Influence Of Shakespeare In The English Language

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3 Shakespeare’s Contributions In the early 16th century, The English language was not highly rated. It was rather seen as a language spoken day-to-day by the lower-caste society due to it sounding barbaric and lacking the sophistication that foreign languages required. Therefore, it was not promoted at schools. Children were taught Latin and Greek in schools, because they were the default languages for scholarly and ecclesiastical communication. English was not ideal for literature. It was merely a language of the street. In the mid-16th century, everything was slowly changing. English started developing into a respectable means of communication with the help of many factors. For example, the literacy rates were increasing which meant that …show more content…

He could achieve this because he was good at coinage. According to Oxford dictionary, coinage is the invention of a new word or phrase. Shakespeare particularly was very skilful at borrowing words from Latin and transforming them. He did this by keeping the stem that belongs to one language and the prefix or suffix to the other. Examples of these words are accommodation, fixture, pious, generous, educate and so on. Through his borrowings, it is said that he introduced roughly 600 words into English. The thing about broadening a language is that some old words will assume new meanings and others not. Furthermore, some of the new words will stick around while others will fade away. This is something that is prone to happen and quite a few of Shakespeare’s words, for example, crimeless, insisture, primy, unsisting, etc. happened to disappear as the English language continued to evolve. This was the process which led to literary language slowly rising towards standardization. 3.3 Standardization of the English Language William Shakespeare’s writings are a part of one of the factors that led to the standardization of English, because as soon as they became popular, his words and phrases were put into full action and from this, the grammar and rules of English slowly started being established. Moreover, his writings represent the rules that are currently being used in the English language, for example, he reinitiated the use of suffixes in grammar. Although he has been dead for a very long time and English has been more modernised since then, Shakespeare’s grammar still remains the same. 3.4 Conspiracy theories concerning Shakespeare’s