The second lecture of the IAS Invited Lecture Series in Multilingual History of English, organised by the Faculty of English and convened by professors Matylda Włodarczyk and Marcin Krygier, will take place on March 25, 2022 at 3.00 p.m. CET.
Dr. Laura Wright (University of Cambridge)
“Medieval Multilingualism in the History of English”
Abstract: Multilingualism has played an important role in the development of Standard English but previous generations of scholars downplayed the multilingual element in its history to the extent of ignoring plentiful evidence of late medieval institutional codeswitching altogether. Codeswitched and trilingual record-keeping was the normal practice of prestigious institutions as well as of individuals in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, although no history of English mentions it and little of it is published. I demonstrate my claim that multilingualism led to Standard English: that Standard English is the descendant of coalesced supralocal Englishes containing codeswitched Anglo-Norman vocabulary and spelling-conventions.
I then track the ‘monolingual origin’ story which is still repeated in textbooks today, which is that Standard English supposedly developed mainly from the dialect of the ‘East Midlands’, or ‘Central Midlands’, or ‘Chancery English’, or a mixture of the above, depending on the textbook. The ‘monolingual origin’ story goes back to the early 1870s, and I consider why the monolingual-source explanation has dominated for so long.
Finally, I present some modern English data in order to demonstrate the non-high register of Anglo-Norman lexis, as textbooks often claim that Anglo-Norman was constrained to the higher registers when in fact it was used for widespread purposes including land-management.
The lecture will be held on Zoom. Please register at https://forms.office.com/r/U8s2t8CmWB to receive the link to the online meeting.