10 - Conclusion

Summary

A typical attitude of the civilised Renaissance man, who valued freedom of expression and adopted a playful attitude towards models of foreign behaviour, was the proclivity to improvise in foreign languages in order to communicate. The early eighteenth century was the turning point leading into the second phase, which began when travellers became conscious that English was a rich and vigorous language, something which affected attitudes towards non-standard varieties of English at home and speakers of other languages abroad. The language attitudes many Britons took abroad from that time on included a new self-consciousness about speech and a strong sense of anxiety about correctness. As they were now concerned about linguistic models of polite social behaviour, their efforts went into using the right language with the right people. The spirit of improvisation typical of the post-Renaissance gave way to a new sense of language as a marker of social and cultural identity. At the same time, the ideology of a ‘pure’ language and the belief that members of polite society in any nation have the monopoly of it, informed their views of language everywhere.