The first thing that made me want to write about Anglo-Saxon was my experience of French exchange students using the term to mean 'anglophone, English-speaking'. I'd warn them against the term, stating (but perhaps not explaining) that it is inaccurate and has connotations they didn't intend in British/American English. (So here comes the explanation.) The second thing is that I've been writing about the history of English and have chosen to mostly refer to Anglo-Saxon rather than Old English and I'm thinking about that choice. The third thing is that Dave Wilton (who writes the fantastic Word Origins newsletter) published a paper in 2020 on the topic that's been on my TBR pile for a while—so writing this post provided me with an excuse to take the time for it.
Anglo-Saxon v Old English
Let me address my second thing first: Why would I want to call the Germanic pre-Norman conquest language/dialects of Britain (5th–11th century) Anglo-Saxon when the name Old English feels more transparent? It's English! But it's Old!
It's that transparency that I want to resist. The name Old English makes it sound like it's the same language as we speak, just an older form. But we really have to question whether it is the same language at all. Yes, I would count Modern English as a Germanic language derived from that previous language, but the fallout of the Norman conquest so thoroughly changed English that it stopped being 'the same language'. The grammar is different, the vocabulary is different, the pronunciation is unfamiliar, the words that have survived often mean very different things today. As this Tiktoker says, you don't need footnotes, you need a translation:
Confusingly, it's common to hear people refer to old English (or Old English?) in reference to Shakespearean English—or even Dickensian. The film director Robert Eggers, whose forthcoming film Werwulf is in Middle English, has been fighting a battle against this kind of misuse:
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So, just to be clear, here are the periods of English, as usually defined:
- ca. 450AD/CE to 1150ish: Old English/Anglo-Saxon.
from the Germanic invasions till the start of Middle English. This can be further divided into prehistoric (450–650), early (650–900) and late periods (900–1150). Beowulf is the most famous literary work from this time. - 1066 to 1500ish: Middle English
from the Norman (French) invasion through the Great English Vowel Shift. This also has early and late periods. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is the most famous bit. - 1500ish to 1650ish: Early Modern English
Shakespeare times. King James Bible times. - 1650ish to now: Late Modern English
No more thou, no more hath, and lots more vocabulary thanks to industriali{s/z}ation and the spread of English worldwide.
The dates should be taken as severely "mushy," since change spread gradually through the Anglosphere—or through England and the British Isles, the limits of the Anglosphere for most of its history.
So, that's one use of Anglo-Saxon: to refer to the people, culture or language of the Germanic-speaking people of Britain before the 12th century. That's the most straightforward meaning.
Anglo-Saxons = English speakers?
But the Anglo-Saxons didn't call themselves Anglo-Saxon. That term didn't arrive till the 1600s. And it didn't get much traction until the 19th century. Here's a bit I wrote about it in The Prodigal Tongue:
At the height of the British Empire, English intellectuals were taken with the notion of an “Anglo-Saxon race”, tracing its roots to the Germanic peoples who settled in Britain after the Romans left in the 5th century. With self-satisfaction they concluded that their “race” was something special, illustrated by the strength of their culture over that of the conquered Celts, their early codification of individual rights with the Magna Carta in 1215, and their break with the Roman church in the 16th century. Belief in their own good example made appropriating other peoples’ lands much easier to justify – and Americans of English stock were happy to share in this myth. But by the 20th century, talk of an Anglo-Saxon race had fallen out of fashion, and instead of genetic inheritance, it was language that seemed to unite us.
Thus we started to be called the English-speaking peoples, a term used with particular influence by two statesmen-historians, Theodore Roosevelt in The Winning of the West and Winston Churchill in A History of the English-speaking Peoples. President and prime minister turned to this language-based description of “our peoples” because other possible descriptions had become impossible.
My French students were still using the Anglo-Saxon race to refer to 'the English-speaking peoples'. One problem in using the term that way is that "races" allegedly have a common genetic heritage, and English-speakers don't. Many Americans cannot trace their ancestry back to England. We are a transatlantic linguistic group and we share some aspects of our cultures. But it's weird to call us a race in contemporary English.
I had a look in the French Web corpus in SketchEngine (frTenTen23) and found some examples of the French usage, just so you can see what I'm talking about (the blue bits are from Google Translate):
- une politique audacieuse pour défendre la langue et la culture française qui se trouvent aujourd'hui particulièrement menacées par l'invasion de la langue anglaise et de la culture anglo-saxonne .
a bold policy to defend the French language and culture, which are today particularly threatened by the invasion of the English language and Anglo-Saxon culture.
