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anti- or cryptolanguages of subaltern populations.³¹ Typically, the languages of these diverse linguistic identities are referred to by the difference-effacing term “English” or the normative and subordinating terms “dialect English,” “regional English,” “provincial English,” “substandard English,” and more, all of which evaluations presuppose Standard English is a transcendental category of reference rather than a conventional form among others.

      When one thinks of anglophony, not in spatial terms, but instead as an irreducibly complex sonic ecology with a variety of speakers, forms, and abilities, Standard English appears merely as anglophony’s most recognizable acrolect (my term for the prestige form of standard written English). In the present, nationally based Standard Englishes appear as the creations of two and a half centuries of metalinguistic debate and coercion rather than a realistic representation of linguistic homogeneity in the world.³² Standard English may very well be the anglophone form that the majority of canonized texts have been composed in, but the preponderance of acrolectic Standard English in the literary canon is no reason to overlook other forms of language that generated texts, animated lives, and circulated in public at the same time and in the same spaces. In fact, when we look closely at anglophone texts, we see that most are chock-a-block with what Bakhtin identified as heteroglossia.

      Writers who composed in acrolectic Standard English have regularly occupied privileged positions within anglophony as arbiters of the aesthetic, not to mention the political, social, and legal. This is why notable eighteenth-century Scots worked so hard to “perfect” or delocalize their English. Doing so meant gaining privilege, cultural capital, and occupational advancement.³³ The achievements of those peripheral to Standard English notwithstanding—and language learning truly is an achievement, mental and physical—the privileged position of acrolectic anglophones within our literary canons is something we should challenge archivally rather than reproduce pedagogically. Acrolectic privileges are something we perpetually reinscribe if Standard English is the only anglophone variety that receives regular critical study as meaningful and aesthetic writing. Of course, there are obvious exceptions to the claim that acrolectic Standard English is all that scholars teach as meaningful and aesthetic writing. I discuss Robert Burns, who is one of the best late eighteenth-century examples of such an exception, in the first chapter. More generally, though, I am interested in seeking out those forms of nonnormative linguistic identity that were not and have not been seen as meaningful or aesthetic, but instead as “vulgar” and “provincial,” or worse, always in the process of becoming extinct.

      Because Multilingual Subjects explores the politics and aesthetics of nonnormative anglophone languages as literary media, especially in the fourth chapter, my use of “anglophony” is intended both as a piece of terminology as well as an argument. As a term, and one with important limitations, “anglophony” helps scholars eschew awkward and unhelpful demonyms, ethnic monikers, and metropole-periphery binaries while revealing anglophone texts that allow us to examine overlooked relationships between linguistic subjectivity and aesthetic practice in the period.³⁴ As an argument, my use of the term “anglophony” is meant as an antidote and countermodel to unserviceable, misrepresentative, and sometimes messianically deployed terms like “World English” or “Global English,” terms that I discuss in the conclusion as one of the logical extensions of eighteenth-century ideologies of Standard English. Anglophony, which should be understood as always multilingual, enables us to grasp the linguistic and cultural dynamics of the present in a way that these other terms cannot. As an added benefit, the many possible pronunciations of the term “anglophony”—some will voice this word as two trochees, others as two iambs, and still other enunciative possibilities exist—enact the differential character of the linguistic environment it purports to describe.

      The objective sonic characteristics of eighteenth-century anglophony are beyond the scope of this book. I focus on representations of anglophony in print, especially insofar as these representations clash with and subvert acrolectic Standard English. For example, anglophony can take shape in print as in the following wry line from Hume, a Scottish anglophone and eminent master of the acrolect: “But the life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.”³⁵ Anglophony can also appear in print as in John Collier, a near contemporary of Hume who was born and bred in Lancashire and who made a career out of local linguistic forms and semiradical politics: “Odds me Meary! whooa the Dickons wou’d o thowt o’ leeting o’ thee here so soyne this Morning? Where has to bin? Theaw’rt aw on a Swat, I think; for theaw looks primely.” (“Bless me! Mary, who the deuce would have thought of finding thee here so soon this morning? where hast thou been?—thou art all in a sweat I think, for thou looks primely.”)³⁶ The archive of this sort of linguistic diversity is vast and full of incommensurable forms. One finds, for instance, that eighteenth-century anglophony can also appear in print as in this line from the diary of West African slave trader Antera Duke: “I go Bord Captin Loosdam for break book for 3 slave so I break for one at Captin Savage so I take goods for slav at Captin Brown and com back.” (“I went on board Captain Langdon’s ship to ‘break book’ [make an agreement] for 3 slaves. I ‘broke trade’ for one slave with Captain Savage. Then I took goods for slaves from Captain Burrows and came back.”)³⁷ I investigate the political and aesthetic parameters of these and other examples as the book progresses, but the point here is to give some forward-looking textual examples of anglophone diversity in its eighteenth-century plenitude.

      With this chain of divergent examples, I am suggesting that the primary way I conceive of the term “anglophony” is as a linguistic supracategory, one that links together a great many varieties and is irreducible to none. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of rhizomatic systems helps us conceptualize eighteenth-century anglophony in spite of the fact that unrecorded communities of sound are impossible to map. Deleuze and Guattari discuss language as a politico-organic entanglement made up of intersecting varieties: “Il n’y a pas de langue en soi, ni d’universalité du langage, mais un concours de dialectes, de patois, d’argots, de langues speciales … N’importe quel point d’un rhizome peut être connecté avec n’importe quel autre, et doit l’être.” (“There is no such thing as language in itself, nor is there universality in language, but rather a competing throng of dialects, of patois, argots, and jargons … Any point of a rhizome whatsoever can be connected with any other point, and should be.”)³⁸ Anglophony was (and is still) an interconnected network of differential comprehensibilities that is irreducible to geographic containers. Deleuze and Guattari’s nonjudgmental chain of equivalent forms—“a competing throng of dialects, of patois, argots, and jargons”—offers the useful vision of a radically dehierarchized linguistic field with countless and mobile contact points. The eighteenth-century archive reveals these contacts often and unambiguously. A Connaught Irishman meets an English-educated Edinburgh Scotsman on an East Indiaman bound for Calcutta. A British-born West Indian plantocrat speaks with his Caribbean-born, mixed-race overseer in some anglophone variety, and this overseer then communicates with the plantocrat’s slaves in an anglophone or other creole. A young polymath poet in London employs as Hebrew instructor a Sephardic rabbi whose language background is a complex mixture of Yiddish, German, Dutch, and Spanish and whose native city is Amsterdam. They communicate.

      A few more terminological points are in order. From this point onward, I will use different terms to refer to anglophone difference in lived reality and anglophone difference in text. With regard to spoken language, I use a term culled from sociolinguistics: “lect,” that is, a form of speech with no value attached. By contrast, in order to discuss the imitation of lectic speech in writing as a literary device, I use terms like “acrolect,” “dialect,” “ethno-lect,” “chronolect,” “regiolect,” “sociolect,” and so forth. My specific literary claim throughout this book is that dialect is not an actually existing set of interactional protocol in the social world that can be transparently represented on the page. Instead, dialect as we should understand it in literature is, to paraphrase Wordsworth, the written imitation of half created and half perceived linguistic attributes, attributes that are called on to signify linguistic and extralinguistic alterity.

      Deleuze and Guattari’s dynamic description of language as a rhizomatic system also provides a conceptual model for understanding power relations that

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