London: The Biography полностью

There were other forms of speech, too, which rendered the language of the city more heterogeneous and polyglot. One linguistic survey of the registers of London English, from the last decade of the thirteenth century to the beginning of the fifteenth, reveals a vast range of sources and borrowings. In the previously unstudied archives of London Bridge, generally dealing with the employment of Thames fishermen, there are elements of Old English, Anglo-Norman and medieval Latin as well as Middle Dutch and Middle Low German; this might be considered merely the work of educated clerks transcribing the rough tongue into a more polished and formal style, but in fact all the evidence suggests that there was a truly “mixed” or “macaronic” style caused by “the interaction between different registers of London English.” The author of Sources of London English, Laura Wright, has also pointed out that Londoners “who used French and Latin habitually in their work would in all probability retain the terminology of these languages even when discussing or thinking about their work in English.” We do not need to imagine Thames fishermen, however, speaking classical Latin. Their Latin would have been some form of argot or patois which included terms inherited from the time of the Romans. The addition of French is predictable enough, after the Conquest, when all these tongues became part of the fabric of living speech.

There were, however, broad patterns of change. During the fourteenth century the dominant East Saxon voice of London was displaced by that from the Central and East Midlands; there is no single reason for this shift, although it is likely that over several generations the more wealthy or educated merchant families had emigrated from that region into the city. There was in the same period another essential linguistic change, when this different and apparently more “educated” language inaugurated a slow process of standardisation. By the end of the fourteenth century there had emerged a single dialect, known as “London English,” which in turn became what the editor of the Cambridge History of the English Language calls “modern literary Standard English.” Writing standards were progressively set by the scribes of Chancery, too, with their emphasis upon correctness, uniformity and propriety.

So the East and Central Midland dialect became the language spoken by educated Londoners and increasingly the language of the English generally. What happened, then, to the East Saxon dialect which had previously been the native tongue of the native Londoner? To a certain extent it was displaced but, more importantly, it was demoted. One of the central prejudices against its use lay in the fact that it had always been spoken and rarely, if ever, written down. Thus these “vocal cries” were filled with “Incongruities and Barbarism.” By the sixteenth century this difference between “standard” and what had become “Cockney” English was well enough understood to be the subject of critical attention, but the salient fact was its survival.