Late Modern English

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Prescriptivism

Late Modern English refers to the period from around 1700 to 1900, it is characterised by the rise of prescriptivism and prescriptivist attitudes. Here are a few important individuals/organisations to know about for your exam:

Jonathan Swift

Swift was a writer (he wrote Gulliver’s Travels) and he was appalled at the state of English. He wrote about how spoken and written English was riddled with ‘abuses’ and ‘absurdities’.
He wrote a book about ‘Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue’.
Swift proposed that we eliminated ‘defective’ grammar and employed more archaic grammar systems.

Académie française

Swift's core argument, however, was that we employ a system like the ‘Académie française’.
This French institution controlled and limited what came into the French language – they confirmed or rejected new words and protected French grammar syntax.

Robert Lowth

Lowth’s grammar book became incredibly influential and many children were taught from it.
Lowth’s personal bugbear (and this was a personal stylistic choice) was that multiple negation (double negatives) should be banned.
Before this, double negatives were very much in use – writers like Chaucer and Shakespeare often used double negatives.

Multiple negation

Originally, the more negatives, the more negative the phrase. Many languages still use multiple negation for this purpose.
Lowth’s reason behind suggesting this stemmed from the fact that two negatives make a positive in maths and therefore our language should be the same.
He also believed that we should never start a sentence with a preposition.

Lindley Murray

Murray believed that we shouldn’t split infinitives.
For example, we should always use ‘to dance beautifully’ rather than ‘to beautifully dance’.

Industrial Revolution and the British Empire

The biggest driver for change in this period was the Industrial Revolution and later the rise of the British Empire.

Change

The Industrial Revolution saw change on a massive scale.
Geographical movement towards cities (e.g. the Liverpudlian accent was formed as a result of mass Irish migration) and away from countryside.
Vast improvements on technology (which leads to lexical change).
Greater emphasis on social class.

Empire

Towards the middle of this period, the British Empire began to rise.
The colonisation of countries led to English borrowing various terms from places like India (like ‘bungalow’).
Within this, we see the rise of America (but more on them later!).

Global language

At this point, English starts to become a global language – a language recognised around the world.
As we pillaged and imported global goods (and words), we exported our language. For more on this, see the section on ‘Global English’.
The important thing to note on this section is that standard use of grammar becomes pretty much fixed at this point.