Development of the Literary Language

The 17th and 18th centuries witnessed some great social and political upheavals, which

influenced the language as well. The most outstanding events were the bourgeois revolution

of the 17th century, the Restoration of 1660, and the industrial revolution in the 18lh century.

But even before these events an important development took place in the history of the

language.

In the 17th century the colonizing of America by Englishmen began. It was caused by

political struggle in England. The official Anglican church was persecuting the Puritans.

They sought a way out in emigration. In 1620 a first group of puritans on the famous ship

Mayflower reached North America. This was the beginning of history of English in the New

World.

Political struggle in Britain ended with a puritan victory and proclamation of a

Commonwealth in 1649. The language of the Commonwealth belongs to the Early Modem

English period, which lasted till about 1660. The literary language of the time bears a strong

imprint of puritan ideology.

The restoration of the Stuarts under Charles II in 1660 reinstated to some extent the

influence of the nobility and along with it that of the aristocratic language culture which had

been overthrown by the Revolution.

Since the mid-17th century a trend makes itself felt against the somewhat entangled

syntactic structures of the preceding period, in favour of shorter and simpler syntactic

formations. This trend is represented by John Evelyn, John Dryden, Richard Bentley.

From the viewpoint of this new trend, the language of the 15th and early 17th century

was bound to appear wild and clumsy. Publications of Shakespeare's works appearing in

the 18th century are full of arbitrary changes designed to make Shakespeare's text conform

to the 'correctness' of the 18th century. In the 17th and 18th century a great number of

grammarians and orthoepists appeared, who set as their task the establishing of correct

language forms: Alexander Gill, Charles Butler, John Wallis and others.

About the middle of the 18th century there appears a tendency to limit the freedom of

phonetic and grammatical variants within the national language. The idea of a strict norm

was expressed with great clarity in a preface appended by Samuel Johnson to his famous

Dictionary.