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INTRODUCTION

Multiplicity and Relation

Toward an Anglophone Eighteenth Century

Johnson, Scott, and the Highlanders

By subsequent opportunities of observation, I found that my host’s diction had nothing peculiar. Those Highlanders that can speak English, commonly speak it well, with few of the words, and little of the tone by which a Scotchman is distinguished. Their language seems to have been learned in the army or the navy, or by some communication with those who could give them good examples of accent and pronunciation. By their Lowland neighbours they would not willingly be taught; for they have long considered them as a mean and degenerate race. These prejudices are wearing fast away, but so much of them still remains, that when I asked a very learned minister in the islands, which they considered as their most savage clans: “Those, said he, that live next the Lowlands.”¹

This passage from Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) registers a charge surrounding the two dimensions of eighteenth-century linguistic multiplicity that this book explores at length: (1) heteroglossic diversity among disparate versions of the English language and (2) polyglossic interaction between these varied forms of English and other languages encountered on the global stage of travel, commerce, and empire.² In this passage, as elsewhere, Johnson tarries in the multiplicities of orality, allowing his reflections to generate descriptive detail about the relationships among various groups within Britain. Each group is marked with a particular linguistic character relative to the others. To every group its shibboleths. This is one of the main premises of eighteenth-century writing about language.

By starting with this brief example of metalinguistic writing—by which I mean descriptive writing that takes language itself as its topic—I want to suggest that Johnson’s passage deconstructs the coherence of the term “English” so thoroughly that the term’s analytical value is thrown into suspicion. In other words, by yoking together several forms of lively linguistic multiplicity under the limiting term “English,” Johnson’s deductions about these linguistic practices reveal their own contingency. In fact, the passage permits a reading that acknowledges the insufficiency of this term for naming the many interpenetrating language forms that people past and present have employed for speaking, writing, and creating literature. By capturing linguistic alterity in many forms, Johnson relativizes his own subject position. Against the precession of these other anglophone tongues, Johnson’s English is just one form among many.³

That literature is, among other things, a name for the aesthetic experience that arises from an encounter with languages and voices as they are rendered in print is a bequest of the global long eighteenth century.⁴ It was during this period that anglophone writers learned to evaluate themselves and others by parsing the linguistic multiplicities around them. It is my contention in Multilingual Subjects that scholars of cultural and literary history need to do more with the linguistic multiplicity of the past as it is encoded in the literary and nonliterary alike. We need to be able to see not only that the term “English” language is insufficient, as in the epigraph above, but also that the insufficiency of this term is a lived condition that generates descriptive texture and narrative momentum in Johnson’s writing as well as that of his contemporaries.⁵ We need to understand linguistic multiplicity better; we need to name its contours more accurately; we need to explore its fissures in detail; we need to explore its role in narrative more accurately; and, generally, we need to think more creatively about how the always-existing multiplicity of language is a dimension of identity that influences literary representation and reception. There are also obvious political opportunities in a better understanding of how linguistic multiplicity is characterized in (and characterizes) the period. Those questions I broach alongside the aesthetic in coming chapters.

Four discrete types of linguistic identities—and, for Johnson, cultural identities—are invoked in this four-sentence passage. Three different varieties of “English” are clearly identifiable. One non-English language appears implicitly—or possibly two non-English languages, depending on how one counts. First, and most obviously, there is the studied language of Johnson’s own narrative voice, an example of Standard English within which the other languages in the passage are contained.⁶ Irrespective of the fact that Johnson might here be accused of a grammatical gaffe—because “those Highlanders who can speak English” is arguably preferable to the deanimating “those Highlanders that can speak English”—his particular form of “English” is the default or framing language. From the reader’s perspective, Johnson’s language is normative, nothing less than what we should expect from English’s first great lexicographer, and, perhaps, literary celebrity, of a certain sort.⁷

From the perspective of Johnson’s elite language, the other forms of “English” appear on a spectrum from unremarkable to deviant or debased in some way. In order of appearance, the second form of language that occurs in this passage is the “English” of multilingual Highlanders who have “learned it in the army, or the navy.” Or, presumably, they have learned it via cross border colloquy with exemplars of “accent and pronunciation,” like Johnson, for these Highlanders “commonly speak it well.” The third form of “English” is that of the Highlanders’ “Lowland neighbours.” These neighbors speak an “English” marked by those shibboleths of “words” and “tone” by which “a Scotchman is distinguished.” According to Johnson’s metalinguistic reportage, the Highlanders consider their lowland neighbors a “savage,” “mean and degenerate race,” certainly not the right people to teach the Highlanders “English,” and, according to the rhetoric of “savagery” here invoked, perhaps not people at all.

Adding another dimension of multiplicity and difference to this already-composite ecology of tongues, some of the Highlanders are multilingual. Johnson is outside their multilingualism, and all he can do is refer to it without examining it. What I mean is that the passage alludes implicitly to the Scottish Gaelic spoken by those Highlanders who cannot speak English just as it alludes explicitly to those Highlanders who can speak both languages. I say this by inference, for if there are some Highlanders “that can speak English,” then there are also some who cannot, and, perhaps, also some who will not. That some Highlanders can speak English while others cannot or will not sketches an important intra-Gaelic linguistic division. Johnson does not expound on this division here, but it comes to the surface in other texts of the period, in particular, Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814).

Waverley is a novel that, similar to Johnson’s travel narrative, orders its characters in terms of complex and overlaid linguistic identities. In one famous scene, for example, Waverley tries to speak to the nonanglophone Highlanders: “Our hero now endeavoured to address them, but was only answered with ‘Niel Sassenagh,’ that is, ‘no English,’ being, as Waverley knew, the constant reply of a Highlander when he either does not understand, or does not choose to reply to, an Englishman or a Lowlander.”⁸ Waverley’s investigations are stymied by his inability to interact in the language his interlocutors prefer. But he seems to know in advance that this would be the case. Instead of letting a dialogue reveal information about the story’s unfolding, Scott uses an expression of linguistic refusal (“Niel Sassenagh”) and an English translation of that refusal (“no English”) to characterize the intercultural dynamics at work in Waverley’s interactions with the Highlanders. This small metalinguistic moment says a great deal. Waverley is frozen, knowing only that his interlocutor refuses the only linguistic medium Waverley knows. His next brief appeal is also rebuffed: “Neither did this produce any mark of recognition from his escort.”⁹ The moment as a whole stands in as a larger metaphor for Waverley’s ongoing attempts to comprehend events that he cannot grasp in an environment that is foreign for him, less welcoming than the legible library in which he has been raised.

