Draft. Spelling and Renaissance

So I made some changes after today. Thanks for your help, especially Morgan.
I got some mixed feed back on how well I support my thesis. Your feedback on that and the flow would be appreciated

Increased Literacy as a Force for Language Standardization

The Renaissance was a time of turmoil; institutions of government, religion, and learning were in upheaval. With the advent of the printing press and the spread of the Reformation, the Catholic Church lost its monopoly of controlling knowledge and learning. The Protestant movement benefitted from the printing press. Protestants emphasized the importance of reading the Bible to maintain personal access to God, and printing made the written word more accessible than ever before. These social influences led to a vast increase in the number of literate people. The sudden increase in literacy necessitated standardization of orthography for ease of learning and consistency of understanding.

Throughout history the number of individuals who were literate has been small because literacy has been carefully monitored by the institutions controlling knowledge. The dissemination of printed materials made it easier and more important for people to be able read. As printed works became more accessible, more people learned to read. The trend of increasing literacy began with the gentry and professionals in about 1500, and by the end of the seventeenth century the gentry had attained close to 100 percent literacy and as many as 70 percent of the servants in some cities were literate (Nevalainen 25). While there was still a definite hierarchy of literacy favoring higher social classes, a broader scope of the population could read than ever before. This vast influx of audience strained the literary system.

While some might argue that the huge influx of newly literate people would lead to greater disparity in language because of their inexperienced and individual vocabulary and spelling, this is unlikely. Initially, reading and writing were not taught together. Reading was taught first and students did not necessarily proceed to learn how to write. Writing remained an independent skill (Nevalainen 25). Thus, during the first movements toward standardization, the written dialogue remained very one-sided. It was not contaminated or destabilized by an increase of errors from incompletely educated writers.

The first movements toward standardization served the purpose of keeping texts accessible to the new audience. When the majority of literate individuals are beginning readers, complex and inconsistent grammar and orthography are all but unnavigable. Movements that wanted to be well understood by the masses used standardization to simplify language. For example, Martin Luther, when translating the Bible into German, simplified the spellings and standardized the grammar. This produced a form of written German that could be understood by all Germans (Krebs 5). The trend of simplifying written language to make it easier to learn appears to be consistent across several languages. A modern linguistic study found that the most evolved and standardized languages are those that have a long history of educating children how to read and write. The constant didactic re-teaching and re-learning lends itself to generating simplified consistencies (Barr 98). Standardization of writing made it easier for non-readers to become literate.

During this time the social institutions were changing; movement between classes had become possible. The nobility did not want to lose their elite status. They resisted social mobility by creating arresting tax structures, raising dowries astronomically to exclude newcomers from titles and land ownership, and increasing the emphasis on high birth and characteristics of nobility (Martines 184, Sperling 57, Martines 206). This increased attention to propriety of action, speech, and writing created immense pressure to conform. In order to be accepted into high social circles, people tried to conform to convention. This led to “hyper-correction” being viewed as prestigious (Nevalainen 24).  As the people began to write as well as read, there was a burst of books and manuals on correct conduct and style in writing (179). Similarly, dictionaries became established as references for correct spelling by the eighteenth century (Krebs 8). While there likely was some influence of incorrect grammar and orthography from new writers, the movement toward standardization was more forceful and more enduring. The monasteries and scriptorium lost their institutional control of written language to the power of printing houses’ standardized practices.

The sudden growth of readership, followed by a more gradual increase in people who could write, allowed standardization to become well established before languages began to be bombarded with new spellings. The movement to standardization primarily benefitted the readers by making language simpler and, consequently, easier to learn and to understand. Additionally, profound social pressure to act correctly cemented standardization in the minds of the people and in the fabric of the language.

Works Cited

Barr, Rebecca. Handbook of Reading Research: Volume Ii. Mahwah, N.J: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1996.

Krebs, Susanne. The Impact of Printing on the Development of the English Language During the Period of the Renaissance. München: GRIN Verlag, 2009

Martines, Lauro. Power and Imagination: City-states in Renaissance Italy. New York: Knopf, 1979.

Nevalainen, Terttu, and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg.Sociolinguistics and Language History: Studies Based on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence. Amsterdan: Rodopi, 1996.

Sperling, Jutta Gisela. Convents and the body politic in late Renaissance Venice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.