandy’s hand, and the Normans at that time could speak only their own language, and spoke French just as they did at home, and had their children taught in the same manner, so that people of rank in this country who came of their blood all stick to the same language that they received of them, for if a man knows no French people will think little of him. But the lower classes still stick to English and their own language.

But in 1204, Normandy was lost to the English crown, and the French of the Normans began to develop along separate lines, and with influence from English. Old English itself had changed by this time, affected by the Normans’ French. Gradually, a new language developed, the product of both these changing tongues, and after the legal recognition of English in 1362, the growth of the common language was paramount, reaching a recognisably modern form in about 1500, and relative stability by about 1700.

The social processes involved in this history are of great interest. We can trace the minor relics of class prejudice in the lasting equation of moral qualities with class names: base, villain, boor, and churl for the poor; kind, free, gentle, noble, but also proud and dangerous, for the rich. But a more important legacy was that affecting the whole language of learning. English passed, during the separation, into the mouths of the uneducated and the powerless. Thus the greater part of the vocabulary of learning and power, together with the bulk of the vocabulary of a richer way of living, came from Norman sources. The only substantial alternative source, in these matters, was Latin, and down to the fourteenth century this was taught in the grammar schools through the medium of French. Of course, once the common language emerged, the whole vocabulary was theoretically available to all. But the long continuation of education restricted to a minority, which learned Latin and French as well as speaking its own language, gave this limited class an access to the resources of their own language which, for the majority, remained much more difficult. Though wider education can resolve this, extending the area of the truly common language, it is probably still important, in English, that so much of the language of learning should have this special kind of class stamp.

A further consequence of this particular history was the splitting of English into many more dialects than hitherto. Old English had had three or four important regional dialects, but within these there were important centralising tendencies. In any language, it is the development of major central institutions – government, law, learning, religion and literature – which leads to the emergence of a reasonably common language among men drawn from various parts of the region to take part in these central activities. But, under Norman rule, this central language was alien, and the removal of these centralising tendencies in English led to a greater variation in ordinary dialects. When modern English emerged, as the language of these central institutions, the relation of the centre to the outlying areas was more complex than hitherto. However, the centralising tendencies continued to operate, and slowly the speech of the centre became accepted as the basis of the new common language. The old East Midland dialect, with some influences from other regions, became the basis of the common language of the centre. Yet it is less the rise of one regional dialect than the emergence of a class dialect. The regional dialect had the advantage of being spoken in an area reaching to the capital, London, and the two universities of Oxford and Cambridge. But the new common language, from the beginning, showed marked differences from the speech of the ordinary inhabitants of these cities. If we say the best speech was that of London, Oxford and Cambridge, we mean the evolved common speech of all those who had come to these centres, to take part in government and learning, rather than of the majorities who had been born there. In the written language, particularly, this divergence was quite evident, and it was largely from the forms of this written language, spoken by men who had been trained in these centres and gone back to their regions, that the new common language spread over England. The existence of a common written language, which when spoken still showed the results of regional influence, is the first key to the subsequent history of class dialect in England.

Through the emergence of a common written language, marked regional speech variations still continued, even at the centre. Between the sixteenth and the end of the eighteenth centuries, Englishmen in touch with the central institutions wrote a common language, but still, in diminishing degree, spoke it differently. In Elizabethan London, the divergences of educated speakers were still quite marked, but the signs of unease and self-consciousness about this were already beginning to show. Palsgrave, in 1530, makes the first recorded mention of a ‘true kynde of pronuntiacon’, and Puttenham wrote:

Our maker therfore at these dayes shall not follow Piers plowman nor Gower nor Lydgate nor yet Chaucer, for their language is now out of use with us; neither shall he take the termes of Northenmen, such as they use in dayly talke, whether they be noble men or gentlemen or of their best clarkes, all is a matter; nor in effect any speach used beyond the river of Trent, though no man can deny but that theirs is the purer English Saxon at this day, yet it is not so Courtly not so currant as our Southerne English is; no more is the far Westerne mans speach. Ye shall therefore take the usuall speach of the Court, and that of London and the shires lying about London within LX myles, and not much above. I say not this but that in every shyre of England there be gentlemen and others that speake, but specially write, as good Southerne as we of Middlesex or Surrey do, but not the common people of every shire, to whom the gentlemen, and also their learned clarkes, do for the most part condescend; but herein we are already ruled by th’English Dictionaries and other bookes written by learned men, and therefore it needeth none other direction in that behalfe.

