Sugar and the English language

Abstract

Sugar has been an important engine of social, economic, and linguistic change. It developed from a rare spice to an upper class luxury, to a common foodstuff, and these changes affected the growth of social institutions. Initially part of the display that symbolized royal authority, sugar contributed, through the London coffeehouse, to intellectual development and to linguistic standardization and codification. Later, it became essential to the new urban proletariat, whose sugar-laden tea made a new pattern of work and new forms of speech possible. It also became a cause and symbol of oppression for the slaves that produced it in the Caribbean. These changes are reflected in English vocabulary and in the development and distribution of varieties of English. Sugar became an English commercial interest with the acquisition of Barbados and Jamaica, resulting in West Indian plantation agriculture, the English-speaking slave trade, and the creation of new English-speaking populations and new English languages. When slavery was abolished, the continuing demand for sugar led to further population transfer, of workers from British India to the Caribbean, Fiji, and South Africa, and hence to yet more varieties of English. Thus sugar played an important role in structuring the present-day English language complex.

Keywords:

• Coffee
• coffeehouse
• diet
• global English
• industrialization
• slave trade
• standardization
• sugar
• tea
• working class

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.