Lord Quirk
Scholar of the shifting currents of language who argued for the importance of Standard English
LORD QUIRK, who has died aged 97, was a former vicechancellor of London University and president of the British Academy, and a leading expert on English as it is (and should be) spoken.
Many of Quirk’s best known books sprang from collaborative research conducted in the Survey of English Usage, which he established in 1959, among them the popular Use of English (1962), which is read around the world, and his Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985), as close to a definitive account of the shifting currents of English usage as it is possible to find.
Quirk was an indefatigable campaigner for the importance of teaching “Standard” English, though, unlike some supporters of his line, he did not feel the language should be preserved from outside influences. He enjoyed the fact that English had a “gaily cosmopolitan air about it” and believed its ability to absorb foreign words easily and its adaptable, libertarian ethos gave it a unique flexibility and range which had brought it pre-eminence in science, commerce and international relations.
John Wain, the former Professor of Poetry at Oxford, once took Quirk to task for approving a modern dictionary definition of the word “enthusiasm”. “The word,” Wain insisted, “really means the state of being possessed by a god.” Quirk replied that by the same analogy, the name John Wain showed that he could not be a professor of poetry, but must be engaged in the transport business.
But Quirk always emphasised that the teaching of Standard English is essential if all children, regardless of social background, are to be given opportunities in life.
He deplored the claims of modern educationalists that all dialects are equally valid, arguing that the multicultural approach to English teaching in schools risked trapping members of ethnic minorities in ghettos, creating a barrier to their educational progress, their career prospects and their geographical and social mobility. “Language is power,” he argued, “and too much English teaching today is denying pupils their full chance of wielding that power.”
He was likewise contemptuous of teachers who avoid troubling their pupils with mundane questions about correct use of words for fear of stunting a potential Shakespeare’s liberty of expression. The pluralist approach to teaching English was based, he believed, on a misunderstanding about Standard English.
It was not, as some have seen it, a language of an elite but a “commonality” of 30-40,000 meanings. It was not about accent or grammar (though it was important to enable children to master the rules), since the grammatical rules of most dialects are shared with Standard English, but about equipping children to think intelligently about the language they use, lest, quoting Eliot, it deteriorates “in the general mess of imprecision of feeling”.
Charles Randolph Quirk was born at Lembfell on the Isle of Man on July 20 1920 and educated at Douglas High School and at University College London, where he stayed on to take a doctorate. After wartime service in the RAF, he was appointed lecturer in English at UCL in 1947 and in the early Fifties spent a year as a Commonwealth Fund Fellow in the United States.
In 1954 he was appointed Reader in English Language and Literature and in 1958 Professor of English Language at Durham University. He returned to London in 1960, becoming a Professor of English and in 1968 Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at UCL.
Quirk developed a reputation for working so unceasingly that he even put in an hour or so on Christmas Day. As well as presiding over the preparation of the Survey of English Usage, he published widely on the development and use of the language from Anglo-saxon times.
His books during this period included The Concessive Relation in Old English Poetry (1954); Studies in Communication (1955, with AJ Ayer and others); An Old English Grammar (1955, with CL Wrenn); Charles Dickens and Appropriate Language (1959); Teaching of English (1959, with AH Smith); The Study of the Mother-tongue (1961); The Use of English (1962); Prosodic and Paralinguistic Features in English (1964, with D Crystal); A Common Language (1964, with AB Marckwardt); Investigating Linguistic Acceptability (1966, with J Svartvik); Essays on the English Language – Medieval and Modern (1968). In 1969 he chaired a Government Committee of Inquiry into speech therapy services, whose Quirk Report of 1972 forms the cornerstone of Britain’s current service.
Quirk’s researches into English dialects took him all over the world. In 1961, when, following a volcanic eruption, the population of the Caribbean island of Tristan da Cunha were evacuated to Britain, he rushed around, tape-recorder in hand, to record the islanders’ unique dialect with its “fascinating cadences of Dickensian cockney, Aussie and Afrikaans”, before they learnt to talk “proper”. Sad as he was about the inevitable disappearance of the dialect, he felt it necessary for the future happiness of its speakers. Keeping the Tristan speech, he believed, would indicate a resistance to integration.
In 1981 Quirk was a surprising choice to replace Lord Annan as Vice-chancellor of London University – surprising because he had always been associated with research and teaching rather than administration. It was a time of cuts in the higher education budget and Quirk thought long and hard before accepting such a poisoned chalice.
Yet, over the next four difficult years, he managed to achieve savings of some 10 per cent in the university’s academic staff without loss of academic quality.
Quirk was always interested in the use of English as an international language and in 1982 he brought together government departments and agencies with a team of researchers to develop a restricted English vocabulary for use at sea.
Explaining why a new language was needed, he recalled an exchange between a Royal Navy vessel and an American one during the Korean War when the British tapped out the message: “Making water in the engine-room”. “Stop that disgusting practice at once,” the American replied.
After retiring as Vice-chancellor in 1985, Quirk served on numerous committees and public bodies and as president of the British Academy from 1985 to 1989, his fellowship there remaining the most cherished of his many honours.
His later books included Elicitation Experiments in English (1970, with S Greenbaum, G Leech, J Svartvik); A Grammar of Contemporary English (1972); The English Language and Images of Matter (1972 with S Greenbaum); A University Grammar of English (1973); The Linguist and the English Language (1974, with V Adams and D Davy); Old English Literature: a practical introduction (1975); A Corpus of English Conversation (1980 with J Svartick); Style and Communication in the English Language (1982, with S Greenbaum, G Leech, J Svartick); English in the World (1985); Words at Work (1986, with G Stein) English in Use (1990, with S Greenbaum); A Student’s Grammar of English Language (1990, with G Stein); An Introduction to Standard English (1993), and Grammatical and Lexical Variance in English (1995).
Randolph Quirk was appointed CBE in 1976, knighted in 1985 and raised to the peerage in 1994. In the House of Lords, where he sat on the crossbenches, he served as a member of the Select Committee on Science and Technology and remained an active and influential spokesman on educational matters.
He married first, in 1946 (dissolved 1979), Jean Williams, and secondly, in 1984, Gabriele Stein. She and two sons by his first marriage survive him.
Lord Quirk, born July 20 1920, died December 20 2017