What it sounds like – a really well written and engaging look at the histories of the various forms of English. What I don’t like are all the sidebars, which interrupt the flow of the book, but they are all informative and illustrate the points nicely.
I love the attitude against prescriptivist fogies. That is the stance to have, and it runs throughout the book.
Usually I kind of pull some quotes in chronological order, but here I’m going to go to the end first. As Greene talked about in his You are What You Speak, there’s a type of discourse around language use that ties it into cultural values. In a similar vein, Crystal talks about how in the 1980s, ‘the age saw the whole of language as a mirror of community standards, ethics, and behaviour.’ (525)
“As nice points of grammar are mockingly dismissed as pedantic and irrelevant, so were punctiliousness in such matters as honesty, responsibility, property, gratitude, apology and so on.”
The suggestion here is that the relationship is one of cause and effect. And his point was echoed by the politician Norman Tebbit in a 1985 broadcast on BBC Radio 4. To lose standards in English, he argued ’cause[s] people to have no standards at all, and once you lose standards then there’s no imperative to stay out of crime. (526)
By this point in the book, Crystal has demonstrated that a strain of anxiety about linguistic purity has been a feature of the language since the Middle Ages, and various Chicken Littles have warned about the impending doom signified by linguistic change over the centuries, with little effect on stemming the tide, often with amusingly contradictory or logically impossible prescriptions, and causing some real damage along the way.
I will here gloss over the fascinating history of Old English and the beginning of the Middle English period. The latter saw the development of a literary culture (based around the needs of the royal government and exchequer,) and a concomitant rise in the self-consciousness surrounding the language, all taken to an exponential degree by the advent of the printing press in the 15th century.
English had an inferiority complex from the start, by comparison to Latin and French which had institutional superiority in England throughout the Middle Ages, and Chaucer earned praise for sprucing it up with elements of those languages. But this practice came under criticism:
by commyxstion and mellyng, furst wiþ Danes and afterward wiþ Normans, in menye the contray longage ys apeyred, and som vseþ strange wlaffying, chyteryng, harryng, and garryng grisbittyng.
by intermingling and mixing, first with Danes and afterwards with Normans, in many people the language of the land is harmed, and some use strange inarticulate utterance, chattering, snarling, and harsh teeth-gnashing (186)
Crystal goes on to demonstrate that the ship has sailed; he earlier made the point that what we see in the era of Middle English is not simply an epoch of innovation, but the codification in writing of the results of a couple of centuries of linguistic ferment. (I’m personally convinced of the influence of the Brittonic substrates on Middle English, though Crystal gives it short shrift.) In any event, by the time those first grammar scolds began to kvetch about the influences of foreign words on their native tongue, it was scarcely possible to create a sentence without using them, and Crystal gives examples from their own writing.
Fast forward a century for the following:
As with all controversies, both sides had a point. Some writers had certainly been overdoing it…it is not difficult to see why some people went to the opposite extreme, condemning all borrowings, or demanding their removal. Sir John Cheke, for example, writes in a letter to Thomas Hoby (1557:)
I am of the opinion that our tung shold be written cleane and pure, vnmixst and
vnmangled with borrowings of other tunges.Loanword antipathy, as we have seen (p. 186), is a long-standing complaint; and, as in previous centuries, Cheke would have been unable to achieve the desired purity even in his own writing. In this sentence alone Cheke used four words of Latin or French origin: opinion, mix, mangle, and pure. (292)
The controversy continued over the centuries-long process of enthroning Standard English. The following passage, about dictionary author Samuel Johnson, is a concise summary of Crystal’s position on the topic in general:
Johnson is the first to take on board the dual perspective which is essential for an integrated and sociolinguistically aware account of language variation. On the one hand, we have to recognize that all varieties of language have their value as a reflection of a segment of society, and are alike fascinating as objects of study. On the other hand, we have to recognize that some variants of language – and one in particular, Standard English – have acquired special roles which give them privileged status in the eyes of society. That is just as much a fascinating linguistic fact. Johnson respected all varieties, while seeing the need for a standard…He was able to maintain a balance. Where things go wrong is when that balance is lost, and an exclusive focus on the latter dimension is accompanied by a denigration of the former. This is the real harm that the prescriptivism of the mid eighteenth century did to English, It prevented the next ten generations from appreciating the richness of their language’s expressive capabilities, and inculcated an inferiority complex about everyday usage which crushed the linguistic confidence of millions. (387)
While the tension for and against prescriptivism is an important part of the book, it is a wide-ranging historical work, and I’ve glossed over a lot for the sake of this brief writeup. So I’ll just briefly mention this discussion of the grammar of dialect, and in particular the use of dialect in literature.
In some cases the deviant form might capture a feature of regional pronunciation, as when might is represented as micht in Scots (p.489), because in such cases there is a happy coincidence between the sound we associate with ch and the sound which actually occurs in the accent. On the other hand, to capture the sound which occurs in Scots either, there is no obvious representation, and several alternatives are found in local writing from Scotland, such as ayther, aither, ather, ayther, ether, eather, eyther, adir, and edder. None of these reflects the sound with any phonetic accuracy; rather, they reflect a belief about the sound. In many dialect representations, indeed, there is no pronunciation difference involved at all, but the nonstandard spelling conveys a regional resonance nonetheless…We have to bear in mind the inherent artificiality – though artistry would be a better word – in all the dialect representations which enter English literature after the emergence and international recognition of British and American Standard English. Authors have to resort to subterfuge to get their characterizations across. (486)
Astute and fascinating observations like this abound in the book.
ianuaditis 
Nice post!