This, indeed, is the shape of things to come, but meanwhile the written language was itself still changing. There was a very important accession of Latin vocabulary and sentence-forms, particularly in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, although parts of this influence were later decisively rejected. And there was also the vitalising influence of the still varied speech on the written forms: an influence at its greatest at the time of the Elizabethan dramatists. The extraordinary invigoration of English at this period can be seen as the flow of the living and varied speech into the narrower common written language. Only when this extension had been made could the tendency towards uniformity prevail over the varied strengths of the speech.

Puttenham speaks, significantly, of dictionaries, but the real influence of such instruments lay nearly two centuries ahead. The language was still changing, though more slowly than in previous centuries, and changes in the social structure of England were now to exert a decisive effect. The process of standardising the written language continued, with growing confidence, yet the source of the standard was now a matter of dispute. When Puttenham wrote, the standard was evidently the Court and the Metropolis, with an afterthought of acknowledgement to ‘learned men’. But the Court, after the Restoration, with a foreign-influenced manner that held fashion for a period, was no longer in fact a centre, and Swift, acknowledging its former pre-eminence, came to describe it as the ‘worst school in England for that accomplishment’. Similarly, deprived of the real Court, Thomas Sprat, in his History of the Royal Society, looked for an ‘impartial Court of Eloquence according to whose censure all books or authors should either stand or fall’, yet recommended

a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness; bringing all things as near the mathematical plainness as they can; and preferring the language of artisans, countrymen and merchants, before that of wits or scholars.

The class-structure of England was now decisively changing, at the beginning of a period which can be summed up as the effort of the rising middle class to establish its own common speech. By the nineteenth century, after many important changes, this had been achieved, and it is then that we first hear of ‘Standard English’, by which is meant speech: a very different thing from the written ‘standard’ established so much earlier. Indeed, its naming as ‘standard’, with the implication no longer of a common but of a model language, represents the full coming to consciousness of a new concept of class speech: now no longer merely the functional convenience of a metropolitan class, but the means and emphasis of social distinction. It is to the history of this process that we must now turn.

III

The late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw a strenuous effort to rationalise English, by a number of differently motivated groups. The Royal Society’s Committee ‘for improving the English tongue’ (1664) represents the effort of a new scientific philosophy to clarify the language for the purposes of its own kind of discourse. A different group, running from Addison and Swift to Pope and Johnson, were concerned with the absence of a ‘polite standard’ in the new society. Yet behind these intellectual groups there was the practical pressure of a newly powerful and self-conscious middle class which, like most groups which find themselves suddenly possessed of social standing but deficient in social tradition, thought ‘correctness’ a systematic thing which had simply to be acquired. Eighteenth-century London abounded in spelling-masters and pronunciation-coaches: many of them, as it happened, ignorant men. Yet if they had all been scholars, within the concepts of their period, the result might not have been greatly different. The scholarly teaching of grammar was locked in the illusion that Latin grammatical rules were the best possible guide to correctness in English. And Johnson himself emphatically expounded a doctrine equally false: that the spelling of a word is the best guide to its pronunciation, ‘the most elegant speakers… [those] who deviate least from the written words’. The new ‘standard’, therefore, was not, as the earlier common language had been, the result mainly of growth through contact and actual relationships, but to a considerable extent an artificial creation based on false premisses. The habits of a language are too strong to be wholly altered by determined yet relatively ignorant teachers, but the mark of their effort is still on us, and the tension they created is still high.

Common pronunciation (as distinct from regional variations) changed considerably during this period: partly through ordinary change, partly through the teaching of ‘correctness’. English spelling, as is now well known, is in fact extremely unreliable as a guide to pronunciation, for not only, at best, does it frequently record sounds that have become obsolete, but in fact many of these were obsolete when the spellings were fixed, and moreover certain plain blunders have become embedded by time. Iland, sissors, sithe, coud, and ancor were altered, by men ignorant of their origins, confident of false origins, to island, scissors, scythe, could, and anchor, but in these cases, fortunately, pronunciation has not been affected. Similar false alterations, however, such as fault, vault, assault (which need no l’s), or advantage and advance (which need no d’s) have perpetuated their errors not only into spelling but into sound. The principle of following the spelling changed the sound offen into often, forrid into forehead, summat into somewhat, lanskip into landscape, yumer into humour, at ome into at home, weskit into waistcoat, and so on, in a list that could be tediously prolonged. Words like these are among the pressure points of distinction between ‘educated’ and ‘uneducated’ speech, yet the case is simply that the uneducated, less exposed to the doctrines of ‘correctness’, have preserved the traditional pronunciation.