Johnson and Scott’s English. The Highlanders’ English. The Lowlanders’ English. Can the diverse linguistic forms that are disambiguated in this passage properly be referred to by the concept “English”? The easy answer is that, yes, of course they can. But this answer is unconcerned with the interpretive flattening that imagining such an implausibly unitary idea of “English” creates. My answer to the question is the long one: no, the term “English” here and elsewhere is insufficient. As a question of interpretation, it matters that we attend to representations of linguistic multiplicity, however subtly they appear. It matters that writers like Johnson, Scott, and others generate descriptive texture and plot developments by differentiating among groups of people in terms of language. My contention is that salient contextual details disappear when we fail to attend to the way that literature of the long eighteenth century actively charts linguistic difference as a way to communicate alterity of many dimensions. Language difference, after all, is one of the long eighteenth century’s most important tropes and topoi. Writers, novelists, poets, and playwrights of the period make it matter.

Johnson and Scott’s English. The Highlanders’ English. The Lowlanders’ English. This chain also represents a cultural hierarchy in which the first form explains and glosses all the others. This is to say nothing of the fact that non-English tongues like Scottish Gaelic are always crisscrossing the chain of English languages here enumerated. The multilingualism of the Highlanders in both Johnson and Scott is tremendously significant, as significant as the internal differences and corresponding subject positions of English forms and speakers in these texts. Moreover, the reader must remain aware that such representations disclose important aspects of a text’s descriptive, narrative, and characterological architecture. It is the reader’s job to interpret these representations of difference and multilingualism. That Johnson’s Highlanders speak English in addition to their native Scottish Gaelic communicates their nobility as well as their tense relationship to the Union of England and Scotland after the rebellions of 1745. These multilingual language skills might attest to some experience in the imperial army or navy, Johnson surmises, for these institutions encourage linguistic compliance and pro-British sentiment. In Scott, Scottish Gaelic signifies in different ways. Fergus Mac-Ivor and Flora Mac-Ivor’s choice of language in different communicative contexts is a narrative strategy for getting at Waverley’s monolingual alterity to the multilingual Highlanders’ culture. Like the reader, Waverley is ignorant and unaware of what is to come; his language deficiencies leave him sealed off from the plot’s intrigue.

This linguistic and thus subjective isolation is literally enacted by the “Stag Hunt,” a scene in which “the word was given in Gaelic to fling themselves upon their faces; but Waverley, on whose English ears the signal was lost, had almost fallen a sacrifice to his ignorance of the ancient language in which it was communicated.”¹⁰ The multilingual context of Waverley’s northern Bildung is ever present to the reader, for the evocation of language’s heteroglot and polyglot textures is a narrative technique Scott executes confidently and to multiple effects.¹¹ A brief additional example that is central to the plot of the novel is the fact that certain of the Lowland and Highland Scottish characters also have linguistic ties to the French. The French abilities of characters like Fergus and Flora evoke their rebellious, extra-British alliances while those of the Baron of Bradwardine and Rose Bradwardine signify a kind of modern civility. The external ties of the rebels resonate with the tensions of Franco-British relations in the early nineteenth-century moment in which Waverley was written just as Rose’s education in French, Italian, and English delineates a set of linguistic qualifications that marked women as accomplished in the period.

I dwell on the linguistic dimensions of Johnson and Scott in order to open into a much broader discussion of metalinguistic writing in the long eighteenth century and its relationships to the present. In both time periods, metalinguistic writing is a form of xenotropism, one that writers find particularly powerful for capturing the interrelationships of groups presumed to be different.¹² At times, and depending on the writer, a curious combination of xenotropism and xenophobia resides in the will toward metalinguistic writing. Metalinguistic writing is by nature xenotropic, as it stresses differences communicated by one’s linguistic habits. But it can also be xenophobic to the degree that it uses linguistic difference as a sign of unbridgeable human difference for aesthetic ends. Insofar as one sees language as a salient vector of interpersonal difference, this curious combination does a great deal of cultural work.

Multiplicity and Metalinguistic Writing

Multilingual Subjects extends ongoing conversations about the global scene of long eighteenth-century culture by documenting the importance of “dialect” writing, multilingual writing, and translation to aesthetic and political practices that emerge during the period.¹³ Even though “dialect” writing is rarely discussed alongside multilingual writing and translation practice, I argue over the course of this book: (1) that these forms of writing are intimately related; (2) that they constitute a robust counterarchive of anglophone rather than “English” linguistic identities; and (3) that this counter-archive of linguistic lives and aesthetic practices allows us to reinterpret the monolingual conjunction of language and nation that is associated with the long eighteenth century’s end.

Multilingualism signifies in texts by generating descriptive, characterological, and narrative possibilities, often in complex ways. Representations of multilingualism in the form of metalinguistic writing speak to cultural worlds beyond the text that are distinct from a narrower cultural world rooted only in a “normal” or “normative” form of Standard English. When they appear, multilingual subjects open Standard English writing onto worlds with which it is not coextensive, whether anglophone or not, thereby showing the imbricated nature of the eighteenth-century linguistico-cultural field. But the representation of linguistic multiplicity can also enfold inassimilable worlds into the world of the English-language text. As exemplars of the eighteenth-century archive, Johnson and Scott are part of a lineage of anglophone writers who attempt to make aesthetic meaning from the topos of linguistic multiplicity. The phenomenon of writing about the internal diversity and external relations of the English language, however, is by no means restricted to discussions of fictive descriptions, narrative momentum, or aesthetic effects. In fact, it is a feature common to all types of writing because generalized concern about the relationship of linguistic difference to cultural, racial, and economic difference is one of the generative engines of the eighteenth-century publishing industry.

