Language is one of the things that a nation uses to define itself; one need only look to the Home Secretary’s recent proposal for all immigrants to Britain to learn English for proof of that. Even more so, a race is assumed to have a language or dialect in common. However, a shared culture is just as important in binding a community together, and the establishment of a literary canon and normative critical approaches to it can be instrumental in a nation’s consideration of itself as a cultural force. The centrality of such a canon often results in the suppression of alternative forms of literature, particularly if they are written in a non-standard variety of the dominant language. For minority or disadvantaged groups the creation of self-identity may involve claiming one of these alternative canons for their own. This essay will look at the work of Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century in standardising English and ‘canonising’ Shakespeare and the contribution of this type of work to concept of the British nation. It will then turn to the twentieth century study of pidgins and creoles and to poetry written in creole to consider how these shape identity for post-colonial communities.

In 1712 Jonathan Swift, distressed by the ‘imperfect’ state of the English language and inspired by the example of the Académie Française, called for an English equivalent: ‘In order to reform our language…[qualified persons] should assemble at some appointed time and place, and fix on rules’ (quoted in Singh 2000: 91). No such Academy was ever established, but grammarians and lexicographers such as Johnson carried out similar work.

Johnson did not intend his dictionary to be of purely linguistic value, however, but rather a tool to understand literature written in English; in his ‘Plan of a Dictionary’ he explains that he wishes to include words that may be ‘found in the works of those we commonly stile polite writers’ (Johnson 1747: 4). He is also intent on making permanent the pronunciation of the English language so that the poetry of the time remains accessible to future generations: ‘The want of certain rules for the pronunciation of former ages, has made us wholly ignorant of the metrical arts of our ancient poets…it is surely time to provide that the harmony of the moderns may be more permanent’ (ibid. 11).

However, he acknowledged that linguistic refinement would be necessary to achieve this literary permanence, and this was within the remit of the dictionary: ‘The chief intent of it is to preserve that purity and ascertain the meaning of our English idiom’ (ibid. 4). This concern for ‘purity’ leads him to distinguish between ‘native’ words, technical words that have become ‘naturalised’ and those which are still considered ‘alien’ (ibid. 6). He concludes that to be useful the dictionary must include some of these unassimilated words, but withholds the right to print ‘those which are still to be considered as foreign, in the Italick letter’ (ibid. 7). This distinction is his to bestow and illustrates the power of a lexicographer to decide what is officially accepted as ‘English’ and what is not.

A tension arises in the dictionary between its literary function, to illuminate the works of great authors, and its linguistic function, to purify and fix the language. There is some resolution of this tension in Johnson’s quotation of Quintilian, that ‘speech was not formed by an analogy sent from heaven’ (ibid. 17). If even the great classical language of Latin was considered irregular and irrational by one of its most famous users, this goes some way towards excusing the troublesome morphology of English and therefore makes it fit for use in world-class literature. Mary Anne Perkins notes the enhanced status that came from such comparisons:

Johnson’s intention in writing the dictionary was to promote language as both a mirror and producer of politeness in eighteenth century society. His reference to the ‘soldiers of Caesar’ about to invade Britain (Johnson 1747: 33) is particularly apt, as language is conceptualised as both the bringer of civilisation and its very fabric.

As has been seen, the focus of English culture in the eighteenth century was very much on literature; in the Preface to his dictionary Johnson opines that, ‘The chief glory of every people arises from its authors’ (quoted in Dobson 1992: 203). Central to this glorification of literature was the status of Shakespeare as a poet and dramatist able to stand his ground as one of the best in world literature. He was taken to represent peculiarly British qualities, and, Brewer comments, his work was thought to be natural and developing organically, like the British constitution (Brewer 1997: 479), which was itself still in need of buttressing after the traumas of the Glorious Revolution and the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745. This ‘naturalness’ is exalted in Johnson’s claims for Shakespeare in the Preface to his edition of 1765: ‘Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature’ (Johnson 1765: 4). However, more significant than this inherent excellence is his choice of language which Johnson sees as so fitted to English that it will never become obsolete; moreover this perfect encapsulation of linguistic identity is still a living language, to be found ‘in the common intercourse of life’ (ibid. 14). Shakespeare’s dialogue is actually analogised to the physical terrain of Britain by Johnson: ‘as a country may be eminently fruitful, though it has spots unfit for cultivation’ (ibid. 14).

This incipient Bardolatry was not simply an overdue recognition of literary genius but part of an attempt to demonstrate the equality of English culture with that of the French. As Brewer observes of the abundant eulogies delivered on British literature, ‘the frequency of these protestations suggests an underlying insecurity, and particularly an awareness of the cultural power of France’ (Brewer 1997: 473). It may for this reason that Johnson launches into such a vigorous defence of Shakespeare’s faults, particularly his lack of formal correctness regarding the Aristotelian unities. He points out that, as the poet of nature, Shakespeare discards such unreal concepts as singular and linear action, and goes on to disparage at length the very idea of unity of place and time, since they rests on false assumptions about the delusion of the audience. Johnson is trying to pre-empt the ‘carping criticism of foreigners’ (ibid. 479) and instead stresses the universality of Shakespeare’s characters: ‘Shakespeare has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men’ (Johnson 1765: 7). These strategies, pursued by Johnson and other editors, actors and luminaries, were very successful; thus Shakespeare became emblematic of the acceptable face of the past and, suitably moralised, part of the national identity. The supremely civilised concept of ‘politeness’ itself descended from sixteenth century Italian court practices, transmitted via France, much the same as the spur for the dictionary was the work of the French and Italian academies. Working with the continental principles of gentility and neoclassical criticism, Johnson and his colleagues attempted to defend and define British culture against that of the French.

