Because national identity is not a permanent or static possession, it has to be continually reinvented. Although Grillo (1989: 44) has argued that there was an almost total lack of attention to any relationship between language and national identity in England, I believe he is mistaken. The role played by language in England's changing conceptions of itself can be seen in both the construction of a glorious past for the language as well as in ever increasing prognostications of a bright future as world language. English, like England, was to have its conquests. As Dean Trench wrote (1855):
What can more clearly point out our ancestors' native land and ours as having fulfilled a glorious past, as being destined for a glorious future, than that they should have acquired for themselves and for those who came after a clear, a strong, a harmonious, a noble language?
The energetic activities of intellectuals such as James Murray, Joseph Wright, author of the English Dialect Dictionary, and others were central to the shaping of European nationalism in the nineteenth century, a time when, as Pedersen (1931-43) puts it, 'national wakening and the beginnings of linguistic science go hand in hand'. Historians such as Seton-Watson (1977) and Anderson (1991) have observed how nineteenth-century Europe was a golden age of vernacularising lexicographers, grammarians, philologists and dialectologists. Their projects too were conceived as children of empires.
Willinsky (1994) singles out the OED, in particular, as the 'last great gasp of British imperialism'. It captured a history of words that fit well with the ideological needs of the emerging nation-state. As Willinsky observes (1994: 194), the OED speaks to a 'particular history of national self-definition during a remarkable period in the expansion and collapse of the British empire'. Murray's tenure as editor of the OED coincided roughly with the period which historian Eric Hobsbawm (1987) has called the Age of Empire, 1875-1914. With the OED, Murray and other editors were engaged in establishing England and Oxford University Press's claim on the English language and the word trade more generally.
Britain's expansionist policy brought with it increasing exposure to other languages. The British presence in India awakened the attention of scholars to Sanskrit. In 1786 Sir William Jones gave a speech to the Philological Society which was to provide a firm basis for the comparative-historical study of language. In 1839 De Quincey called for a monument of learning and patriotism to be erected to the English language in the form of a history of English from its earliest rudiments. The Early English Text Society subsequently founded by F. J. Furnivall was to produce a canon of texts. Such works would help solidify the unity of nation and language and their continuity from the earliest times. Sentiments such as these were at least partly responsible for the replacement of the term Anglo-Saxon by Old English.
While colonial expansion was underway, there was also a need for more civil servants in the service of empire. The opening of the Civil Service to competitive examinations in English language and literature, as recommended by the Trevelyan and Northcote report of 1853 (The Organisation of the Permanent Civil Service), gave impetus to the institutionalisation of English studies. The History of the English Language was treated as distinct from its literature.
Such notions were instrumental in the establishment of what today we might call 'English studies', i. e. the study of English language and literature. It had taken some centuries before people were confident enough about English to deem it worthy of study as a subject for teaching and research. Now that English is so well established as a discipline, we tend to forget that even as late as the nineteenth century it was not recognised as a legitimate subject.
The increasing enlargement of the state education system made the classics-based curriculum increasingly unsuitable for the many new pupils to be encompassed within it. Women and the working classes of both sexes would find the classics too intellectually demanding and needed an easier subject. James Murray actually credited the women's movement direcdy for the appearance of English studies at Oxford in the nineteenth century. 'But for the movement to let women share in the advantages of a university education', he said (Murray 1900: 31), 'it is doubtful whether the nineteenth century would have witnessed the establishment of a School of English Language and Literature at Oxford.'
The English Dialect Society founded in 1873 (and its American counterpart, the American Dialect Society in 1889) were spin-offs of the increasing interest focused on the standard literary language in the curriculum. These projects were motivated by the fear that if work were not begun to record what was non-standard, it would soon disappear. Wyld argued strongly in favour of making the study of the English language a central component in secondary schools. There he believed it would be 'beyond controversy' (1906: 34). Wyld could not, of course, have foreseen just how controversial it would indeed become towards the end of the twentieth century as questions about the canon and standards became a major preoccupation when the Conservative government launched its National Curriculum.
Cameron & Bourne (1988) see the Kingman report (1988), which emerged from the Committee of Inquiry into the Teaching of the English Language set up by the UK Secretary of State for Education as a key ideological text about the state of the English language and its relation to the state of the nation. This proposal to make the teaching of English the cornerstone of a national curriculum whose aim is to produce a common culture has to be understood in historical context as a continuation of the spirit of the earlier Newbolt Report (1921). It too had advocated mass education in English language and literature as the basis for a common national culture so that (cited in Crowley 1991: 201):
The English people might learn as a whole to regard their own language, first with respect and then with a genuine feeling of pride and affection. More than any mere symbol it is actually a part of England; to maltreat it or deliberately debase it would be seen to be an outrage. . . Such a feeling for our native language would be a bind of union between classes and beget the right kind of national pride.
Yet the National Curriculum was also a reaction to the liberal ideas of the 1960s and 1970s as well. Kenneth Baker, Secretary for Education at the time the Kingman committee was set up, commented that while few schools taught traditional grammar, little had been put in its place. A central task for Kingman's committee was to equip teachers with a proper model of grammar. Earlier, The Swann Report (1985: 385) had challenged the ethnocentrism of common culture in order to replace it with cultural pluralism, but it made clear at the same time that this conception of culture was to be transmitted through English as the 'central unifying factor in being British'. In its concern with grammar, Kingman harked back to earlier ideology about the connection between language and nation. 'Language above all else is the denning characteristic of an individual, a community, a nation' (Kingman 1988: 43). As Cameron and Bourne point out (1988:159), part of the meaning of Kingman is nostalgia for the good old days of imperial majesty now faded, and part of what a Conservative Party Campaign slogan called 'Making Britain Great Again'.
