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Words: | Submitted: Mon Jun 19 2006
... role in establishing English as the national language of England. They suggest that by adopting 'the dialect of London and the South-East as the English for his books, Caxton took a decisive step forward in establishing that particular variety as 'the English language'.' (Harris and Taylor, 1980). We get the idea that Caxton as the first printer in England was highly responsible for imposing some form of uniformity to the English language simply by default. His choice of the dialect of the southeast Midlands has given us the present form of Standard English. Before doing any printing, Caxton had to choose a variety of language, which should be understood by a lot of people, and not an exclusive language like Latin, which was the language of the elite. In Caxton's time, Latin, the lingua franca of Europe, was already a dying language. Independent states throughout Europe no longer gave much ...
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