James Adams, author of The Pronunciation of the English Language Vindicated from Imputed Anomaly and Caprice (1799), uses the word “literary” in the sense of “written in books, fictional or nonfictional” when he retrospectively declares, “No literary subject has been so much handled by British writers within the course of the present, expiring century, nor so frequently been distinguished by the exertions of learning, wit, and ingenuity, as grammatical systems of the English language.”¹⁴ Adams does not supply the quantitative data to back up this claim, but as anecdote, he is on the mark. The eighteenth-century anglophone publishing industry witnesses the publication of unprecedented numbers of English dictionaries, grammars, style guides, elocution manuals, translation treatises, and translations, metalinguistic writing all.¹⁵ These texts sought, through different means, to make sense of the linguistic facts on the ground in anglophone and nonanglophone spaces. Additionally, the period is also marked by an efflorescence of travel writing, ethnographies, and pseudoethnographies, as well as protoscientific, analogical approaches to language and culture like Sir William Jones’s famous “Third Anniversary Discourse,” which contains the famous metalinguistic claim, “The Sanscrit [sic] language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either…. No philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.”¹⁶ I continue with the entwined local and global aspects of the long eighteenth-century metalinguistic archive in later chapters, but for now I want to reiterate the main impetus behind the present work: linguistic multiplicity, linguistic difference, and the possible meanings of these cultural facts occupy eighteenth-century readers and thinkers in unprecedented, diverse, and aesthetically productive ways.

By thinking broadly about linguistic multiplicity and linguistic difference as centers of eighteenth-century aesthetic and political concern, this book invites scholars from diverse periods to engage creatively with the subjects that I group under the category “multilingual subjects.”¹⁷ Starting with the title, Multilingual Subjects links the prevailing concerns of eighteenth-century scholarship with contemporary linguistic politics and aesthetics by stressing linguistic habits as an important dimension of identity, then as now. For one, I use the title phrase to refer to code-switching “multilingual subjects,” individuals like Robert Burns and Maria Edgeworth who were able to generate unique approaches to literary composition by capitalizing on (in Burns’s case) or ventriloquizing (in Edgeworth’s case) linguistic multiplicities with which they were familiar. Other “multilingual subjects” can be identified among the period’s new and voluble breed of vernacular grammarians and prescriptive stylists. Schooled in Latin, Greek, and sometimes Hebrew linguistic traditions, among others, scholars and translators like Robert Lowth actively tried to standardize English in order to formulate an internally cohesive and externally reputable medium for a noticeably diverse anglophone sphere and an increasingly polyglot imperial context.¹⁸ Just as this type of advanced scholarship depends on specific forms of institutional multilingualism and multiliteracy, multilingualism also correlates with the most precarious forms of vernacular cosmopolitanism in the period, as it does in our own. Other “multilingual subjects” were, like Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, and so many other servants and slaves—“multilingual subjects” who became so by force, not unlike the multitude of contemporary people who are pushed or pulled into anglophony by the economic and political logics of the present.¹⁹

Beyond referring to individual human beings whose biographies lend coherence to the long history of anglophone multilingualism, the phrase “multilingual subjects” is also meant to invoke ways of writing about language like grammar, elocution, and translation theory. Monolingual in orientation and yet filled with multilingual substrates and residues, these booming eighteenth-century pedagogical discourses had the aggregate effect of restricting multilingualism and multilingual contact during the period. Studied as part of an individual’s passage into “proper” literacy, the existence of these discourses alongside experimental forms of dialect writing in the period dramatizes the culture at large wrestling with newly monolingual forms of literacy and literary composition.

As discourses of Standard English normativity flourished, the period witnessed a proliferation of descriptive, characterological, and narrative strategies for rendering the linguistic habits of diverse individuals and cultures in print. Metalinguistic description—by which I mean the purposeful narration and description of language itself—is one of the long eighteenth century’s most pronounced developments in writing technique, a development the book tracks closely. Indeed, more writing of the period than is commonly acknowledged straightforwardly thematizes linguistic difference. So in the same way that the “subject of a painting” is the matter of its content, eighteenth-century writing is replete with other unexamined “multilingual subjects,” the most important of which are examined in this book as rhetorically generative tropes and topoi. Finally, I show that the many divergent and yet coexisting forms of the English language are themselves crucially important eighteenth-century “multilingual subjects.” Put another way, metalinguistic writing that addresses the internal differences and external relations of the English language is the book’s most frequently recurring and contentious “multilingual subject.”

With all these meanings in tow, Multilingual Subjects lays out the case for paying close attention to the changing cultural meanings of linguistic multiplicity in long eighteenth-century culture, especially insofar as these meanings proleptically announce some of the aesthetic and political dimensions of language and globalization in the present. Far from being minor or peripheral, the interpolation of linguistic difference and diversity into texts of the eighteenth century represents a set of market-oriented aesthetic strategies just as it represents a set of political assumptions relative to language, culture, and identity.²⁰ Grasping linguistic multiplicity as it interacts with literary practice and aesthetic evaluation in the eighteenth-century world of empire and overseas adventurism can helps us critique and understand our own situation, one in which English in its many deterritorialized forms “must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere,” to quote Marx’s most famous descriptions of the European bourgeoisie.²¹ Standard English in the eighteenth century and in the contemporary world: disrupting culture even as it enables it, subverting nonnormative forms of language even as it gives birth to new ones. Insofar as this work’s claims are presentist, then, they are also interested in the patterns of linguistic identity that we can recuperate from the eighteenth-century past as a way to think differently about the future.²²

