Modern geolinguistic tenets and the diffusion of linguistic innovations in late Middle English.

Publication: Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: international review of English Studies

Publication Date: 06-AUG-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Adam Mickiewicz University Press

ABSTRACT

In this paper we intend to reconstruct some of the geographical aspects that may have contributed to the diffusion of linguistic innovations from London to the rest of the country in the late Middle English period. We accept the geolinguistic tenet that interpersonal communicative contacts between potential adopters are basic in the diffusion of linguistic innovations and that these are (and possibly were) remarkably facilitated in urban centres. Particularly three factors are of paramount importance in the study of the spatial diffusion of linguistic innovations: a) the population density of the areas involved and its distribution; b) the physical distance between them; and c) the distance or similarity of the linguistic systems peculiar to each area. We believe that the demographic evidence afforded by the Poll tax returns of the 14th century, combined with the specific analysis of geographical communications in late medieval England, may allow us to establish a hypothetical 'gravity model', in the geolinguistic sense, and to speculate on the interurban courses followed by linguistic innovations from London throughout the rest of the country.

1. Introduction: Standardisation and geography

Recent approaches to the subject of standardisation tend to question the assumption that a single ancestor underlies the development of standard English. Instead, it is widely acknowledged, in accordance with variationist methodology, that the process comprises the "selection" and "acceptance" or "diffusion" of features from a range of social and regional varieties -- including those which, according to Samuels (1963, 1972: 165-170), were promoted to the status of incipient standard norms at different localities from the late thirteenth century. As a result, the standardisation of English is no longer seen as a "linear, unidirectional development", but as "a set of processes which occur in a set of social spaces, developing at different rates in different registers, in different idiolects..." (Wright 2000: 6; see also: Wright 1996; Hope 2000: 51). As regards the "acceptance" or "diffusion" of historical standard norms, the conclusions of recent sociolinguistic studies on the spread of linguistic innovations o ver the social space have proved to be quite useful. In this way, several studies have correlated graphemic, morphological and syntactic characteristics of late Middle and early Modem standard Englishes with the reconstructed pyramid of social ranks and networks in these periods. This process has been related to mobile individuals from the middle echelons of society who could have established loose-knit networks in largely populated towns, like London and Calais (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 1996; Rissanen 2000; Conde Silvestre and Hernandez Campoy, fc.). Concerning the spatial diffusion of incipient standard variants, the proposals of human geography and geolinguistics may also be considered in connection with historical stages of language development. As Britain has stated "[t]he analysis of spatiality is critically important if we wish to fully understand the processes involved in the diffusion of linguistic innovations" (1991: 25 1-252), and this tenet, in our opinion, should hold for both present and past states.

Parallels between the historical conditions in medieval and early renaissance Europe and those of modern underdeveloped countries are often drawn. This procedure is sometimes adopted in historical geography, which may underestimate the demographic and functional roles of urban nuclei in earlier periods, in view of the existence of demographic distances between a limited number of relatively large concentrations of people and a scattered, more or less even, distribution of population in the country. If this is so, the process of "epidemic" or "contagion" diffusion, traditionally represented by the wave model, may have been more widespread in earlier times than nowadays, so that linguistic innovations in late Middle English or early Modem English would have radiated from a focal area and reached physically nearby locations before those at greater distances. Nevertheless, the few studies on the geographical diffusion of innovations in earlier periods of the history of English do not wholly support this perspecti ve. Though intuitively, Samuels, for instance, had already stated in 1972 that even if "gradual changes best apply to areas where the population is distributed evenly ... in the case of changes leading to a regional or national standard those natural expectations may not be fulfilled" (1972: 90). Samuels' intuition has been supported by some research which attempts to diversify standardisation into various processes of "supralocalisation", involving linguistic features of different regional and social origins. The perspectivism granted by the adoption of this vantage point allows experts to appreciate diverse changes taking place in particular regions and localities at any given time and eventually helps them to trace the spread of certain features from the area of origin to other ones (Nevalainen 2000: 329-330). For instance, Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg have reconstructed the geographical diffusion from the late 15th century to the 17th of some morphological characteristics from the north of England. Am ong other variables, they track the spread southwards of the verbal form are (vs. be), the third person singular present indicative -es (vs. -eth) and the relative the which (vs. which) across a number of texts from East Anglia, London and the Court included in the Corpus of Early English Correspondence for the period 1460-1680. They conclude that are reached East Anglia earlier than London, whence it finally extended to the Court, following the expected pattern of regular wave-like diffusion (Nevalainen 2000: 348). However, Londoners seem to have accepted -es and the which earlier than East Anglians in a kind of "dialect hopping process" that may be related to geographical factors like demography, patterns of migration, etc. (Nevalainen 2000: 347-350; Nevalainen and Raumolin and Brunberg 2000: 305-322) (1).

