A sociohistorical approach to language contact and change: The case of William Caxton as a translator and multilingual businessman

The art of printing revolutionised human communication. It enabled knowledge and experience to be shared by a substantially wider audience. William Caxton (1415-24–1492) was one of the most influential at the earliest stage of its expansion. Five hundred years later, in a somewhat similar vein, digitisation of linguistic data and images is changing the landscape of historical linguistics.

Since the first major historical corpus was released in 1991 (The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts), historical linguists have extensively examined synchronic and diachronic distribution of words and constructions attested in the commonly available data, and published their work in such form that is “testable”. Current corpora include data not only from various periods and text genres, but also from different regional and social varieties. This availability of data has contributed to an abundance of research covering major topics on the history of English. Now that researchers have these “shared reference grounds'' in the form of primary and secondary sources, academic interest in the area is constantly expanding.

Our project (Mitsumi Uchida and Yoko Iyeiri, 2015–2018 and 2019–2024), supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, focuses on language contact in the era of early printing. Existing studies show that the time period—the second half of the 15th century—saw significant turns in the development of the English language; some, allegedly, under the influence of French. In our research we pay special attention to William Caxton, not only as the first English printer, but also as a multilingual businessman and translator, who was eager to make profit and keep his business running. Importantly for language contact and change, I outline how his translation shows interesting variation, in terms of word choices, grammatical alternations and spelling. We believe that detailed studies of individual language users make humble but important contributions to the better understanding of linguistic variation and change.