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The Mother's Tongue and the Father's Prose

Languages came and went, but serial monolingualism was the rule. In Anderson’s view, there was nothing ‘ideological’, and certainly nothing ‘proto-national’ about the use of any of these languages, especially the use of what he calls ‘Anglo-Saxon’ rather than the more usual Old English, a terminology which serves only to create a false division between pre-Conquest English and the later Early English. The reality of the period was very different, Latin and Anglo-Saxon (I’m going to call it English, just as the Anglo-Saxons did) were both used for literary and administrative purposes in the pre-Conquest period, and English was not the only vernacular spoken – there were also Danish (or Old Norse), and Norman (or Anglo-Norman) French, not to mention the surviving languages of Briton, Welsh amongst them. Moreover, these sometimes coexisting sometimes competing vernaculars were crucial to the creation of an English nation and an English identity, as well as to a sense of otherness on the part of those whose languages English attempted to colonize or suppress altogether. Vernacular language did indeed carry ideological weight, and was manipulated throughout the period to suit a variety of different agenda.