A History of ‘The History of the Language’

Abstract

For historians of the study of language in Britain it has become a commonplace that the eighteenth century, in which the discourses of prescriptivism predominated, was superseded by a nineteenth-century reaction against such discourses. One such historian has declared that, ‘perhaps the greatest legacy of the nineteenth-century philologist was the study of language from an objective point of view, a view that has been adopted by twentieth-century linguists’. The cause of this shift, he argues, is that, ‘for the philologists, the study of language became removed from the social and rhetorical concerns of the eighteenth century, and thus became an abstract and objective study’ (Stalker, 1985, p.45). However, it will be the major contention of this text that no such shift from prescriptivism to descriptivism took place. Rather the study of language in Britain was to be still, in significant respects, as concerned with ‘social and rhetorical concerns’ in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as it had been in the eighteenth. The objectification of language, it will be argued, is a construction of the history of the study of language in Britain that cannot be supported by the evidence. Moreover, it is a discursive construction that serves particular social and rhetorical purposes.

When you speak of a ‘wide eyed presentation of mere facts’, you characterize the true philological attitude …. The appearance of closed facticity which attaches to a philological investigation and places the investigator under its spell, fades to the extent that this object is construed in an historical perspective.

(Walter Benjamin, letter to Adorno, 9 December 1938)