Where do our rules about "correct" English come from? Jonathan Hsy goes back to the Middle Ages to find out. Geoffrey Chaucer, often called the "Father of English Poetry," wrote in a multilingual world of English, French, and Latin, at a time when there were many Englishes rather than one. Tracing the slow standardization of written English from the 15th-century English Chancery to today's debates over an official national language, Hsy shows that the idea of a single, superior English was built by cultural and political investment in a white anglophone national identity, not by the language itself.

To disrupt this narrative, Hsy reads Chaucer alongside Jamaican poet Louise Bennett, whose poem "Bans O' Killing" asks exactly which English a would-be language-purifier intends to eliminate. Bennett reminds us that prestigious "standard" English began as a 14th-century dialect too, and that no variety of a language is inherently better than another. 

For anyone teaching Chaucer, the history of the English language, or the politics of dialect and multilingualism, this approach connects medieval literature directly to present-day questions about immigration, education, and national belonging. It's a compact introduction to how language becomes a tool of power, and, in the right hands, a tool of resistance.