Multilingual Subjects. Daniel DeWispelare
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