In keeping with the main premises of the last few decades of eighteenth-century research, Susan Buck-Morss’s Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009) evokes “the Atlantic as an expanded social field, shared by millions of heterogeneous, previously unconnected people,” a description that is true to the period in question just as it is obviously informed by the moment of her book’s composition.²³ In Buck-Morss’s words, “The collective experiences of concrete, particular human beings fall out of identifying categories of “nation,” “race,” and “civilization” that capture only a partial aspect of their existence, as they travel across cultural binaries, moving in and out of conceptual frames and in the process, creating new ones. Porosity characterizes the ordering boundaries of their world (as it does ours today).”²⁴ Charting their interconnections, and showing how those interconnections challenge the disciplinary boundaries by which we understand the heterogeneous subjects of the past, Buck-Morss asks scholars to focus on identity’s porosity in that earlier world and in our own. By “porosity,” she means the tendency of subjects to slip inside and outside the categories that we use to define them, categories like “‘nation,’ ‘race,’ and ‘civilization,’” a list to which we should but often enough do not add “language.” Thinking with Buck-Morss, a category’s tendency toward porosity becomes more important than the category itself. Concretely, the archive and the present both demonstrate that one can slip in and out of linguistic categories—through language learning, intercultural experience, or mere communicative adjustment, as sociolinguistics also demonstrates. Porosity is thus another way to figure the multilingual subjects of the eighteenth century, as forms of reading, writing, and speaking that allow for and productively encourage slippages of nation, race, civilization, and also language.

For scholars and students in the present, a critical examination of histories of multilingualism and linguistic porosity are timely in several senses. Such examinations speak to the institutional and pedagogical demands of the present by allowing scholars to connect for students and society at large the diversities of the globalizing present with the diversities of the past. Many different stories culminate in the history of our own present. Too many of those stories are invisible because of the specific historical trends that we choose to privilege. If as scholars we are generally comfortable with the idea of porosity, then this comes as a result of the work of others who have brought that texture out of the past and showed how it conditions the present. Insofar as one of the jobs of the humanities is to attune students to the demands of globality, then critical histories of porosity have already partially served these goals. To the degree that multilingual and porous histories are sometimes invisible in the frameworks with which we train students to think about cultures of the past, students of the present find their cultural lives unaccounted for in some ways. They ought to have some sense that the period they live in has long ties to the linguistic diversity of the past, within the anglophone world and without.

Anglophones and Anglophony

During his tenure as editor of PMLA from 2011 to 2016, Simon Gikandi used several of his editor’s columns to reflect on the past and present of global linguistic diversity.²⁵ Among other things, Gikandi’s columns investigated global linguistic diversity’s relationship to contemporary culture and politics. The specter of “the powerful myth of English as the global language” was never far from his mind. For example, on more than one occasion he puzzled over the way “English-only movements thrive in large parts of the United States.”²⁶ Likewise, in several instances he ruminated on precarious languages in the process of disappearing: “Letting a language die is an injustice, a denial of will to those who speak it.”²⁷ Interrogating the power of English in a world where “the global linguistic map appears to be a simple division between those with English and those without it,” Gikandi invoked Dipesh Chakrabarty in order to argue that English as a language should be “provincialized” in the interest of a new global order of relationality.²⁸ Gikandi’s goal has been to “deprive the [English] language of the ecumenical status of the global and to represent it as one language among many … not as part of a global drive toward monolingualism but as part of the diversity and plurality of world languages.”²⁹ In this respect, his essays are stimulating and provocative reading for their dogged insistence that English must be provincialized, pluralized, and sufficiently reconceptualized to account for the multilingualism of the present.

In keeping with this, I discuss the breadth of linguistic multiplicity that characterizes the eighteenth century and subtends its aesthetic production by employing the interpretive category “anglophony.” Common in contemporary studies, this term crops up only occasionally in literary and cultural histories that focus on periods before the twentieth century, most often as a way to disambiguate Britain from other areas of anglophone population density like North America.³⁰ Calqued from the French postcolonial and neocolonial grouping francophonie, I use the noun “anglophony” to upend normative linguistic and cultural hierarchies—insofar as upending those hierarchies is possible—while also throwing the assumptions of those normative linguistic and cultural hierarchies into high relief. As in the context of francophonie, anglophony is a term that can be used to take together the “domestic,” colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial. As a way of provincializing English, this term acts as a supracategory of linguistic participation, a category comprising everything from laterally interacting and constantly evolving anglophone forms to the nonnormative forms of speakers from unrelated linguistic backgrounds to the class argots and anti- or cryptolanguages of subaltern populations.³¹ Typically, the languages of these diverse linguistic identities are referred to by the difference-effacing term “English” or the normative and subordinating terms “dialect English,” “regional English,” “provincial English,” “substandard English,” and more, all of which evaluations presuppose Standard English is a transcendental category of reference rather than a conventional form among others.

When one thinks of anglophony, not in spatial terms, but instead as an irreducibly complex sonic ecology with a variety of speakers, forms, and abilities, Standard English appears merely as anglophony’s most recognizable acrolect (my term for the prestige form of standard written English). In the present, nationally based Standard Englishes appear as the creations of two and a half centuries of metalinguistic debate and coercion rather than a realistic representation of linguistic homogeneity in the world.³² Standard English may very well be the anglophone form that the majority of canonized texts have been composed in, but the preponderance of acrolectic Standard English in the literary canon is no reason to overlook other forms of language that generated texts, animated lives, and circulated in public at the same time and in the same spaces. In fact, when we look closely at anglophone texts, we see that most are chock-a-block with what Bakhtin identified as heteroglossia.

Writers who composed in acrolectic Standard English have regularly occupied privileged positions within anglophony as arbiters of the aesthetic, not to mention the political, social, and legal. This is why notable eighteenth-century Scots worked so hard to “perfect” or delocalize their English. Doing so meant gaining privilege, cultural capital, and occupational advancement.³³ The achievements of those peripheral to Standard English notwithstanding—and language learning truly is an achievement, mental and physical—the privileged position of acrolectic anglophones within our literary canons is something we should challenge archivally rather than reproduce pedagogically. Acrolectic privileges are something we perpetually reinscribe if Standard English is the only anglophone variety that receives regular critical study as meaningful and aesthetic writing. Of course, there are obvious exceptions to the claim that acrolectic Standard English is all that scholars teach as meaningful and aesthetic writing. I discuss Robert Burns, who is one of the best late eighteenth-century examples of such an exception, in the first chapter. More generally, though, I am interested in seeking out those forms of nonnormative linguistic identity that were not and have not been seen as meaningful or aesthetic, but instead as “vulgar” and “provincial,” or worse, always in the process of becoming extinct.

