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