- L'hôpital a mis en place un concept qui vient des pays anglo-saxons nommé "Kids friendly".
The hospital has implemented a concept that comes from Anglo-Saxon countries called "Kids friendly".
- cette brutale franchise, qui caractérisent la race anglo-saxonne .
that brutal frankness, which characterizes the Anglo-Saxon race. - Cette ardeur chrétienne est-elle particulière à la race anglo-saxonne ?
Is this Christian ardo(u)r peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon race?
The Anglo-Saxon race-ism
Meanwhile in the equivalent English corpus (enTenTen21), mentions of "the Anglo-Saxon race" are much more likely to be associated with white power movements and eugenics—a big reason I wanted to steer my French students away that phrase. For example:
- "The new Constitution eliminates the ignorant Negro vote and places the control of our government where God Almighty intended it should be – with the Anglo-Saxon race ," John Knox, the president of the [Alabama] constitutional convention, said in a speech encouraging voters to ratify the document [in 1901] [source]
- Galton declared that the "Bohemian" element in the Anglo-Saxon race is destined to perish, and "the sooner it goes, the happier for mankind." [source]
But this isn't a blog about French/English differences. It's a blog about differences in American and British English—and I had a feeling we'd find differences in how Anglo-Saxon is used in my two countries.
WASP
I first learned the term Anglo-Saxon as a child when I asked my mother about the AmE term Wasp or WASP. The OED's first citation for that term comes from a sociology journal in 1962:
For the sake of brevity we will use the nickname 'Wasp' for this group, from the initial letters of ‘White Anglo-Saxon Protestants’.
The OED notes that the term is "originally and chiefly U.S." and "frequently derogatory." The Anglo-Saxon in Wasp is meant to distinguish certain white Americans: not the Irish, nor the Scots-Irish, not the Germans, not the Poles... When I hear Wasp I think (NAmE) "old money", members of Daughters of the American Revolution, and people who claim to trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower.
It's hard to exclude the stinging insect when looking for Wasp in a corpus, but White Anglo-Saxon Protestant(s) occurs about five times per decade in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) between 1960 and 2000, and not at all in this century. That's not to say it's dead: there are 11 uses in AmE in the (much larger) Corpus of Global Web-Based English, collected in 2012–3. According to the News on the Web corpus, that was a stand-out year for white Anglo-Saxon protestant(s). The graph shows worldwide numbers. It occurs 8.7 times per million words in the American news corpus and 3.6 times per million in the British, usually in stories about the US.
Three uses of Anglo-Saxon in American and British corpora (Wilton 2020)
We've seen a few meanings of Anglo-Saxon here, and that's what Wilton investigates in his paper by going deeper into a number of corpora:
Wilton, David. 2020. What Do We Mean By Anglo-Saxon? Pre-Conquest to the Present. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 119.425–454. doi:10.5406/jenglgermphil.119.4.0425.
Writing for philologists, he's concerned that trends in how the term is used in general English might be bad for use of the term in medieval studies. (For what it's worth, BrE style guides these days prefer medieval over mediaeval.) Here, I'm concerned just with whether there's a difference between British and American usage, what that's about, and whether there's risk of miscommunication between AmE & BrE.
Wilton tracks three uses of Anglo-Saxon:
- Pre-Conquest: referring to the Germanic peoples of Britain before 1066
- Politicocultural: "references to the politics, economics, and culture of present-day Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and especially the transnational characteristics that these nations share that are not explicitly ethnic or physiognomic." (p. 433) So: like the French usage above.
- Ethnoracial: "any use of Anglo-Saxon that is applied to an individual person; that refers to physiognomy, personal appearance, DNA or genetics or ancestry; or that contrasts Anglo-Saxon with another ethnic or racial group, as well as instances of the phrase white Anglo-Saxon Protestant and the acronym WASP." (p. 433)
Using those three categories, Wilton analy{s/z}ed use of Anglo-Saxon in the COHA corpus:
He notes the increase around the turn of the 20th century, when "immigration from Southern Europe peaked, Jim Crow laws were instituted, lionization of the Confederacy and the 'lost cause' began, and membership in the Ku Klux Klan reached its height" but that the use is still mostly not making reference to Anglo-Saxons as a "race" with physical characteristics at this point (p. 443). He supposes that this might be because whiteness is such a default at this time in American thinking that there's less need to be racially specific. The Ethnoracial usage becomes dominant after 1970, in a period that, Wilton notes, is marked by "white flight" to the suburbs. (By 1970, immigration laws had liberalized and there had been a "Great Migration" of African Americans from the rural south to northern urban cent{er/re}s.)
