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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
It is not easy for English speakers now to believe that their language can ever have been reduced to humble stammerings by another vernacular. A complacent assumption of linguistic superiority was never felt by the English in the Middle Ages: that privilege belonged to those who wrote and spoke in Latin and French. We can come nearer to imagining this linguistic climate if we compare the relation of modern French to English and American, or of modern Swiss-German to German and French, or of Marathi to Hindi and English. All of these are subtly different situations, but in each, certain languages are perceived as dominant, and this provides a cultural model that is at once a source of aspiration and of complex feelings of insecurity. I think something like this is part of what provokes the frequent comments in Chaucer's poetry about the inadequacy of his English. Here is one example, from the Book of the Duchess:
Me lakketh both Englyssh and wit
For to undo hyt at the fulle.
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