Tim William Machan. (2009). Language Anxiety: Conflict and Change in the History of English. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press

Abstract

Tim William Machan’s book Language Anxiety: Conflict and Change in the History of English illuminates the status of English in the context of a conflictual history. It has been on my desk for some time while I have engaged in inner and outer debate about it, mostly about why I find it so rich and students find it less so. To support my teaching of the history of the English language, I wanted a carefully researched book that displayed English and its evolution as a site of difficulty as well as opportunity. I wanted a book that could show that English is a language whose history is laden with issues of colonialism, hegemony, power imbalances, and prescriptivism—the latter complicit in all the preceding. I wanted a book that would detail the need to nuance notions of grammar and its unproblematic goodness. I wanted a book to ground, historically and socio-linguistically, Deborah Cameron’s (1995) arguments in Verbal Hygiene. Machan provides all those things. This review celebrates Machan’s undoubted achievement in producing such a book, while noting that I still search for a book more persuasive to students.