It seems that population geography may have played a role in the spatial diffusion of English linguistic innovations during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and that a hierarchical model of diffusion, typical of modern urban societies, might have coexisted in these periods with the expected wave-like model. One reason for this assumption is that interpersonal contacts between potential adopters are basic for linguistic diffusion and these are (and possibly were) remarkably facilitated in urban centres, which, to quote Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg, "are instrumental in promoting dialect mixture and in spreading linguistic innovations" (2000: 299). As a result, the historical diffusion of linguistic innovations would have been not only a question of physical distance, like the wave-model proposes, but also, like modern geolinguistics assumes, aspects like population size and its spatial distribution (concentration and dispersion), as well as the demographic and functional roles of urban centres and their respective interaction (communication networking), may help to understand why two given localities in the past shared or not certain linguistic features, or why a given innovation appeared and spread to a centre C from a centre B rather than from centre A (Hernandez Campoy 1999a: 149-150; 1999b: 7-11) (2).

2. Objectives

In this paper we intend to reconstruct some of the geographical aspects that may have contributed to a hypothetical hierarchical diffusion of innovations in the late Middle English period. We believe that the reconstruction of demographic evidence from the late 14th century combined with the analysis of communications in late medieval England may allow us to establish a hypothetical "gravity model", in the geolinguistic sense, and help to theorize on the interurban courses followed by linguistic features emanated from London -- one of the most innovative areas in late Middle English -- to the rest of the country. Our aim is basically speculative since, at this stage, we do not intend to correlate the model with linguistic evidence; however, we expect that it draws our attention to the demographic and functional importance of some urban centres in this period and, by doing this, we may establish the background for a comparison with the relationship between geography and language in the later history of English .

The process whereby late Middle English innovations were diffused from London to the rest of the country is related to the importance of this city in the late Middle Ages. London became a centre for the exportation of corn, wool and textiles, within a large international network that spread into the Netherlands and the North Sea, to such an extent that commerce, manufactures and national wealth started to be concentrated in the area (Keene 2000: 99; see also: Beier and Finley (eds.) 1985; Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 1989: 106). Additionally, the progressive centralization of the state and the "extensive authority of the Crown as the source of justice, peace and economic regulation" (Keene 2000: 99) contributed to the functional relevance of London throughout the rest of the country. Such prosperity is reflected in demography: population raised from around 35,000 people and a population density of 56.2 sq/mile in 1377, when London was still part of the county of Middlesex, to nearly 80,000 in 1545 (86.7 s q/mile) when the metropolitan area of London had annexed Westminster and Southwark-Lambeth (Russell 1948: 285). It is well-known that the increase in population was due to the attraction of a growing immigration from all over the country, and specially from the north: people in temporal business, like political, legal or financial errands, and "betterment migrants" in search of social advancement, were attracted to the metropolis. This population mixture created a fluid social structure that favoured the consolidation and diffusion of certain language changes (Conde Silvestre and Hernandez Campoy, fc.). The role of London as a focus of...

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