An amusing sidelight on this process is the development, in literature and journalism, of an ‘orthography of the uneducated’. It has been one of the principal amusements of the English middle class to record the hideousness of people who say orf, or wot, even though these can spell the standard pronunciations. The error consists in supposing that the ordinary spelling indicates how proper people speak. We may look at one case among thousands, from a current detective novel (written by an Oxford don’s wife), in which there is an awful north-country don:

Field stood blinking and rubbing his chilblains. Then he smiled woodenly. ‘Well, Mr Link, you may have a chance of showing your principles at once’ (he pronounced them channse and wonnce).

The difficulty here is how a nice person (without chilblains) would have pronounced them. If he had followed the plain spelling, his ‘chance’ would have been as likely to be Northcountry as anything else, and his ‘once’ would not have been English at all. Submerged in the demonstration, in fact, are the understood values of chahnce (to make it quite certain) and wunce (but that belongs to children and the ignorant). It is difficult to estimate when people will know enough about their own language to stop this, so that naked prejudice no longer goes bowing graciously down the street. Meanwhile we can try to see when it started. It is used in Elizabethan plays to indicate such foreign elements as Welsh soldiers or Somerset peasants, and in Restoration plays there are the beginnings of finer distinctions, socially based, whether in the affected pronunciation of fops, or the ‘errors’ of those from outside the fashionable world. But it is in the eighteenth century, in novels and plays, that the real development is noticeable, and of course by the nineteenth century it is in full spate. I find it interesting to set beside this development the actual letters of eighteenth-century aristocratic women, which contain such phrases and spellings-by-ear as these:

between you and I, Sis Peg and me, most people thinks, sarve, sartinly, larne (learn), schollards, Frydy, Mundy, byled, gine (join), went down of his knees, jest agoing to be married, the weather has been wonderfull stormie, he is reasonable well agane, I don’t see no likelyhood of her dying.

These letters show also a tone which the anxiously correct middle class sought to reform:

I believe I shall Jumble my Guts out between this and russell street. (Anne Countess of Strafford)

I was at her Grace of Shrewsbery’s who I think is more rediculouse in her talk than ever. She told all the Company as they came in that she was very much out of humour for she had things growing upon her toes like thumbs. (Anne Countess of Strafford)

I danced with Ld Petre, and he is a nasty toad, for I long’d to spit in his face. (Lady Sarah Lenox)

She is femenine to the greatest degree, laughs most heartily at a dirty joke, but never makes one. (Lady Sarah Lenox)

We can of course see the standard changing within this class itself, as Mrs Behn found to her cost. Meanwhile, as a last gesture to the ‘orthography of the uneducated’, we might set down, in its orthodox manner, the speech of an educated late eighteenth-century gentleman, according to known pronunciations of that class at that period:

Aye, he’s an ojus feller, if he is a Dook. Her leddyship’s more obleegin, I’ve offen taken a coop of tay in her gyarden, and admired her lalocs, which she thinks more of than goold. A umorous ooman, and her gyearls the prettiest in Lunnon. But to be in the Dook’s neighbrood’s summat dauntin. He talks only of his fortin and his futer, as if he was some marchant of cowcumbers or reddishes. And he wears a cyap and weskit like a sarvant’s, and sits in his cheer like some chaney Injun. You know that kyind.

It is interesting to see how much of this would now slip into the fashionable middle-class sketch of vulgarity.

Between about 1775 and 1850, what was later called ‘Received’ Standard’ pronunciation changed markedly. One of the crucial changes was the lengthening of the vowel in such words as past and path: now a mode of class speech, but until this period a regional and rustic habit. Boiled lost its biled pronunciation, as did almost all the ‘oi’ words, and the ‘ar’ pronunciation (dating from about 1500, in ‘correct’ London speech) in words like servant and learn also went out, except in one or two words, such as clerk and Derby, which, amusingly, are now highly valued, for their anomaly, in class speech. Had and man verged towards head and men, as one can still hear. The ‘r’ in most words was further weakened, more moving towards maw, and the endings of such words as orator diminishing to a mere glide of the voice. Dropping the ‘r’ in such words as bird produced a new and valued vowel sound in what remained. These and similar changes were spread by improved communications, but the main agency, undoubtedly, in fixing them as class speech, was the new cult of uniformity in the public schools. It was a mixture of ‘correctness’, natural development and affectation, but it became as it were embalmed. It was no longer one kind of English, or even a useful common dialect, but ‘correct English’, ‘good English’, ‘pure English’, ‘standard English’. In its name, thousands of people have been capable of the vulgar insolence of telling other Englishmen that they do not know how to speak their own language. And as education was extended, under mainly middle-class direction, this attitude spread from being simply a class distinction to a point where it was possible to identify the making of these sounds with being educated, and thousands of teachers and learners, from poor homes, became ashamed of the speech of their fathers.

