Abstract

It need be no surprise that the politics of language—almost anywhere in the world and at any time in history—is part and parcel of politics in any wider sense of the term. Historical examples abound, as do literary ones. The Norman Conquest of England in 1066 led to the transformation of variants of Saxon—itself an import into the British Isles—into something recognizably like our English by the time of Chaucer in the fourteenth century.