The Spectator, the politics of social networks, and language standardisation in eighteenth-century England

Abstract

Introduction It is accepted as a commonplace in the study of the history of modern Standard English that the grammar writers of the second half of the eighteenth century were instrumental in erecting the English grammar as a prescriptive device. Left unexamined, this commonplace obscures the social and political motivations of what amounts to a kind of prescriptivist movement in the period. In addition, it does not indicate the impact that this apparent movement has on speakers and writers. In this essay, I will consider the question of how the prescriptive grammarians came to identify a particular version or variety of English as a basic model for the construction of a Standard English. Did they discover its identifying features and exempla in the fabric of particular texts produced by specific writers? And if they did happen upon their model in this fashion, how did they choose these texts and these writers as appropriate sources of information for the variety that they would designate as prestigious, and prescribe and transmit as a standard? Put more succinctly, how did good linguistic practices become manifest to the eighteenth-century prescriptivists as sufficiently prestigious to be identified, selected and thereafter transmitted as a norm? There is no simple answer to this set of questions. I will argue that the prescriptive grammarians took as one of the bases of their model of Standard English the periodical The Spectator .

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