Because Multilingual Subjects explores the politics and aesthetics of nonnormative anglophone languages as literary media, especially in the fourth chapter, my use of “anglophony” is intended both as a piece of terminology as well as an argument. As a term, and one with important limitations, “anglophony” helps scholars eschew awkward and unhelpful demonyms, ethnic monikers, and metropole-periphery binaries while revealing anglophone texts that allow us to examine overlooked relationships between linguistic subjectivity and aesthetic practice in the period.³⁴ As an argument, my use of the term “anglophony” is meant as an antidote and countermodel to unserviceable, misrepresentative, and sometimes messianically deployed terms like “World English” or “Global English,” terms that I discuss in the conclusion as one of the logical extensions of eighteenth-century ideologies of Standard English. Anglophony, which should be understood as always multilingual, enables us to grasp the linguistic and cultural dynamics of the present in a way that these other terms cannot. As an added benefit, the many possible pronunciations of the term “anglophony”—some will voice this word as two trochees, others as two iambs, and still other enunciative possibilities exist—enact the differential character of the linguistic environment it purports to describe.

The objective sonic characteristics of eighteenth-century anglophony are beyond the scope of this book. I focus on representations of anglophony in print, especially insofar as these representations clash with and subvert acrolectic Standard English. For example, anglophony can take shape in print as in the following wry line from Hume, a Scottish anglophone and eminent master of the acrolect: “But the life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.”³⁵ Anglophony can also appear in print as in John Collier, a near contemporary of Hume who was born and bred in Lancashire and who made a career out of local linguistic forms and semiradical politics: “Odds me Meary! whooa the Dickons wou’d o thowt o’ leeting o’ thee here so soyne this Morning? Where has to bin? Theaw’rt aw on a Swat, I think; for theaw looks primely.” (“Bless me! Mary, who the deuce would have thought of finding thee here so soon this morning? where hast thou been?—thou art all in a sweat I think, for thou looks primely.”)³⁶ The archive of this sort of linguistic diversity is vast and full of incommensurable forms. One finds, for instance, that eighteenth-century anglophony can also appear in print as in this line from the diary of West African slave trader Antera Duke: “I go Bord Captin Loosdam for break book for 3 slave so I break for one at Captin Savage so I take goods for slav at Captin Brown and com back.” (“I went on board Captain Langdon’s ship to ‘break book’ [make an agreement] for 3 slaves. I ‘broke trade’ for one slave with Captain Savage. Then I took goods for slaves from Captain Burrows and came back.”)³⁷ I investigate the political and aesthetic parameters of these and other examples as the book progresses, but the point here is to give some forward-looking textual examples of anglophone diversity in its eighteenth-century plenitude.

With this chain of divergent examples, I am suggesting that the primary way I conceive of the term “anglophony” is as a linguistic supracategory, one that links together a great many varieties and is irreducible to none. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of rhizomatic systems helps us conceptualize eighteenth-century anglophony in spite of the fact that unrecorded communities of sound are impossible to map. Deleuze and Guattari discuss language as a politico-organic entanglement made up of intersecting varieties: “Il n’y a pas de langue en soi, ni d’universalité du langage, mais un concours de dialectes, de patois, d’argots, de langues speciales … N’importe quel point d’un rhizome peut être connecté avec n’importe quel autre, et doit l’être.” (“There is no such thing as language in itself, nor is there universality in language, but rather a competing throng of dialects, of patois, argots, and jargons … Any point of a rhizome whatsoever can be connected with any other point, and should be.”)³⁸ Anglophony was (and is still) an interconnected network of differential comprehensibilities that is irreducible to geographic containers. Deleuze and Guattari’s nonjudgmental chain of equivalent forms—“a competing throng of dialects, of patois, argots, and jargons”—offers the useful vision of a radically dehierarchized linguistic field with countless and mobile contact points. The eighteenth-century archive reveals these contacts often and unambiguously. A Connaught Irishman meets an English-educated Edinburgh Scotsman on an East Indiaman bound for Calcutta. A British-born West Indian plantocrat speaks with his Caribbean-born, mixed-race overseer in some anglophone variety, and this overseer then communicates with the plantocrat’s slaves in an anglophone or other creole. A young polymath poet in London employs as Hebrew instructor a Sephardic rabbi whose language background is a complex mixture of Yiddish, German, Dutch, and Spanish and whose native city is Amsterdam. They communicate.

A few more terminological points are in order. From this point onward, I will use different terms to refer to anglophone difference in lived reality and anglophone difference in text. With regard to spoken language, I use a term culled from sociolinguistics: “lect,” that is, a form of speech with no value attached. By contrast, in order to discuss the imitation of lectic speech in writing as a literary device, I use terms like “acrolect,” “dialect,” “ethno-lect,” “chronolect,” “regiolect,” “sociolect,” and so forth. My specific literary claim throughout this book is that dialect is not an actually existing set of interactional protocol in the social world that can be transparently represented on the page. Instead, dialect as we should understand it in literature is, to paraphrase Wordsworth, the written imitation of half created and half perceived linguistic attributes, attributes that are called on to signify linguistic and extralinguistic alterity.

