Images of English: Cultural history of the language

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Images of English was the first book to focus exclusively on opinions about the language as they have evolved through time. Through the use of abundant quotations, Richard Bailey lets voices from the past speak to our present assumptions and challenges the notion of English triumphalism throughout the world and the ages. The book offers a unique historical perspective on attitudes towards the language. We see that journalists who fill anxious columns on slow news-days with fulminations on linguistic deterioration are embellishing centuries of complaint; that women who campaign for a language free of patriarchy and suited to themselves express a yearning first conveyed long ago; that teachers who recommend the vigour of Anglo-Saxon words are sustaining an idea that emerged four hundred years ago in notions about racial purity.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• 1 English Discerned
• 2 Emergent English
• 3 English Abroad
• 4 World English
• 5 English Transplanted
• 6 Postcolonial English
• 7 English Improved
• 8 Imaginary English
• 9 English Imperiled
• 10 Proper English.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Bailey shows how ideas about English, beginning with the notion of standard English itself, always reflect the ideology of their professors. Taking off from Brian Friel's notion, in Translations (1981), that it is not facts but "images of the past embodied in language" that influence us, Bailey argues that images of English itself are more illuminating than supposedly factual standard "histories" of English e.g., A.C. Baugh and T. Cable, A History of the English Language (3rd ed., 1978). The book takes the form not so much of a history as of a series of forays into different myths about English e.g., that it is destined to be a universal language; that it will help educate non-Western peoples; that it ought to be improved and fixed; that it is imperiled by barbarian speakers. The volume is packed with interesting historical quotations demonstrating the development and sustaining of the various myths. The constant is that the idea about English is always a mirror of the cultural and ideological perspective of the writer: English, American, colonial, or post-colonial. Contains appropriate politico-linguistic cartoons and 25 pages of useful bibliographic references (though, oddly, Jonathan Swift's "Proposal" is dated 1966 in the text, after its edition date, rather than after its appearance date of 1712). Recommended for general collections and all undergraduates. T. K. Lerud; Elmhurst College

Kirkus Book Review

Drawing on his vast erudition about the uses of language, Bailey (English Language and Literature/Univ. of Michigan), associate editor of the Oxford Companion to the English Language, describes the history of the cultural, social, political, and even psychological attitudes toward the English language. Starting with a discussion of what standard English is (the language spoken by educated people in the south of England, near London), he traces its history from the Norman Conquest in the ninth century through the influence of plagues, politics, prosperity, navigation, colonization, industry, scholarship, literature, even crime, each enriching and diversifying the language with new terms while provoking a reaction in those who chose to maintain or recover its purity, either real or imagined, and promote it as a universal language. Although English is particularly resistant to borrowings, it has been extremely influential, and Bailey's discussion of the effect of colonization on English is subtle, entertaining, and astute as he follows it in Ireland, Scotland, Africa, India, the Caribbean, and America, reaching into the 20th century and the fate of the language in the American colonization of the Pacific and through the subsequent wars. The nationalist movements in the various colonies and the political aspirations of various minorities such as Afro-Americans, feminists, and gays have challenged and enriched the language as they adapted it to their own purposes. Inevitable, purists have lamented these changes as symptomatic of social as well linguistic decline, and have cultivated a vision of English as a universal language--although less than 15% of the people in the world actually use it. For those interested in the social history of language, this book is exceptional, clear, and eloquent. Feminists will find Bailey's discussion of the masculine orientation of standard English particularly illuminating. (Twenty illustrations--not seen.)