This short extract from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels stems from the early 18th century, that is, the beginning of the Modern English (ModE) period. From a structural perspective, there is nothing striking about this text if one ignores a couple of spelling differences and the relatively formal style, which sounds unusual for a life report. Thus, all in all, the passage sounds like pretty normal English to us.

In other words, by about 1700 all major changes in the system of English were completed. The reduced system of inflectional morphology had basically been established by the end of the ME period already. The analytical syntactic system, as we know it today, was almost fully present by the end of the EModE period.

In the same period the last drastic sound change occurred in the form of the Great Vowel Shift. The Modern English period basically just featured another major extension of the lexicon and some minor changes of lexcial meaning. However, the lexical system of English was very dynamic throughout its history. And it still is a very dynamic system today. So what is particular about the ModE period?

Interesting are the controversies centring around the status and form of English as a linguistic standard and the consolidation of English in this function. Having replaced Latin as the language of learning at the end of the EModE period, English became the language to cover all discursive functions, styles, and registers. Therefore, the major changes in the ModE period concern the dialects and sociolinguistics of English.

English goes through a phase of social diversification and stratification. Moreover, the boundaries between traditional rural dialects have become less clearcut. The changed relationships between English lects are the effects of the changed social and demographic patterns in England caused by the massive technological advances in modern times.

The overview of historical landmarks that influenced English in the modern period starts with philosophy. In a world that is no longer characterised by humankind being subject to nature, but rather by humankind becoming able to control nature itself, the role of ideas becomes increasingly important for the human construction of history. So what were the major philosophical ideas that shaped the modern period?

Ideological and epistemological innovation that defined and still defines the modern period is subsumed under the general term Enlightenment .

This general philosophical movement of the 18th century defined a intellectual context in which enlightened rationality was regarded as the key toward scientific progress, and against irrationality and tyranny. Enlightened intellectuals became highly confident in the power of rationality and knowledge.

On the social-political level, the French political philosophers Rousseau and Voltaire questioned absolutism by claiming that inequality and social suffering stem from an unnatural civilisational development that destroys the good in people. Their ideas paved the way for the French and American Revolutions. Also, they provided the basis for Marx’s socialist movement, which has shaped modern ideas on social systems to the present day.

On the epistemological level, the rationalist ideas of Descartes became very influential for modern science, mathematics, and geometry. (Think about Cartesian coordinate systems!). Descartes’s objectivism was challenged by Kant’s phenomenological Critique of Pure Reason. There, Kant questioned the existence of an absolute and objective reality: what we see as the world of experience is to a considerable extent based on pre-established mental categories. Regarding the world of experience as being relative to human ideas, Kant can be seen as a forefather of relativism and its many developments in the humanities.

The spread of ideas from the Enlightenment was accompanied by an extremely fast development of the natural sciences. For example, Darwin’s theory of evolution put a new light on biology in general and the nature of humankind in particular. It can thus be regarded as one of the landmarks in the development towards modern biotechnology.

In the area of physics, the discovery of electromagnetic waves was one of the absolute milestones to determine modern life and lifestyle. Without scientists such as Michael Faraday – a pioneer in electrophysics - modern communication technology or atomic physics would not exist. Without these scientific achievements, a great number of modern developments would never have happened.

In the modern period, massive transformations took place on the social scale. These dramatic demographic shifts would not have occurred without the new political philosophy on the one hand and the rapid technological progress, on the other.

Technological progress first applied to the one sector that is of most relevance to human survival: food. The 19th century experienced an agricultural revolution: the agricultural output was increased strikingly due to the introduction of fertilizers, the use of modern agricultural machinery, and the draining of marshlands. Thanks to these achievements, the last major famine in Europe dates back as far as 1840.

With the increase of agricultural production there was a remarkable decline in manpower in the agricultural sector. With the introduction of farming machinery, less hands were needed. Thus, since people were no longer tied to the soil to earn a scanty living and since food supplies were becoming more and more reliable, a great number of people started to work in industry or commerce. For these people urban life with its concentration of employment opportunities became far more interesting.

Thus, 19th century England experienced massive population movement away from the countryside into the city. Of course, this large-scale movement of people can only be explained when considering another revolution: the Industrial Revolution. It was industrialisation that created most new job opportunities for non-educated rural workers.

The effect of this economic reorientation was urbanisation, i.e. the massive growth of towns all over England.

The combined influence of the agricultural and industrial revolutions caused fundamental changes in demographic patterns that had shaped England for hundreds of years. This had tremendous social consequences: social classes in Britain were restructured.

The landed aristocracy lost its power and influence to industrial entrepreneurs. And with the demise of the landed aristocracy also came the demise of the peasantry, who had earned their living of the gentry’s land.

With the migration of farmers into the cities, the foundations for the British class-based society were laid - class now being mostly defined in economic terms - social stratification into working class, lower-middle class, upper-middle class, and upper class being the consequence. London became the heart of the British class-based society, but all the major British cities basically mirrored the same social make-up.