Deleuze and Guattari’s dynamic description of language as a rhizomatic system also provides a conceptual model for understanding power relations that work to conceal the multilingual complexities of a linguistic system like anglophony. They write, “Il n’y pas de langue-mére, mais prise de pouvoir par une langue dominante dans une multiplicité politique. La langue se stabilise autour d’une paroisse, d’un évêché, d’une capitale. Elle fait bulbe. Elle évolue par tiges et flux souterrains, le long des vallées fluviales, ou des lignes de chemins de fer, elle se déplace par taches d’huile.” (“There is no mother tongue but instead a power seizure by a dominant language within a political multiplicity. Language is stabilized around a parish, a bishopric, a capital. It bulges. It progresses by way of stems and subterranean flows, along river valleys or railroad lines; it spreads like an oil stain.”)³⁹ In this short passage, the writers overturn commonplace notions of language as a system of filiation where one self-contained tongue naturally gives birth to another and where each gains cultural and political power according to the logic of natural selection. When we think without the profitable pretense of a nationally sanctioned “mother tongue,” as Deleuze and Guattari suggest we should, then it is easier to see historically contingent usurpations of linguistic and cultural authority that have always been carried out in loci of power like parishes, bishoprics, or capitals. Armed with the powers invested in these and other institutions, a dominant dialect or acrolect seizes power. Deleuze and Guattari offer nonessentializing ways to think of language as a space of lateral linguistic mixing and nonhierarchical cross-pollination. Their emphasis on contact and contingency helps reveal the complexity of eighteenth-century anglophony even if power relations try to occlude it.⁴⁰

The passage quoted above provides two metaphors for language that help flesh out the methodological openings offered by the term anglophony as this book uses it. First, language is a series of networks that mimic commercial networks. A dominant language moves by subterranean flows, up river valleys, and along train tracks, which are also often the primary routes of trading activity. In this way, a dominant language is the copilot of commerce and communication, traveling wherever the two can be facilitated together, inundating spaces where other linguistic varieties or lects intermingled before. This is why understanding the British Empire’s metastatic eighteenth-century growth and hardening—both overseas and within the British Isles—is obligatory for grasping the linguistic and aesthetic texture of a period that sees Standard English gradually becoming a disciplinary pedagogical space in Britain and abroad. A dominant language form greases the arteries of exchange. Like trade, it traces the globe’s geographical contours and overcomes geographical obstacles where profitable. Any study of literature of the long eighteenth century that foregrounds anglophony as a conceptual category must take into account the interstitial spaces where Standard English is emergent and other interpenetrating linguistic forms are perceived as residual or moribund.

The second metaphor that is methodologically pertinent here concerns the idea that a dominant language can be conceived of like the random pattern of an oil stain, a splotch here, a blotch there, scattered densities cast on a surface in the shape of an archipelago. We can see this splotchy design of dominant language by considering the silos of educated, acrolectic Standard English speakers and writers in irreducibly multilingual places like London, Edinburgh, Philadelphia, Kingston, Bridgetown, Calcutta, and beyond.⁴¹ The metaphor of a dominant language superimposed over the language system as an oil stain enables scholars to think of the coming of standardized English as a spray of intermittent, separated, and ineradicable linguistic blots superimposed over the diverse and ever-changing surface of global linguistic practice. This insight forces network thought, a kind of thought wherein individualized trajectories through disorganized linguistic space become meaningful. Geographical containers like the nation, the British Isles, and even the imperium are here assumed to be innervated with linguistic difference from every direction. As such linguistic difference must negotiate the oily congelations of linguistic propriety that increasingly disperse on its surface.

To recapitulate the justification for the term anglophony I have been advancing until now, when applied to eighteenth-century literature, the term “English” hides more than it reveals. Intended to connote an internally coherent tradition of language and nation—and hence teachable traditions of literature and history—“English” as a category has long been recognized as too limited. More idealization than historical or empirical reality, the flattened and flattening term “English” is a detail-obliterating abstraction whereas anglophony is a detail-recovering one. Other scholars have sought out replacements for “English” that offer increased granularity, terms like “British,” “Archipelagic,” and even “Imperial” English.⁴² In this book I opt for “anglophony” because I relish the conceptual work this term does as well as the methodological practice it encourages. I am also suspicious of objectifying and geographizing language, for language is a process and not an object or space. One aspect of my argument, for example, is that by prizing Standard English over difference and multiplicity, anglophony disavows its unmappable and ongoing interlinguistic contacts—and to its own aesthetic detriment.

The fact that the term anglophony is derived from and has analogues in French postcolonial vocabularies thus intentionally enacts the multilingual intervention I hope to make here. By self-consciously using this borrowing as a borrowing, I want to disrupt any inference that the term is a product of critical parthenogenesis. If it is true, as I claim, that one of the tendencies of anglophone aesthetics and linguistic history has been to naturalize borrowings in such a way that their origins in external and subaltern linguistic systems are effaced, then the traces of the term anglophony’s explicit borrowedness start us down a road toward unraveling those aesthetic and historical tendencies. My point is that, in the present, it is obligatory that students of literature have a better model of what language is, how it changes, how it spreads, and how—following an insight made by sociolinguistics long ago—language rapidly communicates subject positions as well as semantic meaning in any interaction as in any moment of reading.

As an additional benefit, the term anglophony’s third and fourth syllables etymologically foreground voice and sound as salient components of linguistic interaction—and thus aesthetic and cultural exchange. This gesturing to voice (φωνή / pho¯ne¯´) informs the close readings of dialect writing that occupy parts of subsequent chapters. Even so, the preservation of the endonym “anglo-” in the term “anglophony” might give some readers pause. This preservation might seem to circumscribe the diverse linguistic practices I discuss within narrowly construed ethnic or national frameworks. This is not at all my intention, as this book takes as axiomatic the fact that non-English users of different forms of anglophony have always been critically important to anglophone aesthetics. Yet, the “anglo-” in “anglophony” seems to me to serve practical as well as analytical functions. On the practical side, I am using this term to name a dynamic spectrum of semimutually intelligible linguistic forms. If there is a unifying core to the linguistic forms that I will discuss here, then the “anglo-” in “anglophony” captures that grammatical and dictive core, however infelicitously. It does so not by way of ethnicity or nation, however, but instead, by way of invoking the exclusive ethnic and national claims against which many anglophones must constantly fight. On the analytic side, then, the “anglo-” in “anglophony” evokes a specter of English homogeneity that the ongoing deterritorialization of the language constantly contradicts.

