English Language
Teaching the history of the English language: changing attitudes and expanding opportunities
Author
Wim van der Wurff
Newcastle University
What's the use of that?
Teaching the history of English? What’s the use of that? In the 1970s and early 1980s, this question was often asked but the answers usually given did not exactly sparkle with enthusiasm. Methods and materials used were often old-fashioned and the ultimate aim of teaching the history of English appeared to be … well, that students should know a lot about the history of English. The last two-and-half decades, however, have seen real change in methods and aspirations in this area of English-language studies. Attitudes to the subject are more positive and opportunities for it have significantly expanded, in terms of how the subject is studied, how it relates to other areas of language study and how it can be taught. In what follows I briefly trace this development and its consequences.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, studying the history of English was, for many lecturers and students of English language, a somewhat dull and gloomy activity. Hanging over it was the heavy hand of philological tradition, with the a-, i-, u- and vocalic stems of Old English and their Proto-Germanic precursors, its ‘ash 1’ and ‘ash 2’ (disconcertingly always manifested as one and the same sound in the Old English texts normally read), the orthoepic evidence for the Great Vowel Shift and the spelling niceties of the ‘AB language’ (a dialect of Middle English that, in spite of the whimsical name invented for it by wordsmith supreme J.R.R. Tolkien, is a hard nut to crack for any but the most dedicated scholar). Much of the field habitually looked backwards, to the halcyon days of the Neogrammarians, who one century earlier had formulated bold hypotheses about mechanisms of language change and had shown how these could shed light on intricate details of linguistic forms and their reconstructed shapes. In contrast, there was little Neo to boast about in contemporary work on the history of English, which seemed to be suffering from severely arrested development. A further element of backward-lookingness was present in the strong focus on what happened to the language in the Old and Middle English periods, which were considered to be the ones of greatest interest for the study of change
The language of days gone by
Unfortunately, this interest in the language of days long gone by was not shared by great numbers of students. These might be more taken with the excitement palpable in other areas in English language studies, such as generative syntax and phonology, sociolinguistics, discourse studies and computer linguistics, all of them still new fields at this time, which were undergoing rapid practical and theoretical development and offering prospects of a real understanding of the nature of language, its place in society and the principles governing its use. Not surprisingly, teaching the language of the distant past came under fire from those doubting its intellectual and social relevance. Certainly on the continent, it was not unusual in this period for teachers of the history of the language to adopt a markedly defensive attitude to their subject.
Thus, studying English language and literature at the University of Amsterdam in the late 1970s, I and my fellow-students were at one point given a document setting out explicitly the need for a graduate in English to know about its linguistic history, because of its intellectual worth, the light it shed on literary productions of earlier centuries and its essential place in the make-up of a well-rounded Anglicist. The following year I witnessed the same thing happening at a module on Old Norse that I was auditing, where very much the same points were made in response to what must have been similar pressures. Clearly, historical linguistics was a beleaguered field in those days. Some of these pressures indeed continued into the 1990s – examples and responses can be found in many of the papers in Fischer and Ritt (1997).