In the urban context social networks became more diffuse. Traditional close-knit rural communities were replaced by very complex and dynamic urban social systems. While urbanization promoted diversification because it brought a great number of different social groups together, it also led to uniformity of behaviour because people started to accommodate to one another. This also influenced the linguistic developments of English.

Speech pattern were also heavily influenced by two further technological developments: transportation technology with the increase of mobility and communication technology.

On the basis of these inventions, social interaction and communication became even more diverse and complex. Nowadays, it is virtually possible for everybody to travel to any place they like. Moreover, communication has grown global and become independent of distances. This affects patterns of linguistic usage and creates tendencies towards uniformity, but also tendencies towards linguistic change (e.g. the development of e-mail English as a new linguistic genre).

A further very important development is this context is the massive expansion of the media: radio, television, and the press. All of these developments had and still have a major impact on the English language. Especially on the standardization process.

In the process of the standardization of English, the controversies about the notion of 'correct' and 'good' English were not finished after the EmodE Inkhorn debate. Remember that the Inkhorn controversy was about the use of many Latinate loan words in English. This use was bemoaned as destroying the authentic character of the English language. In other words, the anti-Inkhorn advocates basically argued for linguistic purity: Englishness. Thus, language purism mirrored the growing sense of national identity and linguistic self-confidence in one’s own mother tongue.

The beginning of the Modern English period contained another movement towards linguistic purity. But in this case, the ideals of ‘precision’ and ‘correctness’, rather than ‘national identity’ provided the ideological context for the corresponding debates. Exact sciences were making rapid headway from the 18th century onwards. Their exactness and rationality were seen as a standard that had to be met by language as well.

Consider, for instance, the following statement by Swift (of whom you have already read a passage at the very beginning of this lecture):

What Swift attacks here is what he regards as the spreading linguistic impurity or incorrectness of English usage, of course.

Swift – and other famous authors such as Defoe or Dryden - wanted ascertainment, i.e. an authoritative codification of English in terms of what is correct and what not.

In other words, they opted for establishing a linguistic academy in England after the ideals of Italy or France (Italy: Academia della Crusca 1582, France: L'Académie Française 1635). The academy was to purify the English language. However, such an institution was never installed in England.

More specifically, Swift’s criticism further addressed a development in the standardisation process that went along with the encyclopedic movement of the enlightenment period: the making of dictionaries. According to Swift, dicitionary makers recorded flaws rather than correcting them (as an academy should do). The more practically-oriented dictionary makers of course reacted to this sort of criticism:

This statement shows Johnson’s insight into the dynamic nature of language and language change. From a modern linguistic perspective, his descriptive approach to codifying English therefore seems more appropriate than Swift’s prescriptive yearning for a regulatory board.

Nevertheless, the phrasing of Johnson’s statement also reveals that he was not less elitarian in his views about correctness. Being more encyclopedic in his approach, Johnson, however, chose another way towards codification, i.e. dictionary making.

With the growing awareness of their national language and their striving for correctness, the more elitist speakers of English wanted to know about linguistic rules and regulations.

Middle-class climbers, in addition wanted to have pronuciation dictionaries that helped them acquire the correct pronunciation to fulfil their social ambitions. Fixing the lexicon of English and indicating the right pronunciation of English words, dictionaries provided an extremely important step towards the codification of the Modern Standard.

The first dictionaries were Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall (1694) or Nathaniel Bailey’s Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721).

The intention of these disctionaries was to fix the language, to provide a standard for the use of words and their spelling.

From a modern perspective, Johnson provided the best dictionary in case, although it contained some strange, idiosyncratic definitions that also reveal Johnson’s fairly snobbish intellectual attitude.

Along with the first dictionaries also came the development of English Grammars. Given the yearning for correctness and perfection and given the complaints about the impure state of English, these grammars were not just descriptive, but they prescribed what was correct or not. Consider the following statement by Robert Lowth:

View like this lead to the development of prescritive grammar. Prescriptive grammarians established rules about what was correct to say and what not. These rules prevented the use of split infinitives (to boldly go where no one has gone before), double negations (why doesn‘t nobody never say nothing), or prepositions at the end of sentences (the place where I am going to).

The prescriptive view on grammar stemmed from the scientific ideals of the 18th century and moreover attempted to follow the ideal of Latin grammars, even to a very absurd extent. Thus, for instance, it was argued that English had 6 cases (like Latin) although only two cases had been left after the ME period.

Moreover, prescritive grammar had quite an overt class basis. It was the language of the upper-class, the gentry, that was promoted whereas the language of the 90% majority was condemned as being full of flaws. This shows that there was a growing awareness of the socially distinctive varieties of the English language and a clear tendency to re-establish sociolinguistic power relations within English itself.

Since after the ME and EmodE periods neither French nor Latin could be used as badges of class, prestige, and education, the social power relations had to be negotiated on the basis of the English language itself. Prescriptive grammar was one such symptom. Another one can be about 100 years later within the realm of pronunciation.

