Linguistic Stereotypes and National Topoi from Antiquity to Two Early 18th-century English Lexicographic Texts

Abstract

The article focusses on the process of recontextualization of ancient topoi in the English lexicographic representation of “languages”/ “nations” in the early eighteenth century. Laying emphasis on the way in which the dictionaries of the first half of the eighteenth century contribute to the shaping of the correlation between “language” and “nation”, a correlation which is central to the ideology of standardization, the article examines how linguistic and ethnic stereotypes that can be traced back to Antiquity find their way into representations of English present in Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1728) and in the second edition of Nathan Bailey’s Dictionarium Britannicum (1736).