But this takes us on into the continuing social changes of the present century, and we must look at the effect of this history on present theory and practice.

IV

It is now customary, in language theory, to mark three kinds of English speech: Received Standard, whose history we have been tracing; Regional Dialects, the varied survivors of many localities; and Modified Standard, which has gained currency in varying kinds in different areas, representing a development from regional dialects but falling short of Received Standard.

Most people who use this classification are, of course, attached by their own speech habits to ‘Received Standard’, and this has had important effects, even at a scholarly level. Thus a fine historian of language like H. C. Wyld can slip into special pleading, as when he argues that the long ‘a’ in Received Standard path and last is more ‘beautiful and sonorous’ than its alternatives (this is a natural affection but quite arbitrary), or that to ‘insert’ the ‘r’-sound in bird would lose the quality and length of the vowel (but to me, with different speech habits, the sounding of ‘r’ is ‘beautiful and sonorous’). Or R. W. Chapman can write:

In phonetics England does not yet groan under a democratic tyranny; we are free, within wide limits, to speak as well as we can.

But to anyone who has thought about language the class prejudice of this will be especially clear. Chapman goes on to define Received Standard as the speech of

a class which though not arrogantly exclusive is necessarily limited in numbers. Its traditions are maintained not primarily by the universities, but by the public schools.

Wyld argues that the class among which ‘the “best” English’ is ‘most consistently heard at its best’ is that of ‘officers of the British Regular Army’. But of course it is just at this point that one sees why ‘Received Standard’ will not do.

With the growth of towns, and especially the new industrial towns drawing on wide rural areas for their populations; with the increase in literacy, and the vast increase in the dissemination of print; with increased travel and with social mobility affecting wide numbers of people, the evolution of a common English speech was clearly hastened. The difficulty lies in estimating the point we have so far reached in this evolution; it is this question that ‘Received Standard’ begs. If we look at the situation as a whole, we can see a marked decrease in pure Regional Dialects; it does not often happen now, as it certainly used to do, that men from different parts of the country find plain difficulties of meaning in each other’s speech. Moreover, although there are still very many people who speak a clear regional form, though commonly purged of certain extreme habits in vocabulary and construction, there are very many also who, while using regional sounds, in all other respects speak a common tongue. We can say with some confidence that dialects, in the true sense, are rapidly ceasing to exist, and that in their place are a large number of regional ways of speaking a common language. Some of these are, in pronunciation, purely Regional; others seem to represent the growth, over certain extending areas, of forms which are certainly not ‘Received Standard’ but as certainly not the old local dialects in their earlier forms. Within these two kinds, which in individual cases will be seen to be a continuous shading and not a sharp distinction on either side of a line, the majority of English speakers in this country are contained. But the terms offered to describe them, Regional Dialects and Modified Standard, are both misleading. More accurately they are Regional and Modified Regional forms. ‘Modified Regional’ is, however, very different in sense from ‘Modified Standard’, which assumes that everybody in this category is aiming at the class dialect but failing to achieve it.

The next stage in development is, of course, Inter-Regional, and here the real problems of a common language arise. We have seen that ‘Received Standard’ had as one of its leading elements the habit of where possible pronouncing by the spelling. However misleading this might be, as a principle, it was obviously a general and permanent development. In so far as ‘Received Standard’ included changes made on this principle, its changes have been widely accepted, even in many recognisably regional forms. But, in other respects, ‘Received Standard’ was simply the development of a particular Southern form, and it came to include certain purely class elements. Thus, while in certain respects ‘Received Standard’ was in the general line of evolution, in other respects it moved away from this, by the fact of its becoming identified with a particular class. Of course it became entrenched in education, and then in broadcasting, and so had wide effects on the national development, but at the same time the ordinary linguistic process was operating, through the other kinds of social change. Indeed, in becoming identifiable as ‘Public School English’, which is in fact its more accurate description, certain barriers were raised against its general adoption, and these have to be set against the effects in education and broadcasting. In the latter, interestingly, there is already considerable variation, because the class dialect is not universally acceptable. The standard accent of the popular entertainer or commentator is as often pseudo-American as Public School or its derivatives. The class and regional complex is avoided by an imported or synthetic alternative.

