Language standardization, literacy and innovation

From Language standardization and the Industrial Revolution by Leonard Dudley.

An interesting idea. From the abstract.

Why did the countries with the highest literacy rates fail to contribute to the innovations of the Industrial Revolution? Recent empirical research shows that people tend to mistrust those perceived to speak with an accent. Here the hypothesis of a link between language, trust and innovation is tested with a new data set comprising 201 urban regions and 117 important innovations between 1700 and 1850. In the three states that contributed almost all of these innovations (Britain, France and the USA), rising literacy was merely the first step toward the formation of large networks of people speaking standardized languages. These networks proved particularly important for advances requiring collaboration. Elsewhere, where language standardization was delayed, innovation also came later.

The standardization of German and Italian from many dialects into national languages is, I think, a reasonably well known story.

I suspect that the heterogeneity of the English language circa 1500-1600 (the time of Shakespeare) is less well known. It comes out in places like The Seeds of Albion by David Hackett Fischer and of course Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue - English and How It Got That Way in descriptions of very local usages, idioms, vocabulary and even grammar. Very local and highly varied.

I have read arguments that Shakespeare's commanding mastery and innovation in English usage was in part a reflection of London (where he was resident) being a petrie-dish of language consolidation as people moved to the big city of opportunity in the 1550s onwards, bringing rich and highly variant language dialects with them from all over England.

Standardizing a language likely has a dramatic impact on national productivity, initially through improved efficiency and likely later in terms of effectiveness (including innovation.) Dudley's hypothesis is logically attractive. It is an interesting question he is examining.