The urban vernacular of Late Medieval and Renaissance Bristol

Although the development of Standard English has received considerable scholarly attention, many questions as to its emergence and the processes involved in its spread remain unsolved. Traditional accounts of the development of written Standard English tend to trace its beginnings back to a single time and place in history, i.e. the political and economic importance of the metropolis and the prestige that was associated with it are frequently used as explanatory factors for the dissemination and nation-wide acceptance of a London-based Standard variety.These claims are, however, often based on small sets of data or an imprecise interpretation of textual history. What is more, other factors such as the role of language and dialect contact through trade and migration, the development of literacy and different literacy practices, text type conventions, as well as the role of other prominent urban centres have to date often been marginalised. This dissertation therefore takes a different angle on the development of Standard English by taking into account the role of another urban centre – Bristol, which was the second most important port town next to London and also produced a substantial amount of texts.
Based on a newly compiled corpus of civic records and personal writings from Bristol during the Late Medieval and Early Modern periods, this dissertation sheds new light on standardisation processes, notably linked to factors such as literacy, migration and text types. Employing quantitative and qualitative methods, the study takes a historical sociolinguistic angle and is concerned with the development of three different linguistic features: relative pronouns, third person indicative present tense markers, and the replacement of graphs like thorn by digraph th.
The results of the quantitative and qualitative analyses suggest that Standard written English did not emerge at a single location from which it subsequently spread, nor did it develop at a single point in time. Rather, the development of Standard written English should be seen as a set of complex ongoing processes which took place simultaneously in several larger urban centres where text production and literacy levels were high. The most notable processes that were identified in this study are supralocalisation and the levelling away of regional and minority forms. These processes were steered by internal linguistic factors and they were thrusted by social factors, including text type conventions and demographic movements such as trade and migration, as well as by the development of literacy amongst a highly geographically mobile elite group of writers.
This study has shown that in order to explain standardisation several factors need to be considered. In addition to factors such as prestige and overt language planning, one also needs to consider linguistic factors, demography, as well as the general social and historical context in which a supra-local variety developed. Studies that are being carried out in parallel sub-projects of the project Emerging Standards: Urbanisation and the Development of Standard English, c.1400-1700 will also shed more light on how linguistic standardisation processes played out in other urban settings.