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Race formation, canon formation, and the writing of linguistic history can all be understood as processes of standardisation that differentiate through inclusion and exclusion of selected characteristics (of a human group, language use, or literary work) in synchronic moments and artificially link those moments to create diachronic histories that can span millennia. As we will show in this essay, Thomas Warton's The History of English Poetry, from the Close of the Eleventh to the commencement of the Eighteenth Century (1775–1778) enacts all three processes simultaneously in ways that are inextricably entangled, and structured by an ideology of standardisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that medieval literary studies must critically reexamine the deployment of the term "vernacular" in its usage concerning late Middle English writing. The term "vernacular" is used to reify and institutionalize the idea of the "standard language," a concept that emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries alongside "monolingualism" and "nationalism," in order to promote cultural homogeneity and a sense of linguistic wholeness for languages such as English; in turn, non‐English (and other non‐European) languages became "vernaculars" within structures of linguistic supremacy designed to discount the languages of the peoples and places that England colonized and enslaved. By historiographically unpacking where our understandings of "vernacular" languages come from, I chart the ways in which defining "vernacular" languages is intrinsic to the making of race in asserting the inferiority of "vernaculars" as inherent to the supposed inferiority of peoples during the nineteenth century through our contemporary moment and reread moments of "language making" in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Man of Law's Tale, drawing from sociolinguistics in order to offer alternative vocabularies to "vernacular." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]