The Formation of the National English Language

The second half of the 14^th c. was marked by the flourishing of literature. The literary texts of the late 14^th c. belong to a variety of genres. This period of literary florescence is known as the “age of Chaucer”. Geoffrey [‘defri] Chaucer (1340-1400) was the most outstanding figure of the time. He is usually described as the founder of the literary language. The prominent authors of the time were John de Trevisa and John Wycliff. Other chief poets of the time were John Gower and William Langland (all of them wrote in London dialect)

The 15^th and 16^th c. in Western Europe are marked by a renewed interest in classical art and literature and by a general efflorescence of culture. But of all the outstanding achievements of this age the invention of printing had the most immediate effect on the development of the language and its written form. “Artificial writing” was invented in Germany in 1438, by Johann Gutenberg. The first printer of English books was William Caxton. The first English book, printed in 1475, was Caxton’s translation of the story of Troy Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye. All in all about 100 books were issued by his press. Among the earliest publications were the poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, John de Trevisa. About one quarter of his publications were translations from French. The language the first printers used was the London literary English. Caxton’s spelling was more normalized than that of manuscripts and it is possible to say about printers’ influence on the written form of the word.

In the Early NE Period the contacts of England with foreign nations, not necessarily friendly, became closer, which had an influence on the growth of the vocabulary. By the end of the Early NE period, the area of English had expanded, to embrace the whole of the British Isles with the exception of some parts of Wales and Scotland, the Isle of Man, Cornwall, and some parts of Ireland.

The growth of the national literary language and especially the fixation of its Written Standard is inseparable from the flourishing of literature known as the English Literary

Renaissance, the beginning of which goes back to the 16^th c. After a period of “dependence” on Chaucer, literary activity gained momentum in the course of the 16^th c. and by the end of it attained such an importance as it had never known before. This age of literary flourishing is known as the “age of Shakespeare” or the age of literary Renaissance. The most notable forerunners of it in the first half of the 16^th c. were the great English humanist Thomas More (1478-1535) and William Tyndale, the translator of the Bible.

The chief work of Thomas More, Utopia was finished in 1516; it was written in Latin and was first translated into English in 1551. (In Utopia Th. More drew a picture of an ideal imaginary society in which equality, freedom and well-being were enjoyed by all) His other works were written in English.

William Tyndale was a student at oxford and Cambridge and a priest in the church. In 1526 he completed a new English translation of the Bible where he showed himself one of the first masters of English prose. He made a great influence not only on the language of the Church but also on literary prose and on the spoken language. The later version of the Bible – King James’ Bible was based on Tyndale’s translation.