Faithful to the idea of the specter, I have also chosen to preserve the “anglo-” in “anglophony” because this allows the word to serve as a ludic, bifurcated pun that throws into question the ontological reality of its first part: “anglophony,” wherein “phony” is taken not to mean voice or sound but instead “fake,” “ersatz,” “simulated,” or “parodic.” In the interest of continually emphasizing anglophony’s multilingual texture, it bears noting that the word “phony” is the etymological derivative of the slang Irish word fawney meaning “ring finger,” a metonym for the trick of selling a brass ring as a gold one—or so lexicography tells us. The word has been absorbed into English as a noun that indicates the artificial and inauthentic simulacrum of a particular thing. The “anglo-” in “anglophony” represents a simulacrum of Englishness in a world where the vast majority of anglophones are not and have not been English since the late eighteenth century.

As a piece of terminology, I see the way in which the term “anglophony” subverts and dissects itself as methodologically liberating and also new. To refer to an eighteenth-century subject as an anglophone existing within anglophony is not to say that person is English, far from it. Instead, this usage can be taken to insist constantly and unwaveringly on the fungibility and historical contingency of the term “English.” Likewise, to refer to an eighteenth-century subject as an anglophone need not carry any racial, ethnic, class, or gender implications. Instead, the term opens up an analytical field for examining representations of different identities as they are reinforced by linguistic practices and aestheticized in text. Finally, to refer to an eighteenth-century subject as an anglophone makes no claim that this is an exhaustive accounting of that subject’s linguistic skills or affiliations. One can be an anglophone as well as an arabophone, a francophone, a lusophone, a sinophone, et cetera. In fact, it is these sorts of linguistic multiplicities within people that have for too long been overlooked. They have also too infrequently been invoked as tools that can open up texts we know—as well as ones we have yet to study well—in exciting ways. As a broad and multivalent term, then, “anglophony” represents a range of imbricated and always-evolving communicative procedures, many of which are salient elements in the definition of what counts as eighteenth-century literary and verbal art.

The present moment is one in which some anglophones are telling themselves triumphal, depoliticized stories about their language’s global importance, economic relevance, and aesthetic peerlessness. This is occurring while the globe is also witnessing the most thoroughgoing die-off of nonanglophone languages that it has ever known. Anglophone scholars (and others, one hopes) might chasten histories of anglophony and its subjects, its cultures, and its literatures by striving for what Édouard Glissant called “Relation.” Rather than a monolingual and neoimperial global public, Glissant asks humans to attune themselves to the dynamics of creolization by considering the following question: “how many languages, dialects, or idioms will have vanished, eroded by the implacable consensus among powers between profits and controls, before human communities learn to preserve together their diversities?”⁴³

The Poetics (and Prose) of Relation

When we think with the porous framework of anglophony, multilingual subjects constellate themselves in productive ways. These constellations show that multiplicity—perennially contentious and always subject to grave impositions—has always been a generative and indeed essential part of anglophone cultural life, an idea that stands in tension with Benedict Anderson’s more general historical claim in Imagined Communities (1983) that “in the sixteenth century the proportion of bilinguals within the total population of Europe was quite small…. Then and now, the bulk of mankind is monoglot.”⁴⁴ My argument is not that Anderson is wrong and that actually there were scores of bilinguals, trilinguals, and multilinguals throughout history.⁴⁵ Instead, my claim is that Anderson’s term “monoglot” is overly limiting. Its fixity papers over the porous interstitial spaces between “bilingualism” and “monolingualism,” an infinite series of gradations where linguistic knowledge is always in formation.

Moreover, Anderson’s categories treat linguistic knowledge as something one can “acquire” in a perfect or complete form only over a long period of time. “If every language is acquirable,” he writes, “its acquisition requires a real portion of a person’s life: each new conquest is measured against shortening days. What limits one’s access to other languages is not their imperviousness, but one’s own mortality.”⁴⁶ But what about people who learn a word, a phrase, a set of phrases, a passive understanding, an operational but perhaps limited ability in another language or languages? Put otherwise, a “bilingual” who has “acquired” another language by investing “a real portion of his life” over a long period of time is not the only subject who displays and draws on linguistic difference, and this is to say nothing of disability as it relates to language, a topic that is unfortunately outside the purview of this book. Taken in this more flexible way, multilingual pasts are recuperable and meaningful. Moreover, lineages can be drawn from these multilingual pasts to anglophony’s lively (but often disavowed) multilingual present.

Glissant’s account of the ways that monolingual thought is central to imperial practice is an important element of the theoretical apparatus that Multilingual Subjects puts forth going forward. This is because Glissant’s conclusion that “Relation … is spoken multilingually” advocates for multilingual forms of knowledge, education, and interaction that are under threat in the globalizing present.⁴⁷ Departing from the notion that “the extinction of any language impoverishes everyone,” Glissant holds up the creolization of language in the colonial and postcolonial Caribbean as a model for future forms of human relationality. He rightly diagnoses the sick present of global language politics, a present in which Standard English users too often assume that the rest of the multilingual world has facility in its communicative forms. “Whatever the degree of complexity, the one thing henceforth outmoded is the principle (if not the reality) of a language’s intangible unicity,” Glissant writes, later concluding that treating or teaching language and literature as though its “unicity” were real is an “epistemological anachronism,” although one might also call this an episte-mological error.⁴⁸

The history of anglophony suggests that anglophones evade their own definition in aesthetically productive ways. Chosen for their exemplarity—in the contranymic sense of “exemplary” as totally unique but also utterly typical—the historical figures whose stories unfold in this book offer glimpses of anglophone life and aesthetics in forms that are otherwise difficult if not impossible to access. After this introduction, this book contains five chapters and a conclusion. Each of the chapters is organized around a particular form or genre of nonstandard, multilingual, or metalinguistic writing—linguistico-political writing, standardization theory, translation theory, intralingual translation, and interlingual translation. As such, the form of argumentation in each chapter conforms to the archive it studies. In addition, intercalated between each of the five chapters are short biographies of multilingual subjects of the long eighteenth century, human actors whose linguistic identities recapitulate the preceding chapter and anticipate the coming one. These biographies also attempt to refract the argument of each chapter in different and sometimes contradictory directions. In these short interludes, my own forms of metalinguistic writing come to the fore.

