Article published in:
The Evolution of Englishes: The Dynamic Model and beyond
Edited by Sarah Buschfeld, Thomas Hoffmann, Magnus Huber and Alexander Kautzsch
[Varieties of English Around the World G49] 2014
► pp. 282–300

The evolution of English(es)

Notes on the history of an idea

Many of the central tenets of modern linguistics – and thus also of the study of World Englishes – have a history which goes back to the nineteenth century. This article focuses on the idea of the evolution of language(s). I will employ a discourse-historical approach to show that evolution was generally taken to imply not only progress but also hierarchization, and that English and its standard variety – as well as their speakers – were inevitably seen as the most progressive and placed at the top of any linguistic hierarchy. Of course, crude nationalist and racist thinking are no longer current in academic linguistics today; nevertheless, this article will claim that in order to fully comprehend contemporary ideologies of language, we need to understand the historical origins of the assumptions and beliefs upon which they rest.
Keywords: (varieties of) English, evolution, historical discourse analysis, ideologies of language
Published online: 12 September 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/veaw.g49.16hac
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