Dictionaries and Grammars

Abstract

During the Romantic period the English language was, as always, a field of struggle between different interests. Those dominating the professions, institutions, and commerce of writing and print developed a ‘standard’ and ‘national’ form of English that in fact embodied their values and served their interests. This process had two broad aspects, repeated elsewhere in forming nation states: a ‘standard’ written form was consolidated by the late eighteenth century; then a ‘standard’ spoken form was created based on it. This was eventually known as the ‘King's’ or ‘Queen's’ English or ‘received pronunciation’ approved by cultural gatekeepers such as teachers, editors, publishers, critics, and journalists, and, after the Romantic period, state schools, cultural foundations, government departments, and so on. Both the written and spoken ‘standard’ were the social and political instrument of those who invented them, largely the professional middle class who, by the nature of their work, were people of writing, as both experts in various kinds of writing, from sermons to contracts, manuals to legislation, treatises to constitutions, legal briefs to literature. Standard English enabled its possessors, a minority scattered across nation and empire, to constitute themselves as an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 2006), with similar culture, language, and interests. It enabled them to presume to have a unique cultural and social, and hence political authority. The standard implicitly relegated ‘non‐standard’ Englishes, from regional dialects to class‐based sociolects, to ‘sub‐standard’, and implied that users of ‘non‐standard’ were merely local in identity while possessors of the standard language were a national class. The establishment of ‘national’ standard English implied the existence of a ‘national’ identity, the necessary basis of a nation state and, by extension, of an empire.