The short prelude to Chapter 1 examines the diverse linguistic identities of four escaped slaves who appear in a fugitive advertisement that was purchased by George Washington and published in the Maryland Gazette in 1761. Following on this first invocation of language, labor, and power, the first chapter begins with the uncanny similarity between a description of the coercive technologies used to teach English in Ireland during the 1790s and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s famous description of colonial Kenyan children being “taught the lucrative value of being a traitor to one’s immediate community” via linguistic pedagogy.⁴⁹ After tracing the representation of language and body in the eighteenth century through the emergent discourse of fugitive advertising, this chapter inverts the main terms of Derrida’s The Monolingualism of the Other (1996)—as well as recent responses to this book by Yasemin Yildiz, Thomas Bonfiglio, and others—in order to refigure eighteenth-century approaches to the multilingualism of the other as a curious pairing of aesthetic interest and political demonization. Highlighting this ambivalence between the aesthetic and political, I then argue that eighteenth-century cultural incursions made in the name of linguistico-imperial thought were anticipated, critiqued, subverted, and challenged. I make this case through close readings of Robert Burns and Phillis Wheatley, two multilingual anglophones who are rarely discussed together because as subjects they appear dissimilar. As multilingual subjects, however, the aesthetic and political terms of theirfamehavesurprisingcommonalities.

The interlude between Chapters 1 and 2 examines an Irish clergyman’s fatalistic lament that Irish language and literacy were dying. This lament functions as a transition into the second’s chapter’s discussion of Jacques Ranciere’s Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (2013), a book that enables a discussion of the forms of eighteenth-century multilingualism that were permitted to rise to the level of aesthetic and literary appreciation during the century, as one sees in the case of Burns. In order to begin this discussion, I elaborate on how eighteenth-century anglophony was all at once aesthetically interested in and yet politically resistant to the multilingualism of the other. The texts of the English standardization movement, I show, paradoxically criticized and valorized the English language by noting its “copiousness,” a polysemic term that yokes together the language’s perceived imperial belatedness and grammatical impoverishment (when compared to Greek, Latin, and French) with its abundant array of words and forms. At its heart, this chapter tracks the multilingual implications of the term “copiousness” as a metalinguistic description and idea relating to anglophone cultural identity.

Dorothy or “Dolly” Pentreath, a woman who has been mythologized as the last native speaker of the Cornish language, is the subject of my third biographical interlude. I tell Pentreath’s story through the textual record of antiquarian Daines Barrington’s effort to locate and converse with her in the 1770s. The third chapter addresses eighteenth-century theories and methodologies of translation in order to show that discourses of standardization and translation are mutually constituted over the course of the period. As I show, the ambivalence that characterizes standardization’s negotiation of linguistic multiplicity also marks the period’s translation theory. Translation theorists of the eighteenth century engage with linguistic multiplicity internal and external to anglophony by focusing on the translator’s imperative to eschew “the servile path,” so as not to fall under the control of the source language’s characteristics. The regular injunction to pursue “free” or “liberal” translation coupled with the constant caution against “servile” or “slavish” translation amounts to a roundabout way of warning against unauthorized transportation of cultural material from other linguistic realms into anglophony. It also offers an additional, period-specific binary—free or slavish—within which to understand translation practice.

The primary conceit of popular outsider-looking-in texts like Oliver Goldsmith’ The Citizen of the World (1760), or, a generation later, Elizabeth Hamilton’ Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), is language’s ability to situate a subject, even in writing. The interlude that links Chapters 3 and 4 considers Joseph Emin, a polyglot traveler who, despite “not being very well versed in the English language,” wrote and published his own biography in 1792. Emin’s fear of being judged through his language offers a way to think about anglophony and “dialect,” a concept I purse in the fourth chapter. This chapters focuses on demotic “dialect dialogue” writing in Andrew Brice’s Exmoor Scolding In the Propriety and Decency of the Exmoor Language (composed ca. 1727; first extant print edition 1746), John Collier’s regularly reprinted A View of the Lancashire Dialect by way of Dialogue (1746), and, later, Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth’s Essay on Irish Bulls (1802). By reading the aesthetics of Brice and Collier’s work, as well as their Standard English translation histories, I frame these dialogues as deliberate critiques of the spread of Standard English literacy during the period.

Between Chapters 4 and 5 I discuss Ntiero Edem Efiom, a West African slave trader whose anglophone idiolect is a good model for the active rescripting of language and meaning through multilingualism that is discussed in the fifth chapter by way of interlingual translation. Whereas the fourth chapter focuses on intralingual translation, or, translation from one anglophone form to another, the fifth and final chapter positions interlingual translation in commercial terms. The works of Alexander Fraser Tytler, Sir William Jones, William Julius Mickle, and George Campbell show that interlingual translation of the period—like intralingual translation—stresses “free” and legible rather than “servile” translation. I intervene into analyses of imperial translation practice and aesthetics by suggesting that the effects of this ideology of translation are crucially related to the period’s ideas of the commodity value of particular languages.

This book closes by considering the life and inventions of Sequoyah, a man well known for his invention of the Cherokee syllabary in 1821. This rumination on Sequoyah’s desire to escape from and provincialize Standard English paves the way for the conclusion’s discussion of contemporary conversations about the past and future of the English language. I discuss popular and potentially hyperbolic accounts of English’s spread and influence in order to argue that the counterarchive of long eighteenth-century “dialect” writing, multilingual writing, and translation theory that the book has just surveyed offers a different view for the future of anglophony and the humanities more generally.