Histories of our language used to focus on "standard English". Now, writes Henry Hitchings, they are as likely to draw on rap and advertising as on Keats and Milton
A History of the English Language
edited by Richard Hogg and David Denison Cambridge University Press, 510pp, £75
ISBN 0415280990
The Oxford History of English
edited by Lynda Mugglestone Oxford University Press, 496pp, £30
ISBN 0199263388
What is a history of English? According to Ralph Waldo Emerson, it should be a rummage through the picturesque past, in which we uncover the stories of our ancestors and the fossil remains of their lives' poetry. A more recent perspective, offered by David Crystal in his Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (1995), is that it "promotes a sense of identity and continuity, and enables us to find coherence in many of the fluctuations and conflicts of present-day English language use". Popular accounts often strike a jingoistic note - the global spread of the language is presented as majestic proof of British and American excellence. Scholarly studies, on the other hand, tend to be technical and hard to digest.
The terrain is fraught with hazards. First, rather than being monolithic, English comprises a forest of varieties. These include Irish English, which has existed since 1169, when a polyglot band of adventurers from Pembrokeshire landed near Wexford, as well as Maori English, the West African English spoken in Ghana and Sierra Leone, and recent fusions such as Singlish (spoken in Singapore). Where a history of English might once have focused on its "standard" form, an authoritative telling must now take account of dialects and variants. Furthermore, where it was once acceptable to talk about "the triumph of English", it is now customary to identify the extraordinary spread of the lan-guage as a mark of the ruthless imperialism of Britain and America. At the same time, a subtle version of its history may well give space to the history of languages spoken in England, which is something quite different. So the very idea of a history of English is problematic, and its politics are thorny.
Two new histories cover the usual ground convincingly, yet both offer fresh approaches. Cambridge University Press's A History of the English Language, edited by Richard Hogg and David Denison from the University of Man chester, is firmly grounded in the scholarship and methodology of the magisterial six-volume Cambridge History of the English Language (1992-2001), in which both editors were closely involved. It begins with a 40-page editorial overview, divides the remaining terrain into eight areas - among them phonology and morphology, syntax and standardisation - and proceeds chronologically within each. The Oxford History of English is edited by Lynda Mugglestone, whose particular area of expertise is the 19th century and, above all, the OED. Besides its more pointedly assertive title, it has an overarchingly chronological structure. After a brief introduction, it begins with a chapter entitled "Preliminaries: before English", and concludes with David Crystal's vision of English as it moves "Into the 21st century".
The value of the Cambridge volume's thema- tic approach is that it more obviously illumin- ates change and continuity within a particular domain - for example, the question of where speakers lay the stress on individual words they utter. The organisation of the Oxford history allows a more sustained narrative thread, creating the sense of an unfolding "story" of English - and of English-speaking civilisation. The differences of method do not result in vastly different tellings, and it is by no means insignificant that three scholars have contributed to both volumes: thus in each we find an essay by David Crystal, concerned with modern, global English and its potent, perhaps disquieting, future. The relationship between the two volumes is not exactly adversarial.
The disparity in their prices suggests different audiences - the Cambridge history, being more expensive, will be bought by libraries rather than by word sleuths or fans of Radio 4's The Routes of English. Yet both these books are essentially aimed at an audience of undergraduates and scholars needing a handy one-volume companion. While most of the material they contain is eminently readable, there are many passages of technical discussion that will flummox non-specialists. In the Cambridge history, the best example is the long chapter on syntax, which is dense, prickly and rewarding. In the Oxford history, April McMahon's discussion of the Great Vowel Shift involves a minute exploration of the scholarly debate surrounding changing accents in the 15th and 16th centuries - and is thus a meta-history at least as much as a history.
The most enjoyable writing in both volumes engages with the linguistic dimension of social history as much as with the social dimension of language history. In the Oxford volume, Matthew Townend offers a deliciously succinct treatment of the "contacts and conflicts" between Old English, and the Latin, French and Norse of Britain's invaders. Richard Bailey's discussion of English's interactions with other languages between the Renaissance and the modern period is another example of a penetrating essay that coolly distils a vast amount of information, while Mugglestone contributes a fine chapter on the fertility of Victorian English - compensating for what has to date been very limited treatment of this period.
The Cambridge volume has fewer contributors, and each has more ground to cover; the essays are perhaps not meant to be read straight through, but instead to be consulted, and their manner is less seductive and more fastidiously academic. But there is elegant writing here, and sometimes it is succulent, too, as in Richard Coates's chewy essay on the names of people and places, or Dieter Kastovsky's pacy treatment of vocabulary.
Reading the two works side by side, we can arrive at a pretty clear sense of what is happening to the study of the English language. Technology is playing a leading part. The successful spread of English is increasingly being presented as a less than savoury manifestation of English-speakers' business acumen. Quaint notions of purism are being displaced by a broad-church approach: in the words of one of the Oxford contribu- tors, Clive Upton, "non-standard is not sub-standard". Above all, the margins are being explored more energetically. Today, if you pick up an academic journal relating to English language studies, you will find articles about, say, the teaching of Arabic in Restoration London or teasing as a means of developing social identity among Britain's Bangladeshi girls. Histories of the language have tended to rely heavily on literature for evidence of usage, but now non-literary sources are quarried wherever possible: the best place to see change in action may be an advertisement, a song or a runic inscription, rather than an epic poem or a novel. Both these histories, and the Oxford one especially, include forays into diaries and unpublished correspondence - such as letters written by the Clifts, a working-class Cornish family at the end of the 18th century - to supplement impressions of the linguistic status quo available in printed texts. This is a fresh and valuable approach, and it is likely that future histories will make more extensive use of newspapers, letters, novels, poems, lectures, pamphlets, diaries and broadcasts.
While the impact of computer science on the study of language is palpable in both these histories, they also demonstrate the importance of cogent expository prose. There is a risk that, in the future, those who write about language will be either fluent amateurs or tech-savvy specialists, with an ever-widening gap between the two. Both these volumes answer the need for a history of English that is up-to-date, culturally sensitive, detailed and rigorous. Yet they also, true to Emerson's philosophy, convey some of the lustre, excitement and agony of the past.
Henry Hitchings is the author of "Dr Johnson's Dictionary: the extraordinary story of the book that defined the world" (John Murray)
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