Introduction: Lower class language use in the 19th century

Abstract

Abstract ‘In looking back upon the history of ordinary people, we are not merely trying to give it a retrospective political significance which it did not always have, we are trying more generally to explore an unknown dimension of the past.’ (Hobsbawm 1998: 270) The historiography of modern Western languages has traditionally concentrated on unification and standardization processes. This approach was deeply rooted in 19th and early 20th century (language) ideologies and (language) politics. The language discourse in many Western countries displayed a remarkable collaboration of linguists with politicians, historians and writers in constructing a picture of unified nations with autonomous cultural, especially literary and linguistic, traditions that were sometimes projected backwards to the Middle Ages and beyond. Hence, generations of scholars and teachers have presented language history as a long march toward a uniform standard. Variation and other linguistic digressions were usually either ignored or stigmatised as corrupted language and not considered as suitable data for linguistic research. Up to the end of the 20th century, many textbooks on national language histories were dominated by this teleological view, portraying ‘classical’ authors as role models for language norms and style. As such, language history was largely reduced to the study of literary language, often coinciding with the high variety employed and received by only a tiny minority of the population. ‘Non-standard’ variation – let alone language use from the non-elite – was usually regarded as corrupt and vulgar and, in an act of ‘sanitary purism’ (Milroy 2005, 324–326) or ‘verbal hygiene’ (Cameron 1995), simply cleansed from textbooks.