Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [262]
William Caxton, the first English printer and publisher, faced the problem in the most extreme form, and was highly influential in solving it. We can predict what the answer would be: overwhelmingly (as we shall note in Chapter 13, p. 529) the dialect spoken in a capital city has become the standard for its national language. Before declaring his policy, Caxton did point out the predicament:
Certaynly it is harde to playse every man by cause of dyversite & chaunge of langage. For in these dayes every man that is in ony reputacyon in his countre, wyll utter his commynycacyon and maters in suche maners & termes that fewe men shall understonde theym. And som honest and grete Clerkes have ben wyth me, and desired me to wryte the moste curyous termes that I coude fynde. And thus bytwene playn, rude & curyous, I stande abasshed. But in my judgemente the comyn terms that be dayli used ben lyghter to be understonde than the olde and auncyent englysshe. And for as moche as the present booke is not for a rude uplondyssh man to laboure therin, ne rede it, but onely for a clerk & a noble gentylman that feleth and understondeth in faytes of armes, in love, & in noble chyvalrye, therfor in a meane bytwene bothe I have reduced & translated this sayd booke in to our englysshe, not ouer rude ne curyous, but in suche termes as shall be understanden, by goddys grace, accordynge to my copye.12
Caxton, then, claimed to be following a classic English policy of reasonable compromise. But what he was actually doing was converting texts into London English. This is clear, for example, in the passage that begins this section, where the text that John de Trevisa had originally written is set out above the version published a century later by Caxton. Examined closely, it is a fairly slight set of changes—here using they for hy, eliminating the verbal ending -ep in the plural, and replacing b and z throughout with th and gh—but it is still amazing what a difference it makes in bringing a text into the ambit of readability for a speaker of modern English, even now, some five hundred years on. Standard English, as we now know it, still bears the mark of those decisions taken by Caxton and his contemporaries.
Once this decision was taken, the growing availability of printed literature, in concert with growing powers of literacy among the public, strongly reinforced use of the particular dialect that was being printed. It helped that the main sources of book-writing in English, Oxford and Cambridge, were also located in the same broad dialect area, often known as southern West Midlands.* Printing, once enough people could read and did read, became the first of the mass media, with the polarising, ‘winner takes all’ effects now familiar from TV culture. People inevitably learnt from the books they read how English should be written, and the King’s English thereby became the people’s English too, at least on the page. ‘The English tongue’, for the first time, was being defined.
This process was not confined to English. Almost precisely comparable processes of language definition were under way at the same time for other languages of western Europe, notably French, Spanish and German, which in speech had been at least as dialectally riven as English. French typographers in the first half of the sixteenth century begin to give rules for spelling and use of accents, beginning the task—one never completed—of pruning the vast numbers of consonants traditionally written by purists but never pronounced in that language. Spanish, whose pronunciation had changed less