Language Anxiety: Conflict and Change in the History of English (Electronic book text)

This engaging and wide-ranging history of language anxiety ranges from the Tower of Babel to the internet. It shows how worry about language results from and causes linguistic change, as well as fuelling perennial concerns about class, culture, identity, and social change. -;This book looks at a ubiquitous and yet often unrecognized aspect of language change - anxiety. When people notice that the grammar, sounds, or words of their language are mutating, they invariably get anxious about what is going on. Such feelings show themselves in worries about social change, moral standards, and ethnic or national identity, as well as about what the people and their government ought to do about them. Language change has fuelled concern from King Alfred's worriesabout English integrity to current apprehensions about the internet's corrosive affect on youthful literacy. Tim Machan's story focuses on English, drawing on other languages (including French and Welsh), and a wide array of evidence from archives, literature, history, polemics, and the press. He uncovers linguistic anxieties from the Tower of Babel and medieval tracts on the poverty of Engish, through the novels of Dickens, to contemporary postcolonial writing. He combs through centuries of legislation to reveal perennial concerns about language and its relation to national worth and identity. Heshows that English speakers have always set great store by their language but the manner of their doing so has been in constant flux.Tim Machan has a fascinating story to tell. He offers a new perspective on the history of English and unusual insights on human behaviour. Informative, amusing, and engaging, he writes for everyone interested in languages and the people who speak them. -