There is no British equivalent to the COHA corpus (a real shame), so Wilton had a look in the parliamentary record to see British use of Anglo-Saxon in the same period. It's not (as he acknowledges) a fair comparison, but it is interesting:
Moving on to more recent times, here's what Wilton found in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA):
Again, we don't have a good comparison corpus for British English, but the findings from the British National Corpus (texts from 1980–93) look like this:
Wilton followed up with the News on the Web corpus, which is more comparable across countries, comparing two short periods in each, 2012–13 and 2017–18.
(As you can see, he's also analy{s/z}ed Canada, which has its own patterns, and which I'm not covering here because that's not my beat. But do follow up with Wilton's paper if you're interested.)
So both countries have all the uses, but the UK has a lot more Pre-Conquest usage, which is not at all surprising, since you run into Pre-Conquest things in the place that was conquered—less so in the place later conquered by some people from the place that was conquered.
More notable is the division of ethnoracial versus politicocultural usage in the two countries.
In Britain, there's either even (BNC, 1980–93) distribution of ethnoracial and politicocultural or lots more politicocultural (NOW, 2010s). Wilton writes:
In Britain, there's either even (BNC, 1980–93) distribution of ethnoracial and politicocultural or lots more politicocultural (NOW, 2010s). Wilton writes:
One might have expected an increase in the ethnoracial uses of “Anglo-Saxon” [in the UK] since the advent of the Brexit era, but the data shows this not to be the case. Any impression otherwise is probably due to increased awareness of ethnoracial uses of the term. In other words, people are only now noticing the uses that have always been there or are now reading ethnic connotations into the term that they had not before.
Wilton goes on to show that politicocultural interpretations dominate in other English-speaking nations, except the US and Canada, where the proportion of ethnoracial uses is around half of total uses and seems to be increasing.
In The Prodigal Tongue, I quote the late Guardian columnist Simon Hoggart:
A wise American reporter based in London once told me that every British news story is, deep down, about class. Every American story, he said, is about race.
Our linguistic differences often support that impression.
So, in terms of mutual understanding, I would expect that Americans seeing BrE use of Anglo-Saxon might easily take an ethnoracial impression where a politicocultural one is intended, since AmE use is heavily skewed toward that meaning and vice versa. The differences between these two uses are sometimes hard to pick apart—Wilton acknowledges that he sometimes found ambiguity in his data and needed to pick a side for the analysis. And that makes them even more apt to fly under our "semantic difference radar".
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Considering the reasons for your decision to use ‘Anglo-Saxon’ instead of ‘Old English’, do you also prefer an alternative genealogy of English?
ReplyDeleteNot necessarily, no. It just seems less ambiguous when writing for non-linguists. If I say and briefly explain Anglo-Saxon, it's clearer that I'm talking about something very "foreign" to moderns.
DeleteAlso, I have to refer to the people, and it doesn't work to call them Old English
DeleteTry "English", It worked for them. Bede, writing as far back as 731 AD, called his book Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, not "... Angli-Saxonum".
DeleteAbout a year or so ago online (it's always online), I saw a British writer being criticised for using the term Anglo-Saxon, by Americans, because they considered it racist. The Brit was literally writing about the actual Anglo-Saxons, but that didn't register with their critics, because of their very different cultural experiences.
ReplyDeleteI wish we had 'like' buttons on comments here—yes, exactly
DeleteThere is also the meaning as given in Chambers:
ReplyDeletePlain English, often implying forthright use of English words that are usually taboo in ordinary conversation (informal)
And there is the phrase Anglo-Saxon attitudes, used by Lewis Carroll.
oh, good addition!
Delete"You prefer the good old Anglo-Saxon, I believe" - Kipling, Stalky & Co; meaning plain speech (or, indeed, 4-letter words).