Of course, the search for a coherent and valuable national identity is not exclusive to eighteenth century England. At the same time as Johnson was participating in the creation of a literary idol, some of the first accounts of English-lexifier pidgins were being written by amateur linguists in the colonies of Britain’s expanding empire. The early concept of pidgins and creoles was that they were bastardisations of the superstratal language, which, it was assumed, the indigenous people or slaves had failed to learn properly or greatly condensed. In the nineteenth century substratal theories, which proposed that creoles were essentially the non-European language relexified with colonial vocabulary, gained currency. With both these theories, the continuing rejection of these languages is exemplified in the behaviour of the comparative philologists of the time: faced with the dilemma of where to place pidgins and creoles on their grandiose language trees, with the superstratal or substratal language, they most often omitted them altogether. The assumption was that they were not ‘real’ languages and this reinforced the colonial attitude that native or slave populations were too undeveloped to attain the European language of their masters and too apathetic to maintain their own.

Chomsky’s theory of internal generative grammar offered twentieth century linguists the means to incorporate creoles into a wider theory of language. Derek Bickerton uses his language bioprogram hypothesis (LBH) to address creoles, arguing that they prove the existence of an innate linguistic formulation because they have developed ‘in the absence of the generation-to-generation transmission of particular languages that is a normal characteristic of our species’ (Bickerton 1984: 174). Whether or not one is convinced by his evidence, he shows that creoles must be considered in any theory of internal grammar, either as a central supporting example or as a contradictory stumbling block.

Although Bickerton does not explicitly state the implications of his hypothesis for issues of national and racial identity, for creole speakers they could clearly be huge; it has the potential to rescue these marginalised languages from academic obscurity and facilitate their study on an equal basis with ‘normal’ languages. However, the peer review pieces for ‘The language bioprogram hypothesis’ show that most linguists are not ready to bring creoles into the fold; Morris Goodman (ibid. 193-4), for example, still insists on substratal influence because he doubts Bickerton’s sociological data, Geoffrey Sampson (ibid. 207-8) queries whether creoles can prove what ‘ordinary’ languages do not and Pieter Seuren (ibid. 208-9) rejects the LBH entirely because, he says, it is based on ‘irresponsible flights of fancy.’ Clearly, as Ishtla Singh also observes, there is a lingering view of creoles as ‘freak cases arising out of aberrant circumstances’ and therefore a reluctance to include them in wider linguistic approaches (Singh 2000: 16).

The development of creole languages was not the only consequence of colonialism, as Dennis Walder attests: ‘it is clearly one result of colonisation – when societies and cultures intermingle – that that the literary forms, like the languages of the colonisers, have been adopted’ (Walder 1998: 12). Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s influential lecture History of the Voice recounts how the prevalence of iambic pentameter in the canonical English literature studied by Caribbean schoolchildren affects the poetry that they produce as adults. He is concerned with how inaccurately this rhythm reflects both the environment and the speech of Caribbean poets: ‘it carries with it a certain kind of experience, which is not the experience of a hurricane’ (Brathwaite 1984: 10). He also illustrates how the canonical tradition of sonnets and suitable subjects for them results in the effacement of any authentic authorial voice for West Indian poets. The only way to reflect the genuine experience of life in the Caribbean, he argues, is to create poetry using ancient calypso forms and the poets’ mother tongue, which, perhaps mindful of creole’s less than exalted place in linguistics, he calls ‘nation language.’ Brathwaite’s personal view of creole genesis is substratal – he sees it as a preservation of African culture, even a resistance movement. For Brathwaite and other post-colonial writers there must be a conscious effort to reject the norms of colonial literature and promote the voice of their history. In Decolonising the Mind Ngugi wa Thiong’o considers concepts of standard language and its literature as tools of oppression:

Walder considers it important that creole is no longer used only in servile situations but in the full range of human activity. As a result it can become a regional ‘standard’ of its own – nation language – open to all the cultural use and abuse that implies.

