Between Homonymy and Polysemy: The Origins and Career of the English Form Dialect in the Sixteenth Century

Abstract

AbstractThe emergence of the form dialect in early modern English is often mentioned in histories of the language, but important as it is, the evidence for it has never been analyzed as a whole, and its treatment in the revised OED entry for dialect leaves room for modifications. This article presents and re-evaluates the evidence for dialect in sixteenth-century English sources. It demonstrates that there were two homonyms with this form, one a shortening of English dialectics and one a borrowing from post-classical Latin dialectus, from its Greek etymon διάλεκτος, and, less often, from French dialecte. After treating dialect ‘dialectics’ briefly, it explores the known attestations of dialect ‘kind of language’, showing the range of senses in which this word could be used, and the ways in which it can be shown to have spread from one user of English to another, beginning with one clearly defined expatriate learned circle in the 1560s, entering more general learned use in the 1570s and 1580s, and becoming a fully naturalized literary English word in the 1590s. The paper therefore offers a detailed case-study of the naturalization of a learned word in early modern English and also contributes to the history of the conceptualization of language variation in sixteenth-century England.