Erminia:

I think there's a pretty fundamental split in how we view 'English'. You
seem (forgive me if I misunderstand you here) to see English as some sort of
coherent central language, coloured by interesting offshoots, which is
re-homogenising due to its ever-increasing commercial and cultural
centrality. I'd see it differently.

But to take this up in relation to the start of your post ...

<<
let alone your equally patronizing tone - about which I personally have
nothing against - when I say the glorious 'historical' English of
Shakespeare it goes without saying and even disputing that I
mean 'historical' in relation to contemporary English and within this
particular thread about its 'supposed' (because I am not supposing it).


It is in relation to the 'present' phenomenon of globalization of your
idiom - that I am talking about Shakespeare's language as historical
>>

I'm not meaning to be either picky or patronising here, and I hope it
doesn't come over as such, but I have real problems in getting my head round
what you mean by 'the English of Shakespeare'.

Do you mean (to start with the largest possibility) the English spoken in
England in Shakespeare's time?
The English spoken in London in the 16/17thCs?
The English used in Shakespeare's plays?
The English spoken by the historical William Shakespeare?

English 'began' (or we have the first written records thereof) with the
Anglo Saxon invasions in the 5th Century. There were then three distinct
strands of English (take it that for every use of English, I mean 'English')
which didn't (despite the impact of the Scandinavian invasion, which had a
much more profound effect on the language than the arrival of Norman French)
unite.

By the late 14thC, you can still have the Gawain Poet in the West Midlands,
Langland in the East Midlands, and Chaucer in London writing quite distinct
varieties of English.

The imposition of the first "globalised" "homogenous" 'English' (and for
once I'll make the inverted comas explicit) comes round about the 15th
century with the emergence of a standard language for use in the Court, the
courts, and printed books. This didn't come about through homogenisation,
but through the imposition of one variety of English -- that spoken in the
Court in London -- +as+ the standard.

This existed as an administrative and cultural convenience (a bit like koine
in Greek and written Classical Chinese), but didn't displace the other
varieties of English which happily continued.

This Administrative Standard English (to coin a term) would be +one+ of the
Englishes spoken in London in the 16/17C.

The English spoken in Shakespeare's plays isn't itself a single form. The
bulk of the plays fall within the dominant linguistic register, but not all
(see, e.g. the prose scenes in the Henry IV plays).

As to Shakespeare 'himself', the closest we can probably get is in the
Sonnets. And I'd doubt just how close that is. It's how "Shakespeare"
might have +written+.

And if you take the English spoken in some of Ben Jonson's plays (_The
Alchemist_ and _Bartholomew Fair_), you'll get a very different kind of
English again, one closer to that +spoken+ by the majority of Londoners.

I could go on, but you know this as well as me. I'm laying it out like
this, because I suspect we're using the same material to come to totally
opposite conclusions.

Now, my rather laboured point would be that within the bounds of the poor
British Isles, there's already been for some hundred of years an uneasy
coexistence between the administrative variety of the language and
individual, more local varieties. This didn't lead to the extinction of the
individuality of the local Englishes.

Nor (though it was much-predicted at the time) did the advent of radio in
the forties.

So one thing is that I feel that your sense of a global English taking over
the world, or whatever, is nothing new -- it's simply a replication on a
larger scale of what's already happened within England itself. (And
Scotland and Ireland and Wales, with Scotland being the last to fall, first
with the Union of the Crown in 1603, and later in 1707 with the Union of the
Parliaments. Scots didn't vanish, but it was supplanted, administratively,
with what eventually came to be called Received Standard English.)

So when you say "English", I want to say, "Whose English? Which English?"

<<
(Allow me to be provocative[pro-vo-kaptive]: one couple
of parents keep their children - son - or daughter - in the house as
virgins, the other let them go out in mini-skirts and on motor-bikes with
no admonition or help or safety policy or condom in the pocket: the
results of those two patriarcal attitudes are both wrong and both
potentially negative)...
>>

Well, yes, but I think where (for me) your metaphor breaks down is over the
image of parent/child and parental control. Languages can't be controlled,
and the different contemporary varieties of English don't exist as parents
and children but as brothers and sisters. All English speakers today,
wherever in the world, are ultimately the (linguistic) desendents of the
Angles, Saxons, and Jutes (just as all Italian, French, and Spanish speakers
are linguistically descended from imperial Latin). Just that some try to
illicitly elevate themselves as the favoured child.

Robin