In his essay ‘On Not Being Milton’ – itself a reference to History of the Voice – Dabydeen argues that one of the ways young British blacks have resisted the dominance of the white culture is the evolution of a ‘patois’ based on the West Indian creole of their parents (ibid. 410). He considers that the repudiation of conventional poetic subjects combined with the pressure of racism forces black writers into poetry that appears ‘disturbing and passionate’ to people used to ‘normal’ English poems (Dabydeen 1996: 412). This disapproval extends to their patois, which suffers from the charge of being ‘surly and indecent’ (ibid. 411). The language used by blacks seems to have become absorbed into a wider discourse that casts young black men in particular as breakers of rules and perpetrators of crime. John Agard’s poem ‘Listen Mr Oxford don’ tries to highlight the dangers in this analogy and its potential to criminalise the innocent:

The deliberate misuse of critical convention by placing slashes at the end and in the middle of lines echoes the violence (slashing) of which Agard feels he is being accused. The ‘slashing’ of suffixes, ‘splitting’ of syntax and ‘mashing’ of grammar are all typical indictments of creoles, coming from a colonialist perspective that regards them as debased, non-morphological versions of the superstratum. ‘I ent serving no jail sentence’ conveys the feeling that language can be imprisoning, just as references to ‘the Queen’s English’ bring to mind the threat of spending time at Her Majesty’s pleasure. Black poetry itself is regarded as seditious (‘inciting rhyme to riot’) but though it can be ‘a dangerous weapon’ the tender vitality of the phrase ‘human breath’ suggests that it also has the potential to act for good. Poets writing in creole frequently stress this oral aspect of their work and its distance from the conventional poetic tradition; it is a celebration of an oral tradition that can contribute towards a cultural identity for the creole-speaking community.

The search for racial and national identities has existed in one form or another for centuries; it is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that several contemporary post-colonial authors choose to quote or reference Samuel Johnson. Singh, for example, names him as an early practitioner of corpus planning, deciding which varieties of English should be made standard, which words should be labelled technical or foreign, and so on (Singh 2000: 91). Walder opens a chapter with a quotation from his 1785 Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides: ‘Languages are the pedigree of nations’ (Walder 1998: 42). Of course, Johnson is an icon of language study but this cannot account for his appearance in such diverse texts, particularly as creolistics and Caribbean literature remain somewhat outside the mainstream of their respective disciplines. It may be due in greater part to parallel circumstances. Dabydeen bemoans the status of writers who reject ‘universal’ themes and standard English and must therefore do without ‘the patronage of media-hype’ and eventually ‘perish in the backwater of small presses’ (Dabydeen 1996: 414). Financially, creole writers are experiencing conditions remarkably similar to those of Johnson and his Grub Street colleagues and this perhaps produces an affinity and respect for him. More important than this, however, is the uncertainty of identity aroused in both groups by their changing geo-political situations. Johnson was writing at a time of global expansion when Britain needed a solid national identity to export to its colonies. Brathwaite and other contemporary commentators and poets are writing at a time of global contraction, and as long-established colonial boundaries and identities become disrupted they are using their distinctive creole language in an attempt to create racial unity.

As Walder comments, the choice between standard English and creole varieties becomes more, not less important as colonial experience recedes into the past (Walder 1998: 117). Standard English is a medium accepted around the world, but ‘nation language’ can give post-colonial communities an individual global identity. Literature and literary study gives them the opportunity of ‘countering, while inevitably incorporating, imposed colonial identities’ (ibid. 118) while also rediscovering their lost history in language. Back in the eighteenth century Johnson was trying to do something similar for English and Britain. His iconic status as a lexicographer shows how successful he was in promoting the study of language as a way to purify and preserve it; though of course he did not stop language change, he did raise interest in it and it became the primary occupation of linguists throughout the next century. He also succeeded in creating an image of Britain as a nation that took its language and concomitant cultural attributes seriously. Johnson’s edition of Shakespeare was just one of many during that time, as the playwright and poet was gradually elevated to the status of literary great, a national poet befitting a civilised nation. Dobson observes that, ‘If Shakespeare is celebrated as more than an author at the Jubilee [in 1769], it is at least in part because the Britain of which he is invested as literary deity is becoming more than a nation’ (Dobson 1992: 227). Shakespeare and all the other ‘polite writers’ whom Johnson admired would soon be transported around the world and foisted upon slaves and their children. It would be two hundred years before those displaced populations could begin to consolidate their own language and literature and with them their own identity.

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Barrett, Michèle (1991) The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Bickerton, Derek (1984) ‘The language bioprogram hypothesis.’ The Behavioural and Brain Sciences 7:2 pp. 173-222.

Brathwaite, Edward Kamau (1984) History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry. London: New Beacon.

Brewer, John (1997) The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the eighteenth century. London: HarperCollins.

Dabydeen, David (1996) ‘On not being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today.’ In Alison Donnell and Sarah Lawson Welsh (eds.) The Routledge Reader in Caribbean Literature. London: Routledge pp. 410-5.

Dobson, Michael (1992) The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship 1660-1769. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Johnson, Samuel (1970) [1747] ‘The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language.’ In R.C. Alston (ed.) English Linguistics 1500-1800. Menston: Scolar Press.

Johnson, Samuel (1905) [1765] ‘Preface’ to The Plays of William Shakespeare. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press.

Perkins, Mary Anne (1999) Nation and Word, 1770-1850. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Singh, Ishtla (2000) Pidgins and Creoles: An Introduction. London: Arnold.

Walder, Dennis (1998) Post-colonial Literature in English: History, Language, Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.

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