It looked, indeed, for a time, as if Public School English would be the effective Inter-Regional Speech, but it now seems quite certain that it will not be, in the forms then envisaged. Every use of the form for class distinction (and this, of course, has been widespread) reduced its chance of becoming a true common speech. Its identification with power, learning and material success (factors naturally making for its imitation) was countered by strong feelings against it, in the explosive human area of snobbery and resentment. The way things would go was first shown by an interesting adaptation of the ‘orthography of the uneducated’ to an orthography of Public School English (particularly applied to Wyld’s ‘best class’ – officers of the British Regular Army), e.g.:

We head a chahnce of pahchasing that fohm, but a bahd in the hend seemed maw vehluable, evenchalleh.

Here the class form encountered the powerful current of pronunciation by spelling, and of course once the so-called ‘Received Standard’ could be used not only for comic representation but also as a distinction from the ‘correctness’ of pronunciation by spelling, its chances of common adoption, in spite of all the powerful factors in its favour, were small. What in fact has happened is that Public School English, too hastily called Received Standard, has itself begun to shed certain sounds found wrong on the ‘correctness’ principle, and the actual inter-regional speech that is developing is a combination of old ‘Received Standard’ and some of the more important Modified Regional forms. The breathed sound which acknowledges the ‘h’ in ‘what’ and similar words, counted as not Received Standard in the 1920s, is becoming normal, even in ‘Received Standard’ speakers, because of the spelling. The ‘r’-sound, also, is making its way back, though as yet not emphatically, and the vowel-sound in words like ‘more’ and ‘bird’ is noticeably changing, again under the influence of the spelling. The crucial ‘a’ sounds are also changing, so that while ‘chance’ is still ‘chahnce’ the length of this stress is reduced, while in words like ‘had’ the tendency towards an ‘e’-sound has been reversed. The crucial factor in all this, more important than the dropping or softening of sounds which had been identified as ridiculous, is the speaking-by-spelling of a more widely educated society. ‘Received Standard’, as defined thirty years ago, is becoming a local form, for there are now many thousands of people who do not make these distinctive sounds yet who speak an English that has lost any obvious regional identification. The change is more marked among men than women, but already it is fair to say that the sounds crucially identified as ‘Received Standard’ are passing into local and historical use. And we cannot say that ‘Received Standard’, as the best form, is evolving. The fact is that we are at still too early a stage, in the development of a common pronunciation, for anything like a standard to have been introduced.

There are now not only inter-regional but international problems in this. To American ears ‘Received Standard’ was always unacceptable, and there has in fact been a considerable interaction between American and English forms, with American predominating. Not only have hundreds of American words, speech forms and pronunciations been taken, often unnoticed, into English, but American speech has had an influence on almost all kinds of traditional English speaking, and it is worth noticing that it works against every single sound that was identified as peculiarly ‘Received Standard’. Moreover, by giving other accents to power and material success, it has deprived Public School English of its former monopoly in this respect. The process is still going on, but it is not simply the Americanisation of English; it is, rather, the addition of another factor to the long and complicated history of spoken English.

It is by no means certain that any one form will emerge as universal, but in any case what matters is that we should reduce the area of mystification and prejudice. The U and non-U controversy, at its popular level, was pathetic rather than dangerous, for it showed, in the end, how shifting the class boundaries, in this case of vocabulary, are. There will doubtless always be people and groups who are anxious to show that they are not as other men, but the deep processes of the growth of a great international language will not be much affected by them, though they may for a time be blurred. We want to speak as ourselves, and so elements of the past of the language, that we received from our parents, are always alive. At the same time, in an extending community, we want to speak with each other, reserving our actual differences but reducing those that we find irrelevant. We are almost past the stage of difficulties of meaning, in ordinary discourse, though with a limited educational system there are still serious and unnecessary difficulties wherever the world of organised learning is touched. For the rest, the problems are of emotional tension, and these, while certain to continue, can be much reduced if we learn to look at them openly and rationally, with the rich and continuing history of English as our basis of understanding. ‘Vor bote a man conne frense me telth of him lute’, wrote Robert of Gloucester, noting the social superiority of the Norman French of the masters of the time, but the language he noted as superior is even farther from us, in the same country, than the language in which he noted it. Nor did history end around 1800, or in the 1920s. The living language offers its deciding witnesses.