Thus, on numerous occasions in the past century right down to the present day, the English language would be offered as evidence of the underlying unity that held all together despite superficial differences, particularly when political and cultural crisis threatened. In an interview with Margaret Thatcher when she was Prime Minister (Newsweek 8 October 1990) and stood much to gain from aligning herself with then President Ronald Reagan, she very generously conceded that Shakespeare belonged as much to Americans as to Britons in characterising the 'special relationship' that exists between the United States and Britain. Speaking to an American interviewer, she observed:
The Magna Carta belongs as much to you as it does to us; the writ of habeas corpus belongs as much to you as it does to us. . . There is such a common heritage as well as the language. Shakespeare belongs as much to you as he does to us. . . That is what unites us and has united us - rather more than a philosophy, but history as well, and language and mode of thought.
Indeed, Gramsci (1985: 183-4) observes that:
Every time the question of the language surfaces, in one way or another, it means that a series of other problems are coming to the fore: the formation and enlargement of the governing class, the need to establish more intimate and secure relationships between the governing groups and the national-popular mass, in other words to reorganize the cultural hegemony.
Despite the fact that the Newbolt report claimed it was not advocating the 'teaching of standard English on any grounds of "social superiority'" or 'the suppression of dialect' (cited in Crowley 1991: 205), as Crowley observes, the attempt to create unity by means of a class dialect in contradistinction to other forms of speech which are branded vulgar and provincial, is doomed to defeat because it will reinforce divisions rather than make the differences between standard and non-standard 'gradually disappear' (Newbolt Report, cited in Crowley 1991: 200).
Despite democratic rhetoric from some quarters about making Standard English accessible to the population as a whole through universal education, some always wanted to maintain the exclusivity of the club of Standard English speakers. R. W. Chapman, for instance, in extolling the virtues of Oxford (= Standard) English, admitted he was 'so undemocratic as to believe that the best, in speech as in other things, can never be widely and rapidly disseminated without damage to itself (1932: 560). Already, it was exposed to dangers from both within its ranks as well as without. 'As the speech of a very small minority of English speakers it is obviously exposed to gradual absorption by the surrounding mass and perhaps also to deliberate attack. It is well known that English vocabulary and idiom are undergoing penetration from America and elsewhere. . . Even our grammar is threatened' (1932: 562).
The division between standard and non-standard is symbolic of other fault lines as large as those of class and nation; increasingly, race and gender are at stake too. Debates about language are thus really about issues of race, gender, class or culture, as can be seen in the controversy over 'political correctness', which has also been carried out largely on the battlefield of language. While proposals for reforming sexist language are considerably older than the political correctness controversy, they have become caught up in it, as can be seen in American prescriptivist John Simon's lumping together of a variety of groups discriminated against on grounds of class, race, sexual orientation, sex and ethnicity. He (1980: xiv) objects to the 'notion that in a democratic society language must accommodate itself to the whims, idiosyncrasies, dialects, and sheer ignorance of underprivileged minorities, especially if these happened to be black, Hispanic, and later on, female or homosexual'. Simon's rejection of language reform is really a statement about keeping women (and other minority groups) accountable to white middle-class male standards by maintaining the linguistic status quo. A society or nation in control of itself is in control of its grammar - and in control of its women!
The OEUs creators had defined themselves as the white, male property-owning centre of a British Empire. The dictionary served to codify a history traced through the nation's best writers. Earlier, the act of translation of the Bible into English reflected the connection between language, nation and empire. The dissemination of the English Bible to Britain's colonies made it look as if English were the very language spoken by God. At the centre of this process of national and cultural self-definition was the act of citation. The Bible is at the top of the list of books cited in the OED. The dictionary derives part of its authority and power in defining the language by the process of exclusion of texts and authors. What was included authorised a view of the English language that was in line with England's hegemony in the last century.
The fact that the grammarians and lexicographers who created Standard English and set forth its rights and wrongs were male has not gone unnoticed by modern feminists such as Dale Spender (1980) and Julia Penelope (1990). A much earlier male commentator, Elias Molee, repelled by linguistic snobbery remarked in 1888 (p. 201): 'It looks to me as if the English language were constructed by some eccentric, rich and learned bachelors who had nothing else to do but hunt up the meanings of words in dictionaries and to spell'. Bailey (1991: 274), who cites this remark, notes parenthetically that this description applied apdy to Molle's successors, the Fowler brothers! Symbolically, the first thing Becky Sharp in Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1848) jettisons from the coach which takes her away from school is Dr Johnson's Dictionary. In the twentieth century feminists such as Mary Daly (1987) would write their own dictionaries. Daly describes her Websters' First New Intergalactic Wickedayy of the English Language as a wickedary, a dictionary for women spun by websters. She plays here on the original meaning of the word websters 'female weaver' and the fact that the family name Webster is still closely associated with dictionary making in the US.
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