Linguistic purism in English

English words gave way to borrowings from Anglo-Norman following the Norman Conquest as English lost ground as a language of prestige. Anglo-Norman was used in schools and dominated literature, nobility and higher life, leading a wealth of French loanwords to enter English over the course of several centuries—English only returned to courts of law in 1362, and to government in the following century.[13]

In spite of this, some texts of early Middle English engaged in linguistic purism, deliberately avoiding excessive Anglo-Norman influence. Layamon's Brut, composed in the late 12th or early 13th century, espoused several features of Old English poetic style and used a predominantly Anglo-Saxon vocabulary.[14] Ancrene Wisse, of the same era, allowed for French and Old Norse loans but maintained conservative spelling and syntax to keep with Old English.[15] Ayenbite of Inwyt, a Kentish translation of a French treatise on morality written about a century later, used calques in avoidance of borrowing from French.[16]

Controversy over inkhorn terms—foreign loanwords perceived to be needless—persisted in the 16th and 17th centuries. Among others, Thomas Elyot, a neologizer, borrowed extensively from abroad in support of "the necessary augmentation" of English.[17] Linguistic purists such as John Cheke opposed this borrowing in favor of keeping English "unmixt and unmangled".[18] Thomas Wilson, a contemporary of Cheke, criticized borrowing from foreign languages as seeking an "outlandish English".[4]

William Barnes, a 19th-century poet and linguistic purist

With the influx of new industrial and scientific terms from Greek and Latin, linguistic purism saw renewed interest in the 19th century.[19] American statesman Thomas Jefferson observed in an 1825 letter that "a taste is reviving in England for the recovery of the Anglo-Saxon dialect".[20] Dorset poet, minister, and philologist William Barnes coined several words to promote "strong old Anglo-Saxon speech", including speechcraft for grammar, birdlore for ornithology, and bendsome for flexible.[21] Poet Gerard Manley Hopkins discussed Barnes in an 1882 letter to Robert Bridges, lamenting the "utter hopelessness" of Barnes's purism but nonetheless writing in support of it, claiming that "no beauty in a language can make up for want of purity".[9][22] Charles Dickens emphasized the importance of Germanic elements of English during this period, stressing that a writer should not "seek abroad" for new words.[8]

The fifth rule of vocabulary in The King's English, published in 1917, suggests that writers should "prefer the Saxon word to the Romance".[8] In his 1946 essay "Politics and the English Language", George Orwell criticized the extensive use of "foreign" words in English.[12] Australian composer Percy Grainger, a contemporary of Orwell, invented a "blue-eyed English" that he perceived to be linguistically pure and preferred the use of English words in the place of traditional Italian music terms.[11] One year after Grainger's death, philologist Lee Hollander emphasized in his 1962 translation of the Poetic Edda—a collection of Old Norse poems—that "Germanic material must be drawn upon to the utmost extent ... because of the tang and flavor still residing in the homelier indigenous speech material".[23]

Paul Jennings coined the term "Anglish" in a three-part series in Punch commemorating the 900th anniversary of the Norman conquest of England.[2] Jennings's articles, entitled "1066 and All Saxon" and published in June 1966, envisioned an England in which the conquest had failed and included linguistically pure English passages; Jennings gave "a bow to William Barnes" as an inspiration.[24] In 1989, science fiction writer Poul Anderson released a similarly-written text about basic atomic theory called Uncleftish Beholding composed almost fully of Germanic-rooted words. In 1997, Douglas Hofstadter jokingly entitled the style "Ander-Saxon".[25]

The September 2009 publication How We'd Talk if the English had Won in 1066 by David Cowley updates Old English words to today's English spelling, seeking mainstream appeal by covering words in five grades ranging from "easy" to "weird and wonderful" and giving many examples of use with drawings and tests.[26] Paul Kingsnorth's 2014 The Wake is written in a hybrid of Old English and Modern English to account for its 1066 milieu,[27] and Edmund Fairfax's 2017 satiric literary novel Outlaws is similarly written in a "constructed" form of English consisting almost exclusively of words of Germanic origin.[28] An online newsletter called The Anglish Times has regularly reported on current events without non-Germanic borrowed words since January 2021.[29]