To bring my language near to the language of men? Dialect and Dialect Use in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: Some Observations

Abstract

The rhetoric of radical Romantic writers that a democraticisation in written language was taking place has been supported by later critics, including Bakhtin. This view is difficult to sustain. The Romantic period, due to the spread of education, was one where use of dialect in writing became inherently knowing.Keywords: Bakhtin, dialect, education, Romanticism, standard, Wordsworth.Pre-modern language attitudesSince at least the discovery of writing there has always been a perception of difference, of the other, in relation to different varieties; often this perception has been based on positive attitudes towards the language of power-wielders and dismissive of the rural and far away, as can be seen in the case of English, for instance, in Chaucer's use of the perception of northern dialect in his Reeve's Tale (although here the linguistic attitudes plotted are, typically for Chaucer, subtle) or, more markedly, in the use of a stereotypical bumpkin Kentish (or West Country) dialect in Shakespeare's King Lear and other works. Outside of literature, the well-attested surprise of contemporary commentators at Sir Walter Raleigh's use of rustic Devon dialect at the royal court could also be cited (as discussed, for instance, by Baugh and Cable 1993: 244-45).But this is missing the point somewhat. Before the critical period focussed on in this essay, an elitist view of language use existed. The fully literate minority largely had no desire for their generally standardised language to be replicated by the poor and the provincial. The poor and provincial were expected to speak dialect and leave perfection in speech and in particular writing to those naturally suited by ability and station in life to its pursuit. Something like this view can be found in Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), where an idealised peasantry are either mute providers of the poet's subject matter or express themselves (for thou canst read) through an elegant late Augustan poetic inscription.The modern situation developsIn western Europe, it is the eighteenth century - particularly the middle and late eighteenth century - and the early decades of the nineteenth century which see a fundamental shift in the boundaries of the acceptable use of language in both written and, eventually, spoken domains. This change in awareness led to a number of highly contradictory tendencies both in literary perception and use of language and, more importantly, in the ways in which speakers related to how they spoke and increasingly wrote. This tension is implied in the quotation from Wordsworth's Preface to the 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads, which forms part of the title of this essay. While attempts were made to create, to (mis-)use Bakhtin's term, a polyglossic environment in print (Crowley 1996: Chapter 2), the same views were also creating an environment which imperilled this diversity, replacing it with nearhomogeneity for many and an increasingly self-conscious employment by the new minority, first in writing and then in speech, of dialect features as markers of personal and group identity.The causes for this change are well studied: at heart, they relate to the rise of the (lower) middle classes and their ongoing seizure of power during our period, their well-documented linguistic insecurity and its connection to growing levels of education (as discussed in Millar 2005). The increasing affordability of the products of print capitalism must also be factored in. At the same time, as established religion was replaced by national integration along vertical rather than horizontal lines as the abiding ideology of successful states (Anderson 1983 and Gellner 1983), the idea that one national language, used in writing and speech, became necessary and, indeed, prescriptive. The originally elitist ideas of other varieties being sub-standard were replaced by an ostensibly egalitarian distrust of linguistic diversity. …