Learning Linguistic Discrimination in the Grammar Classroom: Barbarismus, Xenophobia, and Non-Standard Language in Early Medieval English Texts

This dissertation examines how the prescriptivist linguistic ideologies early medieval English students encountered in their grammar classrooms influenced the way they later wrote about language and its relationship to identity. Examining the linguistic ideologies underlying the grammar textbooks students studied in schools, this dissertation argues that grammars associate linguistic error with xenophobic stereotypes of foreigners, teaching students to equate linguistic, moral, spiritual, and intellectual error, and to assume that second-language speakers will demonstrate all of these. This project then uses these linguistic ideologies as a hermeneutic to examine passages about language throughout the Old English literary corpus. Writers use these frameworks of thinking about error to dehumanize foreign characters by limiting their opportunities to speak, by presenting their speech as threatening, or by associating their speech with supposed immorality and heresy.

This dissertation divides into four substantial chapters and a conclusion. Chapter 1 argues that the subject of grammar was taught so ubiquitously in early medieval English schools that its linguistic ideologies influence most of the Old English literary corpus. Chapter 2 argues that prescriptivist and xenophobic linguistic ideologies underlie etymologies, sound theory, and error theory in the grammars authored by English writers. The grammars associate linguistic errors with foreignness, immorality, heresy, and poor cognition, and restrict language to humans. The remainder of the dissertation shows how writers extend these linguistic ideologies and their prejudices into literary texts. Chapter 3 argues that writers dehumanize foreign characters by denying them the opportunity to speak, and by linking their non-normative or absent speech to presumptions that they are immoral, unintelligent, and heretical. Chapter 4 shows that these linguistic ideologies have been generalized beyond their scope in the grammars—preface-writers stigmatize their own people as they argue that their translations save non-latinate English people from becoming like the supposedly immoral, unintelligent, and heretical foreigners. Chapter 5 argues that because linguistic ideologies are deeply internalized, these xenophobic and prescriptivist ideologies pervade the corpus’s mentions of language. By reevaluating discussions of language in the corpus in light of these theories, we can uncover as-yet-unnoticed racializing discourses, and also humanize the characters that the texts dehumanize.