Cultural revolutions come from below, not above

Active young men, going to work, now sport a new kind of uniform, part oik, part kiddy: trainers with upturned toes, baggy pseudo-patch trousers of the kind worn by dustmen, short zip-jackets, a child’s rucksack and a baseball cap. In the Sainsbury’s queue the other morning, a man thus attired addressed me in a marked Wykehamist accent. He was on his way to the City. This is the latest example of what I called prolerise, the way in which culture springs from the depths. If those at the top hit upon a really useful gadget, like the French table fork, brought to England by Richard II, then it will gradually catch on lower down the scale of class and wealth. But the process usually works the other way, since poverty is a spur to utilitarianism.

Contrary to what many people think, then, cultural change is demotic. This applies particularly to language. Since it was founded by Richelieu, the Académie française has been attempting to control spoken and written French, and in particular to repel loan-words. It has failed miserably. The speech of the people always replaces the speech of the rulers. Thus Latin, once thought of as vulgar and barbarous, replaced Greek in the Western Empire. In England after the Norman Conquest, it took 300 years for English to replace French, but progress — despite fierce rearguard actions by the establishment — was sure and ended in a resounding public triumph for the demotic tongue in 1362 when Parliament was opened for the first time with a speech in English, and enacted the Statute of Pleadings commanding that all cases in the courts ‘shall be pleaded, showed, defended, answered, debated and judged in the English tongue, and that they be entered and enrolled in Latin’. I suspect that the Chinese, now they have embraced the modern capitalist world, will experience similar difficulties with the failure of Mandarin to become a universal spoken language, and that the Indians, striving to leapfrog over the Chinese smokestack revolution into information high-tech, will have to choose between Hindustani and English, with Calcutta Cockney the likely winner.