While written grammars and dictionaries favoured the standardisation and codification of grammar and spelling, the pronunciation of English was highly influenced by dialectal differences till the end of the 19th century. Thus, before 1870 no superregional pronunciation standard existed for English. Even upper-class people – including the prime ministers (Gladstone and Peel) - could speak in their local dialect without being stigmatised.

After 1870 things changed. With the education act of 1870, schools were opened for the general public. As a consequence, children from different classes were mingled for the first time. The elite reacted to this by re-establishing the linguistic and social differences and power relations in their very own way. When the public schools were opened to become accessible to everyone - unlike their name indicates public schools in England (such as Eton, Harrow, or Rugby) are historic and elitist institutions - the social elite was afraid of losing its status and prestige.

As a reaction to this potential danger the upper and upper-middle classes started to use the pronunciation of their dialect – the dialect in the East Midlands triangle - as a spoken standard for the educational sector. Non-standard vernacular uses were stigmatized and became a marker of a lack of education.

Thus, the socially aspriring lower classes started to use this newly established class dialect as well. A very good, and ironical insight into this process is offered by Shaw’s Pygmalion and its musical adaptation My Fair Lady.

The phonetician Daniel Jones called this educational standard English Public School English. Public school English is the origin of what is nowadays known as RP.

Before 1870, the use of spoken dialect was not stigmatised. However with the development of public school English to become RP – the accent of the social and educational elite – the use of non-standard pronunciation became a marker of low social status and lack of education by 1890.

Therefore, the use of RP quickly spread from the educational context to become a general super-regional spoken standard. The Army and the Imperial Civil Service were two important institutions to fuel this process.

With the invention of radio and television the dissemination and authority of RP was further strengthened: the BBC adopted RP as a pronunciation standard. They even founded an advisory board that had to decide on the right pronunciation of difficult words and moreover developed pronunciation guidelines for radio and TV speakers. Therefore, RP is also known as BBC English.

For a long time RP was associated with authority, wealth, success, and elitism. The prestige of RP went so far as to make it the variety of English spoken in Hollywood films of the 1930ies.

However, throughout its development this accent had always conveyed an aura of snobbery as well. This negative attitude towards RP was highlighted after 1960 when people started to feel more positive about their regional dialects again.

It has been argued that the highly popular Beatles played an important role in this development. Speaking Liverpool dialect, the Beatles showed that one could be successful and endearing by using vernacular English. Moreover, the local conditions in non-central areas of England gradually became better. This caused people to feel more self-confident about their local background again. On the other hand, RP gradually increased its stigma as snobbish Queen’s English and its prestige therefore dropped considerably.

Nowadays less than 3% of English speakers use pure RP as their native dialect. While it is still used by the Royals, the Church of England, and in the High Courts and the Parliament, RP has become far less prominent in the media, especially the BBC, where dialects are not banned from the newsrooms any more.

Non-native speakers of English still regard RP as the right form of English. This is not surprising given that RP dominates the EFL (English as a foreign language) domain.

The dialect landscape of England was strongly influenced by the demographic shifts in the ModE period. Due to increasing urbanisation, mobility, and communication technology, traditional rural dialects have started to lose some of their distinct profiles: the dialects have been subject to levelling. Urban areas constitute complex and highly dynamic social contexts in which social networks are far more weak-knit than the close-knit rural communities.

Thus, the movement of people away from the countryside into the cities has influenced their use of English. Modern linguists must therefore distinguish traditional, rural dialects of English from modern, urban dialects.

According to Peter Trudgill (1990), traditional English dialects are spoken in rural areas of England, usually by older and less educated people such as farmers or fishermen.

The following map provides an overview of the traditional dialect areas of England and indicates some of the features by which they can be distinguished.

Modern or urban English dialects are spoken in metropolitan areas of England, usually by younger, educated middle- and upper-classspeakers. The urban dialectsare not as distinct as the rural ones due to dialect levelling.

After the decline of RP in the last 50 years, a new super-regional form of English seems to make its way out of the South-Eastern English standardisation zone. The phonetician David Rosewarne has called this upcoming dialect of English Estuary English.

Estuary English is described as a mixture between RP and Cockney. It is spoken in the area of Greater London.

From there, it has started to spread all over England and is heard being spoken by MPs, business people, or entertainers.

The status of Estuary English is still disputed and discussed controversially among linguists. Is Estuary English a new spoken standard that is indicative of social levelling? Or is this dialect just the latest step in the London influence on English? Be it as it may, the discussions about Estuary English show that English still is a highly dynamic language that is constantly developing.

In 500 years from now, the ModE period will probably be described as one episode in the long history of English only. If Estuary English has played an important role in this period or if it was just a ghost haunting the linguists’ imagination is for the future researchers to decide.

Barber, Charles (1993). The English Language: A Historical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ch. 9: “English in the scientific age”.

Crystal, David (1987). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ch. 6: “Modern English”.

Fennell, Barbara A. (2001). A History of English. A Sociolinguistic Approach. Oxford: Blackwell, ch. 6: “Present-Day English”.

Easy introductions.

Trudgill, Peter (1990). The Dialects of England. Oxford: Blackwell.

On English dialects.