Prehistory and Origins of the English Language

Focussing on the Germanic language of the early Anglo-Saxon period (c.400-650/700 AD), this book addresses a period and a set of linguistic data to which little attention has been paid in histories of the English language. As a contribution to historical linguistics, it highlights the methodological difficulties of dealing with a small corpus of data and proposes a solution to those difficulties. It also emphasises the usefulness of insights from archaeology and historiography to the understanding of language history, by illustrating how different theoretical and methodological approaches lend themselves to different interpretations of the data.

Conventionally labelled 'pre-Old English' (pre-OE), early Anglo-Saxon language is generally seen as a stage of the English language belonging to early migrants and their immediate descendents, and a linguistic ancestor to Old English (OE) 'proper'. Understanding of the structure of pre-OE is thus dependent on well-established methods of comparative and internal reconstruction: the outcomes of these sound changes are identified by studying variation within OE, and correspondences between OE and other early Germanic languages; and pre-OE is reconstructed by 'undoing' the changes. Yet, the small size of the dataset presents a severe methodological challenge. The comparative method, by 'filling in' for an absence of data, fails to capture surface variation and creates an illusion of homogeneity, which in turn encourages historical narratives based on ethnic and cultural unity. On the other hand, the approaches which do take account of variation have limited resources to overcome a lack of real data. The solution to this dilemma, outlined in this book, turns the problem on its head by proceeding from micro-readings of individual texts in their material and cultural contexts, to describe the language of the period in terms of local and regional variety rather than an ethnic or national grand narrative. As such, historical linguistics is positioned as historiography, and the study of language change as the construction of historical narratives contingent on the theoretical stance of investigators and their methods of linguistic analysis.