I teach a course called English Language Change. What I try to do in this course is, of course, to give an overview of the history of English but to do this in a way that is informed by theories of language change. In my mind, this isn’t a particularly weird approach, but it doesn’t seem it is very common. In any case, at least the standard course books for History of English courses don’t offer the combination of historical linguistic theory and English-specific examples that I would be after. From talking to colleagues, I understand I’m not the only person frustrated by this.
Current setup. My course is seven weeks, with four contact hours per week. I use one of these hours for a lecture in which I present a particular bit of theory of language change: on sound change, grammaticalisation, new dialect formation, etc. Two hours are spent on student-run seminars/presentations on “special topics”. They tackle a specific language change in the history of English and organise a class on it. Topics include the Great Vowel Shift, th-fronting, the loss of case, and Celtic influence on English. The remaining hour is for exercises. My favourite is where I give them an Old English and a Present Day English form of the same word, and the students have to list the changes and intermediate forms to get from one to the other.
The focus in my own teaching, and in the course as a whole, would probably be on concepts of language change, as applied to English. But the course book I’m using — the classic Baugh and Cable’s A History of the English Language — is probably about 100% theory-free. (Alternatives that I have looked at have the same issue.) The book does talk about language in a formal-linguistically informed way, but it does so exclusively for the Old and Early Middle English periods. As soon as we hit texts that we can read with few problems, texts that suffer from “slightly archaic diction” and “poor spelling” at most, linguistic theory is out the window entirely, and what we have is literally a history of the English language. External history. Sociology of language, definitely, but language change, not so much.
The root of the problem. I stumbled upon a likely cause of the ‘problem’ — although that is a bit of an overstatement — when I read Richard J. Watts’ Language Myths and the History of English (CUP, 2011) earlier this year. (As a shameless bit of self-promotion: my review of this book will appear in the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics in a few months.) Watts’s book is essentially a j’accuse of standard language ideology. It shows very effectively how from the 17th or 18th century onwards, ‘language’ was ‘standard language’. And from that same period, Standard English was codified and fixed. It did not change; and even if it did, we have always been at war with Eurasia. There is no longer a need for a theory of language change. What we get is a focus on how Standard English was spread and accepted.
(Funnily, incidentally, Watts falls victim to the same watershed in his book. The language myths that pertain to the Old and Middle English periods are much more linguistic in scope, i.e. they deal with the form of the language, but the ones from the later periods are much more a social history of England rather than of English.)
The boring history of English. We can also approach the question from the other direction. Teaching theories of language change combined with the history of English is difficult because, firstly, theory wants a thematic rather than a chronological focus, and secondly, the history of English is, quite frankly, relatively boring. The mismatch between theory and chronology is quite clear. You want to talk about sound change, for example, and discuss speaker-based, listener-based and system-based approaches. This works quite well in isolation, but the obvious examples — Grimm’s Law and Verner’s Law, late Old English quantity shifts, the loss of rhoticity, th-fronting, and an eclectic selection of greater and lesser vowel shifts — are from quite different periods in the history of English. Conversely, a chronological focus lets us see relations between changes (reduction of unstressed syllables, the loss of case, constituent order changes) that at least in a relatively entry-level course, a theory focus masks.
Most introductions to historical linguistics have copious examples from languages other than English. Lyle Campbell’s book has lots of North American languages, and Larry Trask’s has lots of Basque. There are English examples, of course, but most are not. (There is an argument that it won’t hurt to look beyond the one language you’re actually studying, and I agree, but that’s not the point of the course.) We’re dealing with the simple fact that the changes that have happened in the history of English are only a small and oddly recurring subset of what is theoretically possible, which makes a thematic focus mostly irrelevant.
An English-only problem? I don’t have an awful lot of experience with History of A Language courses for languages other than English, but a quick survey suggests that this isn’t an English-only problem. Schönfeldt’s historical grammar of Dutch gives a (very!) detailed list of phonological and morphological changes, but no information on why the changes occurred. It also doesn’t have so much external language (hi)stories, but for that we have the out-of-print Het verhaal van een taal. My other experience is with Norwegian. Here there’s Torp and Vikør’s Hovuddrag i norsk språkhistorie, which is split in a part for internal and a part for external history, but again without any meaningful engagement with theory.
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In order to fully appreciate the history of a language, we need a focus on three things: (a) a more or less chronological overview of changes as they happened, (b) a similarly chronological historical sociolinguistic overview of the circumstances in which the changes happened and progressed, and (c) some idea of why the changes might occur and progress the way they do. I don’t have the specialisation, the time or the stamina to write a coherent and theoretically informed textbook on English Language Change, but if anyone wants to give it a go, I can guarantee the publisher a sales volume of about 20 copies a year.
Anyone?
Remco Knooihuizen 