12. Medieval Attitudes toward Language

This lecture examines some attitudes toward language change and variation in the Middle Ages to understand how writers of the past confronted many of the problems regarding social status and language that we still deal with today. Beginning with a brief review of Old English educational traditions, the lecture moves through a consideration of Middle English writers who wrote about problems of dialect variation, the relationship of French and English, and the social and class issues raised by languages and dialects in contact. This lecture is a history of attitudes toward the history of language—a look at the problems of diachronic change and synchronic variation in previous contexts, to provide a background for our own debates on the social function of language and language learning, the idea of a standard or official language, and the ways in which spoken and written forms define class and educational boundaries.