ReplyDeleteIt's not just your French exchange students: When I lived in Israel in the 1970s, all native English speakers were called "Anglo-Saxon," a word that had been thoroughly Hebraicized with Hebrew vowels and Hebrew plural suffixes. To me, an American Ashkenazi Jew with zero Angles or Saxons in the family tree, the label was hilarious and preposterous. I'm told it's no longer in use. I wrote about the a few years ago (gift link): https://wordworking.medium.com/when-i-was-anglo-saxon-3242029d65d6?sk=87801d51efaae24b04abbf06617e082c
ReplyDeleteThanks, Nancy!
Delete"Anglo-Celtic" is a term sometimes used in Australia for people whose ancestry is from anywhere in the British Isles.
ReplyDeleteIsrael still does have a company called "Anglo-Saxon Real Estate" [https://www.anglo-saxon.co.il/en/].
ReplyDeleteFor corpus searches for WASP, I wonder if "WASPy" would work? On the one hand my intuition says it's probably younger (for whatever that's worth) and informal, but it seems like a term unlikely to be used for the insect
ReplyDeleteYes, it definitely trails the full form, time-wise, peaking in the 1990s and 2000s, but with very small numbers.
DeleteActually, waspy is in Chambers as an alternative to waspish - like a wasp. Not that I've ever heard it out in the wild.
DeleteMaybe I'll switch the /Anglo-Saxon/s in my manuscript to /Englisc/. I'm thinking about it...
ReplyDeleteI (British) didn't realise other groups would use it quite like that. I feel like it would be similar to still calling France Gaul and that'd be silly.
ReplyDeleteI'm a translator from Italian, living in Italy, and "anglosassoni" is definitely used here to mean anglophones and/or residents of the UK and US (also the other primarily English-speaking countries, but they're rarely thinking about those). There's no intentional genetic connotation, although I would never translate it as "Anglo-Saxon" and it irritates the hell out of me even in Italian for the reasons you state. No "razza anglosassone," at least, since "race" is a somewhat taboo word unless one is talking about racism. I think some people have a vague awareness now that "anglosassone" is inaccurate - fifteen years ago almost no one did - but it's still everywhere, even in formal writing.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised that style guides still need to specify the spelling of 'medieval'. A British medieval historian told me back in the 1970s that 'medieval' was the standard British academic spelling, and that 'mediaeval' was, well, medieval. I have some books that confirm this - not least a volume from 1992 of the Cambridge (UK) Studies in Medieval Life and Thought, whose three editors all include 'Medieval' in their job descriptions. Anyway I must get back to writing a programme to compute coördinates.
ReplyDeleteI suspect the style guides are getting at me. I use mediaeval simply because I always have done. Probably because it was fashionable when I was young (approximately in the Middle Ages)
Delete'But the Anglo-Saxons didn't call themselves Anglo-Saxon. That term didn't arrive till the 1600s.' Yes, it's true that they had difficulty describing exactly who they were, but surely the term is a little earlier than that? 'In certain charters of the late 880s and early 890s Alfred is styled king of the Angles and of the Saxons, or king of the Anglo-Saxons' (Keynes and Lapidge 1983) or Asser: aelfred angul saxonum rex.
ReplyDeleteInteresting--but the Latin bit is not in English, so it's not counted in the OED as first use of the term.
ReplyDeleteFair enough. On the other hand here’s the Britannica website:
ReplyDelete@ The term Anglo-Saxon seems to have been first used by Continental writers in the late 8th century to distinguish the Saxons of Britain from those of the European continent, whom St. Bede the Venerable had called Antiqui Saxones (“Old Saxons”). The name formed part of a title, rex Angul-Saxonum (“king of the Anglo-Saxons”), which was sometimes used by King Alfred of Wessex (reigned 871–99) and some of his successors. By the time of the Norman Conquest, the kingdom that had developed from the realm of the Anglo-Saxon peoples had become known as England, and Anglo-Saxon as a collective term for the region’s people was eventually supplanted by “English.” For some time thereafter, Anglo-Saxon persisted as an informal synonym for English, but that use diminished as emigrants from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and other areas beyond northern Europe further reshaped Britain’s ethnic composition.
Cool—the OED entry was updated in 2008, so probably not due for another update too soon, but maybe they'll get to that!
ReplyDeleteYes, the associations with Anglo Saxon can be unfortunate, especially if you're not primed to expect them. I remember when I was studying abroad in England and taking a linguistics class, having to guide a fellow American student away from a white power website that came up in the first page of results when she searched 'Anglo Saxon'. And this was in about 2010, when Google searches were somewhat less dire than now.
ReplyDelete